You may notice that I have concertedly NOT mentioned this story, but the Ides of March are upon us, and it could not wait. It must be said, though I am loathe to do it. Here goes…
Schadenfreude sells sleazy scandalsheets
For all the cheapjack moralizing that goes on in the media, you’d think someone would have said it, or even played the devil’s advocate, but the John Edwards case has been demeaning and degrading to women, as much as it has been the public drawing and quartering of a man who has been out of public office for six years.
Because, you see, we degrade women by maintaining the old, outdated double standard. By maintaining a huge chunk of that old Victorian bullshit that women are inherently MORALLY superior to men, that they are the “fairer” sex, the “nobler” sex, the “civilizing” influence of the world. That is degrading to men, and it is degrading to women. (Equality means just that, with obvious exceptions for biological plumbing and offspringing conditions.)
We degrade women by not allowing them to commit evil acts. Worse, we degrade women by maintaining the fiction that only men want to fuck and therefore, only men are morally responsible in situations of fucking*. (Or, in the case of Monica Lewinsky, assisted ejaculation of semen.)
[* Really? One of the most hilarious of clichés in film is the hero turning down hot sex: being the "responsible" guy and telling the seductress, "Connie, it would be wrong." WHEN has this mythic behavior been the norm in the history of the world? I have known men, and I have known women who told me about what they knew about men, and I'm afraid that this dramatic cliché needs to be tossed out in the same trash barrel as "Bermuda Triangle," UFO abduction, bigfoot, yeti, chupacabra and Loch Ness Monster stories.]
The automatic presumption, never debated, never questioned, is that John Edwards is the only person in this drama who bears moral responsibility. No: we love the “victim” story of Elizabeth Edwards, cancer victim, cheated on with his glamorous mistress.
And we are so emotionally brutal, in a way that would cause the Romans to turn away in shock, disgust and horror brutal, that we actually get Elizabeth Edwards, dying of cancer, on television and ASK her: hey, your husband fucked that woman we’ve been showing pictures of for the last six hours leading up to this interview … how does that make you feel? Does remembering what he did (er, imagining, which is always worse) make you feel terrible? How terrible? Isn’t he just a shitheel. How can you LIVE with a skunk like that … et al, etcetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum, ad breaks for 2 minutes.
There is something sick in this prurient sleaze-fest that is much sicker in the commentators than in the actors. Barbara Walters, and nobody else, has the right to invade private lives the way that they do, but if it cannot be stopped – - and it probably can’t — at least we ought to invade the privacy of the players equally. An even-handed public flaying, at least.
There has long been a presumption by the dinosaurs of the press, that the “public’s right to know” was actually a license for reporters to engage in the sickest voyeaurism possible, and, if the details appealed to a large enough audience (you know, “earthy” and a little raunchy but never pornographic) and sell newspapers with it. Now, with pictures and television and surround sound and home theaters we’ll soon be bringing you hot teacher-on-student stories in 3-D.*
[* By the way: any different colored glasses 3D craze wears off rather quickly -- probably because, it sets the hemispheres working against each other and it's annoying. Probably overheats the corpus colloseum, the interface between right and left hemispheres, but I'm not a brain mechanic, so I couldn't tell you. Could be the blinker fluid, though. The blinker fluid drains and corrodes the muffler bearings and then the entire hubcap stops working and you have one hell of a diagnostic train wreck.]
But not once in this orgy of peeping-tommery, of schadenfreude, of hounding and humiliating an ex-senator who was NO LONGER A CANDIDATE nor of any public interest, except in a gossipy way, not ONCE has the other party in the illicit copulation compounded by cancer, Katie Couric, Cosmopolitian and commenters, not once has Rielle Hunter, sperm recipient, been held as morally responsible in all of this by that selfsame media.
This goes back to the Monica Lewinsky case: where a woman desperate for attention and notoriety stalks a powerful man, and attains public attention and even material compensation for displaying that she had in some wise, made use of the powerful man’s semen.
In Lewinsky’s case, a stained blue dress. In Rielle Hunter’s case, a bouncing little bundle of joy, a millionaire’s child support for the next, oh, sixteen, eighteen years, at least. (Remember: when child support is paid, it ain’t the child that gets to spend it.) She’s famous. She was bought a house (but, poor dear, complains in GQ today, the Ides of March, that it’s too expensive to live in it, so she’s renting an apartment elsewhere. Oh, and some months her “allowance” wasn’t as four thousandy as others. Lovely shots of Hunter doing cheesecake shots that suggest, tastefully, that she’s naked in a rumpled bed. Oh, and one with the kid.)
We used to call this the “badger” game. Get a powerful man to have unprotected sex with you. Become pregnant, blackmail the SOB for whatever you want: shotgun wedding, secret child support, you name it. But then birth control and abortion became available, and, like smallpox, we believed that we had eradicated it.
But no.
Now, I am not saying that this is what Rielle Hunter did. I am saying that it is a possibility, and that it is a possibility that ought to have been looked into, DID WE CEDE WOMEN AN EQUAL RIGHT TO BE WRONG.
It is telling when the mistress in this classic triangle story comes under LESS scrutiny than the dying wife. And is less badgered. Jiminy crickets!
We degrade women by maintaining a sexual double standard. You can’t pick and choose which equalities we want and which equalities we don’t.
Both parties are responsible. Both the fucker and the fuckee bear responsibility for the actual act itself. Indeed, if we truly believed this, fucking wouldn’t be something someone (e.g. the male) does TO someone else (e.g. the female). And it wouldn’t feel odd reading the old germanic word for the act used to DESCRIBE the act, because we use the word all the time, but almost never to describe the act it exists as a word TO describe. We DO say ‘fuck’ an awful, awful lot in English in America (can’t vouch for other places), almost always as a negative and pejorative thing, and almost never describing the act of reproduction, just as we engage in the act quite a lot, but almost never for reproduction, if we can help it.
We need a new Sexual Congress, one firmly committed to the proposition: No Sexation Without Representation. Then, we might have equality.
He could have used a condom. She could have used birth control. He could have used good judgment. (Oh, wait. We — the American cultural ‘we’ — act as though horny men make good choices when it comes to matters of sexation; at least since the story of Samson, we do).
If she decided to keep the baby, however, he had no say in the matter. And this is where that matter of ’representation’ comes in. It was completely in HER (metaphoric) hands to do with ten cubic centiliters of seminal fluid mixed with sperm, emitted in less than five seconds; and her choice was to obligate him financially, emotionally and legally for decades to come. He was given no say in the matter, and yet he is held as the ONLY morally culpable agent.
Of course, according to her, he never asked.
“Choice” has a nuance that is never addressed: while it is any woman’s inalienable right to CHOOSE whether or not to take the long, tough road of bringing a pregnancy to term, namely the choice of BEING the father to that child. We are as unwilling to cede the father a choice* in that matter as we are to admit that the biology of sex is such a powerful instinct (and biological compulsion) that at full operating capacity it overwhelms all rational control. We used to order our world in such a way that we were rarely in a situation where those impulses COULD overwhelm us, but that has been tossed to the winds, in favor of the presumption that sex is entirely a matter of choice and volition. Closer it is, then, to pon farr.
[* Not whether to complete pregnancy or not, but whether to be responsible or not. "Deadbeat dads" is the term for that utter lack of choice, still made.]
But technology and science have given us ways to accept our biology without becoming slaves to our instincts. We have several opportunities to rationally choose, even when biology takes all choice from us.
She could have terminated the pregnancy AFTER the fact became known, legally and lawfully. If she did not believe in doing so, it was still HER belief and moral choice.
She could have chosen not to bear a child that was not a mutual decision.
But she did not, and now she will be paid by the man with whom she had sex — for whatever reasons – for the foreseeable future, because she is somehow considered blameless in this phony projected patriarchal fantasy. If women are equal, then she’s equally to blame, and maybe more or less so, given the circumstances. Certainly if it was consensual — and she has quietly bragged about her “conquest” in a “look girls! See what I bagged!” kind of way — then she is morally culpable at some level, no matter how Mother Teresa-esque her humping might have been.
We’ll get to that. But first, we should make it clear: You’re not making a penny from this interview.
[laughs] I am not making a penny from this interview!I would imagine you could have sold out a hundred times.
I could have cashed out big. But that’s not what I’m about. I love Johnny and I love my daughter more than anything in the world, and I don’t want to ever do anything to hurt them or hurt their relationship.[TRANSLATION: I'm not a whore. -- GQ Rielle Hunter Interview, released today]
We do NOT know enough about this to make moral judgments. There are many possibilities. But we are not privy to their private lives: John and Elizabeth Edwards and Rielle Hunter, and the offspring, whatever its name. Nor Should We Be. [But we CAN be nauseated]:
By the way, do you always call him Johnny?
[laughs] Isn’t that funny? You know, when I first met him, the first week of our relationship, I said to him, “For some reason I cannot call you John, it doesn’t come out. Could I call you Johnny?” And he said, “That’s my name.” And I didn’t know that, but that’s his actual birth name.
Is he okay with your doing this interview?
He’s very supportive of me talking now. He believes that it’s something that will help me be at peace with it. And he knows how important truth is to me. Factual truth as well as spiritual truth.What was the hardest thing you’ve had to read about yourself?
Um, well, there’s so much, Lisa. [laughs] I mean, just for starters, I never “hit on” Johnny. I’m not a predator, I’m not a gold digger, I’m not the stalker. I didn’t have any power in that way in our relationship. He held all the power. And then, you know, um, Elizabeth’s book tour and Johnny’s interview [in August 2008 with ABC's Bob Woodruff] were devastating to me. But I also knew it didn’t mean anything.[TRANSLATION: I'm not a whore. -- GQ Rielle Hunter Interview, released today]
There are limits, and the National Enquirer engaged in a vicious game of stalking that has destroyed lives to no public purpose. And yet we reward it, and consider its actions moral. There’s even talk of a National Enquirer Pulitzer prize (for LITERALLY stalking Edwards for months AFTER he’d ceased to be a presidential candidate.)
I am not making this up. (World Nut Daily now has hope that it, too, can grow up to be a legitimate operation, like the National Enquirer. Oh, wait. Flip the binoculars around and look through the eyepieces.]
or, more likely, the death of the Pulitzer as a meaningful prize
Actually, we do not consider at all, in our prurient rush to imagine our little stereotypes in all sorts of wonderful scenarios, vicariously joyful at the misery of other (private citizens) human beings.
We love it all the more, and have a sort of tissue-thin rationalization when it’s elected officials, but it really doesn’t matter what we do to THEM, because our fantasy lives are MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than the lives of four people in this crazy world who don’t amount to more than a hill of beans. And the National Enquirer KNEW that. Knew that all along, and knew that no one would hold them responsible for this oh-so-much-more-sophisticated game of pull the wings off of a fly.
And that is our moral blindness. But it is not as important as our maintenance of an antiquated and oppressive double standard in holding the sexes responsible for offspring. It is the universal moral question of all humanity, else humanity would cease, altogether, and yet we maintain this odd moral inequality: use a penis, go to jail. A vagina, on the other hand, is the most sacredest and benificent organ in all of humankindliness.
(Well, maybe right behind the mouth.)
Followed closely by the breasts, which have a bizarre moral schizophrenia that we really oughtn’t go into here. But, in this whole gossipy soap opera mess, there were breastsuses involved. I can guarantee that. There WERE breasts involved. SAnd, with a high degree of probability, acting in BOTH moral roles.
But we do not cede women the equality to sin. Therefore, we have not ceded them the equality to transcend. If women don’t have the right to be wrong, then, ultimately, they don’t have the right to be right, either. They remain protected, mythological beasts, like unicorns, and, believe you me, ceding that kind of absolute power corrupts some women absolutely. Facing an equal moral justice the foundation of our “rule of law” and the last vestiges of patriarchal patronizing need to go.
And yet, maintaining the old Victorian double standard of purity and choice in the sexual arena is the Moral Operating System of our sleaze merchants of the media. (Are you listening, Rupert? I would work for Larry Flynt, but I cannot morally justify working for Rupert Murdoch. Sorry: I’m just not that broad-minded.) Look at this sleaze:
Rielle Hunter bares all in first interview about affair with John Edwards
Mistress dishes on his fears, ‘abortion hope’ & ‘abusive’ marriage
By JEREMY OLSHAN
Last Updated: 6:17 PM, March 15, 2010
Posted: 6:00 AM, March 15, 2010
Comments: 96EXCLUSIVE
John Edwards’ mistress has revealed for the first time how the illicit lovers fell in lust and slept together the night they met — and claims the presidential candidate predicted the wild romp would cause his premature ejection from politics.“Falling in love with you could really f- – - up my plans for becoming president,” Edwards told vixen videographer Rielle Hunter after their sexual tryst at Manhattan’s Regency hotel in February 2006.
That’s not news. That’s the opening to a bad romance novel.
(“Vixen”? “Vixen”?? Who the hell says “vixen” anymore who’s not connected to Christmas? Rupert’s imported Brit sleazebag editorial staff, that’s who. And to think that SCREW Magazine went under due to flagging sales. The pity. At least SCREW was vulgar AND witty in a bizarro world way. The New York Post is merely vulgar.)
But WHO appointed them? (Who IMPORTED them?) They are worse than any pornographer — because at least pornographers openly sell their wares with utter literalism, while the sleaze merchants of the Murdochian media somehow maintain that they are “morally outraged” while selling us the same pornography, except, WHOOPS! We can’t show you that. (But who knows!?!?)
you get the idea, though, right?
It’s just to tease your money out of your wallet without giving you what’s being advertised. Sort of like a stripper as opposed to a whore. In the end, you might spend the same amount on either, but one actually provides the product advertised, while the other does not. But who is considered more “moral”? The stripper, of course. Just as Rupert Murdoch is considered a pillar of the community, while many “upstanding” organizations won’t even accept Larry Flynt’s money.
Case in point: there has been a long-running soap opera about an Edwards-Hunter SEX TAPE that has been the subject of return by the guy who ORIGINALLY claimed to be the father, etc. etc. and no one has seen it, but it DOES exist (it was turned over to the court), and …
“WHOOPS!,” we can’t show you that!! (But who knows!?!?)
But we CAN show you Rielle Hunter, rolling in the sheets, in a glamor photo shoot, with a concurrent “complain, whine, settle scores” interview gamboling betwixt the chromes.
Because that’s what we’re talking about here: fucking, pure and simple. And we just LOVE peeping in other people’s bedroom windows. Don’t be offended at my language, be offended at what it describes.
And, of course, naturally: CNN: [Rielle] Hunter upset over GQ photos
But I would say this:
Just remember, John Edwards, on this Ides of March, that not all assassinations are carried out with knives.
(From last year’s Sheer Galt: Randroid Update)
Courage.
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UPDATE: click here for the (short) Update In Rielle Time
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