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The bimbo. The bitch. The whore. The soulless skank. How many names can you think of to describe the other woman?
“Don't forget 20-something gold-digger,” my friend Mia adds.
“Of course.”
We're at Ralph's on a 3 A.M. run for the kind of goodies that run our side of the blogosphere: caviar, strawberries, pate, crackers, Marlboros, Coke and a wide array of cheese.
I've been looking over the tabloids lined by the cashier. In the past week, it seems the entire nation's attention has shifted to the woman now associated with Jon Gosselin, one of the stars of the TLC reality TV series Jon & Kate Plus 8, about a husband and wife and their eight children.
The show, which featured the trials and tribulations of two parents dealing with two sets of multiples, gained traction over the years, but went into a sabbatical during season five to give the Gosselins time to sort out their emotions surrounding a very public separation. The episode announcing the split was the highest rated episode of the series, with some 10.6 million viewers.
That being an old story for the media—and far better told by the Gosselins themselves—the tabloids had moved on to Jon Gosselin's alleged newest (there appear to have been at least two others before her) object of affection. Or, as they preferred to describe her, “his bimbo.”
“For all the grief we give Hollywood about sugarcoating everything, the truth is that there is nothing we like more than the decay and destruction of happy endings,” I tell Mia, grabbing several tabloids and throwing them into the cart. “We are the vulture culture. It's almost like we can't tolerate happiness. We just want to get fat on the misery of others.”
Back home, I stayed up all night reading about Jon and the woman with whom he'd spent a weekend in Saint-Tropez. She was described by Us Weekly, In Touch, and People as a raunchy, celebrity-seeking bimbo, a sexually confused party girl mooching off her parents and friends in the pursuit of fun, with a past marijuana possession conviction. This woman, the tabloids are implying, is a dangerous influence, a temptress who is only using Gosselin for celebrity.
I'm really tired of seeing the other woman quartered as though it's always her fault for luring an innocent, hapless man away, as though men somehow don't have the capacity to think for themselves and make the same choices that women do.
It's demeaning to men. What are they, then? Dumb beasts of burden who can't control themselves? Who have no capacity for thought or choice? It's sexist and ridiculous, and yet the notion is so prevalent as to have become some kind of truth.
Men are dogs! They don't know better!
My good friend Shelly is one of the perpetrators of this fallacy. She and her boyfriend recently ended a relationship of twelve years. It's not that things weren't working, that they hadn't had sex in years, that he was disloyal. It's that a “fucking bitch slut whore” came around and ruined everything.
Shelly's forgiven him. It wasn't his fault. Obviously he was no match for the fucking bitch slut whore.
“Shell, you need to stop calling her that,” I said to her the last time we spoke.
“Well, she is!”
“She never made a promise to be faithful to you,” I told her. “He did. And he broke it.”
“With her,” she pointed out. “She's not a saint!”
“No, I'm not saying that—”
“What is he supposed to do with this twenty-something jumping around at work in little shorts?” Shelly screamed. “Men don't know!”
“Men don't know?” I asked. “Men don't know? He was smart enough to hide it, to sneak around, to lie, but somehow the reason he had to do all of this escaped him?”
Men don't know. Men don't think with their head, they think with their dicks. Men are just animals who must be watched and controlled.
How about letting people take some responsibility?
It's not that men are animals, it's that sometimes people make choices that they think are in their best interest and not in the interest of the people in their lives. Sometimes these people are men. But 50 percent of the time, they're women.
I don't know whether the decision the Gosselins made had anything to do with the fact Jon was having an affair. I don't know whether he was having an affair—or several. And I don't know whether the allegations that Kate had an affair are true, either. All I know is that raising a family—especially one that large—is not easy, especially in public.
