Wandering Willies
Former Gawkerette turned
Radarite Maggie Shnayerson
tipped us onto this
AP story about how people are criticizing Elizabeth Edwards for John's affair. "I think she's complicit," Brad Crone, a Raleigh-based Democratic consultant told the
AP. "Obviously, she knew. While she's the victim, she clearly didn't stand in the way of the cover-up." Sigh. This old meme again, one I'd thought had been retired after it had been
used against Hillary Clinton so frequently. We've covered a lot of cheating husbands in the public eye this year — from politicians like Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and our favorite whoremonger Eliot Spitzer to personal-narrative spinners like
Elle's Philip Nobel and
New York's Philip Weiss — and what strikes me is that in every instance, the betrayed wife is blamed in some way, either by her husband or by pundits.
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marital strife
If Philip Nobel were more of an asshole, I would be less depressed right now. When he agreed to talk to me about
his Elle article "Danger Man" — an account of leaving his wife for a younger woman which both
Tatiana and
I criticized last week — I was sort of hoping for an unremitting narcissist whom I could cheerfully skewer. Nobel does have some bad ideas (implying that his detractors are unsophisticated in their judgments), but he also has some good ones (everyone should read the divorce code before they get married). And his thoughts about marriage and relationships are the same ones lots of learned men and women have been touting lately. Thing is, these thoughts need some serious work.
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The Other Woman
One of the most offensive things about Philip Nobel's How-I-Left-Your-Mother
Elle essay, "Danger Man," is the way he writes about the two women it primarily involves: his unnamed ex-wife, and his ex-girlfriend, "Ingrid." The difficulty of accurately describing the people one is close to aside, it seems inexcusable for any man to call the mother of his children as "insufficiently curious", let alone point out that throughout their 15-year relationship, Nobel apparently felt the need to "edit out of conversation the allusions I didn't think she would get." When Nobel turns his gaze on Ingrid, his then-22-year-old research assistant and the woman for whom he left his wife, he is creepily objectifying and infantilizing in turn. He never misses an opportunity to mention Ingrid's "big tits" or her "bombshell" looks — yet he also paints a patronizing picture of a lost-little-girl. My first reaction to the essay was disbelief: No way could either of these women actually exist within the circumscribed lines of Nobel's self-serving plea for sympathy. And then I met "Ingrid" last weekend — and discovered I was right. A very special take-back-the-discourse with Ingrid, after the jump.
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arrested development
Philip Nobel wants you to know he's "That Guy" — the one who got married, had kids, fell in love with his much younger research assistant, got divorced, and wrote about it all in
Elle magazine. Despite his public airing of private pain (I'm sure his ex-wife and his ex-girlfriend both really loved reading it), Nobel's article "Danger Man" starts out kind of sympathetic. He married young, he was bored and confused, his kids actually understand his life better than he does. But then Nobel starts talking about the other other women in his life — disapproving friends who just can't accept that his choices are "original" — and that's where things
really get crappy.
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Jezebel
