Published: March 18, 2008 09:32 pm            

Stephanie Salter: What do we call a woman betrayed? Whatever we want

TERRE HAUTE — I find it strange that during Spitzer’s resignation he looked like he just got back from a well-rested vacation and his wife looked like she had aged overnight.

— poster JaninNY, on a CNN blog site



Once again, events remind us (some of us, anyway) that there is no female equivalent of the word “cuckold.”

Funny, huh? Everyone from preachers to psychotherapists can tell us that men cheat on their wives and girlfriends at a far more fervent rate than women cheat on their men. The fallen Democratic governor of New York is only the most recent fellow to add his high-profile name and low-life anecdotes to this nearly infinite body of empirical data.

But which sex has a specific and time-honored noun to pin upon the cheatee?

Since at least 13th-century Europe, when wives were viewed by church and state as so much property belonging to a husband, “cuckold” has stood alone to describe a male whose mate takes to another man’s bed. That handful of you waving the word “cuckquean” around as the female counterpart? Get serious.

It isn’t in Webster’s or most mainstream dictionaries. Google “cuckold,” and more than 6 million, 320 thousand entries are yours for the perusing. Try “cuckquean,” and the choices are limited to 2,400.

Speaking of Googling, put “Eliot Spitzer” and the word “wife” into the search box. Some 268,000 entries register. Type “Eliot Spitzer’s wife standing beside” (without the quotation marks, as practiced Googlers know) and 18,500 mentions materialize.

I typed those five words just to get an idea of how Silda Wall Spitzer’s version of the Betrayed and Humiliated Political Wife’s Perp Walk has gone down in the US of A. Not surprising, analyses and comments are all over the map — or all over the catalog of Rorschach ink blots.

Women, men, shrinks, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, sexologists, pastors, pundits, ultra-conservatives and unmitigated boors have weighed in by the planeload to project their emotions and expertise onto yet another woman almost no one knew of until her husband was linked to a prostitute (or airport men’s room).

The range of reactions has been as broad and diverse as our nation itself, and just about as polarized. Silda Spitzer and her marriage have been dissected by millions of strangers who’ve offered sympathy, contempt, judgment and reams of advice.

One of the most common reactions among women was articulated on an Ohio-Kentucky Web site, cincymoms.com. Posted by the username AutumnsMommy, it addressed the excruciating press conference at which an afflicted-looking Mrs. Spitzer stood as Mr. Spitzer monotonously alluded to behavior that had injured his family.

“I would’ve waited til he was done talking then whopped him upside the head and walked away,” wrote AutumnsMommy. “Maybe I would slowly jab him with a keychain knife as he was talking. Or maybe I would take the microphone and publicly announce my divorce right there. Let it be the first time he hears about it, too.”

At the other end of the spectrum was the ever-comforting radio therapist, Laura Schlessinger. Appearing on a panel of talking heads for NBC’s Today show, Dr. Laura allowed, “I do not know anything about their personal lives,” but she dismissed Silda Spitzer’s pain with customary dispatch:

“When the wife does not focus on the needs and the feelings, sexually, personally, to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like her hero, he’s very susceptible to the charm of some other woman making him feel what he needs.”

What he needs?

A beautiful, bright woman forgoes her own legal career to support her ambitious lawyer husband and provide a stable, loving home for their three daughters. What her husband needs is allegedly to pay $4,000 per visit for unprotected sex with a 22-year-old prostitute whose MySpace page confides that — like most girls and women in the sex industry — she was once homeless and abused as a child.

Such “charms.” No wonder Spitzer was susceptible. Or, as Schlessinger opined of cheaters in general, that he was just one more man who chose “to feed himself where he’s starving.”

A few years ago, the spouse of another disgraced Democratic New Jersey governor executed the Betrayed and Humiliated Political Wife’s Perp Walk. Then it was Dina Matos McGreevey, whose competition was not a call girl named Kristen, but a guy named Golan Cipel.

Like Silda and scores of others before her, Dina stood loyally by her husband’s side as cameras clicked and whirred. Unlike most of the disgraced politicos’ wives, however, James McGreevey’s spouse eventually divorced him. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey after Dina Matos resumed using her maiden name, she offered a telling explanation for her news conference appearance.

“We have a daughter together,” Matos said of her ex, “and one day she’s going to hear about this or read about it, and she’s going to ask me, ‘Mommy, why weren’t you at Daddy’s side?’ So I was there for my daughter’s father.”

Why weren’t you at Daddy’s side? Apparently, it’s one of those lessons that still comes with being a girl.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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