Well, its Maureen Dowd and I don't have to tell you that my gender does get the short end of the stick with her. So in her mind unless the wife is a tatoo-riddled skank, then "he" will be marrying up. Anyway...Red Bird wrote:I know little about those other couples but how is it that Tiger Woods or Arnold Schwarzenegger Married up? Or Anthony Wiener for that matter. Since when is a Congressman lower on the chain than an aid to Hillery Clinton?After seeing a cascade of famous men marrying up and dating down — Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Dick Morris, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Tiger Woods, David Vitter, John Ensign and Arnold Schwarzenegger — and with Dominique Strauss-Kahn being supported by his prominent, elegant and wealthy journalist wife as he fights charges that he assaulted a 32-year-old hotel maid, maybe feminists have learned that male development stops at power.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... es/240152/
Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) husbands are so "proud" of the physical beauty of their wives, that they encourage their wives to get naked in public. This taps into a deeper part of the male ego, the "....ha ha guys, eat your heart out! I am FUCKING this woman and YOU AREN'T.... and I KNOW you are jealous of me..." kind of thing. A showing-off/bragging mentality, mostly. This twisted mentality is for men who keep score with each other based solely on the physical beauty of the women they plant the seed inside.Megan wrote:Society takes a greater interest in marriages than in other relationships because society, as well as the individual, has an interest in strong marriages. Strong marriages support a strong society. And society supports the marriage by encouraging people to do the very hard work of keeping their promises. One of the ways in which society ensures strong marriages is by tut-tutting (or worse) at people who don't keep to their vows: who abandon spouses, treat them badly, or yes, violate their trust by engaging in covert sexual activity. I'm a big fan of sexual privacy. But you cannot have a public institution that rests in part on fidelity, and also complete privacy on those matters.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think that social sanction can be very helpful in assisting us in doing important but difficult things. Marriage is stronger if people who find out that their friends are cheating don't say, "Awesome, is he hot?" but "How could you do that to Jason?" Marriage is stronger if people who cheat are viewed with slight revulsion, and so are the (knowing) people who they cheat with. Marriage is stronger when people who decide not to care for seriously ill spouses are met with an incredulous "What the hell is wrong with you?", not "Yeah, I couldn't handle that either." Of course it would be nicer if we didn't need this sort of help. But we are a flawed species....
I'm not saying that we should spend weeks and months torturing the guy--that's up to his wife, if she wants to. But I don't think that the media should have hushed up something that was, um, very public . . . or that it's somehow out of bounds to say that, unless she was really enthusiastically supporting his desire to text photos of his body parts all across our fair land, this was a really remarkably shitty thing to do to his wife.
Harry Hamlin has had three very beautiful wives, Laura Johnson, Nicolette Sheridan and Lisa Rinna (four, if you count Ursula Andress since they had a kid together.) Of the these four women who have shared intimacy with Harry, at least three have posed nude for Playboy (Rinna twice, once full nude while 6 months pregnant with Hamlin's child.) Obviously, Harry likes to show off his women. So he would probably be in that "braggart" category that I discussed in the paragraph above this one.
Which brings me directly to my question for the women AND ONLY THE WOMEN here. Smeee, Karen, Red Bird, Dora, would you ever want your husbands showing off their body parts to the whole world (similar to the manner our fair Congressman did) with a feeling of "bragging" in the manner with which I have described how some men feel when their wives get naked? I would have to guess "no" because I can't imagine women (any women) thinking the way Harry Hamlin does, but I'm not a woman so......