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.

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.” Read More »