Easy, Tiger

By now, the sordid details of Tiger Woods’s first major scandal are familiar to anyone who keeps up with celebrity gossip: the mysterious car accident! The golf-club wielding wife! The alleged mistress, who says that being asked about her relationship to the golf legend is like being asked “to comment if there are aliens on Earth”! The whole mess is shaping up to be the biggest tabloid story this side of Jen, Angelina, and Brad.

By Hillary

The main question on all of our minds, though, is the same one that always crops up when rich, powerful men cheat on their gorgeous wives with trash like Rachel Uchitel, Nicole Forrester, or Ashley Dupré: “What the hell is wrong with him?”

Jessica Wakeman of The Frisky brings up an interesting point about this line of thinking. As she writes, “What I want to know is why we insist a woman’s beauty—which is highly subjective!—is some kind of barometer—which is highly shallow!—of whether or not her hubby will cheat.”

Wakeman’s right. People have affairs because they’re unhappy for whatever reason, not because they suddenly find their significant others hideous. “The implication,” she goes on to say, “is that Nordegren is too pretty to cheat on and that Tiger’s infidelity would make more sense if she were ugly—but since she’s beautiful, there must be something else she did that drove him to do something so insane.”

Okay, point taken. We should be evolved enough that when a guy cheats on his Swedish former model wife, we don’t immediately think that it must be because she’s somehow inadequate—or that the whole thing is somehow her fault.

Then again, thoughts like those weren’t really running through my head when I first heard about the whole sordid affair. I certainly don’t want to blame poor Elin Nordegren for her crappy husband’s idiotic mistake.

When I wonder how Tiger could possibly cheat on a seemingly lovely woman like Elin, it’s because I just don’t get how a guy that used to being in the public eye could possibly think he could mess around with another woman without getting his face splashed all over Us Weekly. Don’t celebrities know that members of the media are always watching them, just waiting for someone to screw up royally? What made Tiger think that he would be different?

Moral of the story: Tiger Woods did not bone a stripper because his wife is not smokin’. He did, however, think that he was somehow impervious to the vicious gaze of the celebrity gossip machine. And for that, maybe he deserved to be tapped lightly a few times with a nine iron.