In the summer of 2005, I was on my J1 visa, living and working in East Hampton. It was the year of the Unholy Love Triangle between Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Jennifer Aniston, and their faces were everywhere. I went to see Mr and Mrs Smith in the local movie theatre, I scanned the covers of the gossip magazines as I queued to pay for my groceries, I gasped at the W magazine editorial which depicted Brad and Angelina’s ‘domestic bliss’, I hung out at the newsstand to read Jennifer’s interview with Vanity Fair about Brad’s missing sensitivity chip. As my friends and I breathlessly dissected the drama, I even ordered a Team Aniston t-shirt from Kitson boutique to send to my sister back in Ireland. I couldn’t get enough of it.
I wish I could say I had the discernment at the time to critique the inherent misogyny of how this story played out in the media but alas, I did not. I never thought to question why it was the two women who were pitted against one another, how the breakdown of the marriage was either Jennifer’s fault (too ambitious, too career focused, she wouldn’t give Brad a baby, what else was the poor man supposed to do?) or Angelina’s (so wild, so sexy, how was the poor man supposed to resist?). Brad, the person who had actually taken vows to remain faithful, almost disappeared in the ensuing uproar. Protected, as always, by his gender, his privilege, his beauty.
I was thinking about this when I read Madeline Gray’s piece for Grazia, in which she writes that it’s time to re-think the role of the mistress. She references the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, and how the latter was demonised, despite the enormous disparity in power and age in that relationship. She also mentions the ‘Scandoval’ mess – Rachel Leviss, the ‘other woman’ in that story, had to enter inpatient treatment at a mental health facility due to the public fallout, becoming, in her own words, ‘one of the most hated women in America. “Sleeping with another woman’s partner is (seen as) ‘un-feminist’, a betrayal of the sisterhood,” Gray writes. “This ignores the fact that both women are being hurt by the same man’s entitlement. In seeing the ‘other woman’ as a predatory threat we suggest that men have no self-control and are therefore blameless… So, is the mistress finally having her moment? It’s undeniable that there is a shift occurring in terms of how we represent her. Hopefully, what comes with this is a redirecting of our anger. Mine is towards the man – and I think yours should be too.”
I largely agree with Gray (as an aside, I ADORED Green Dot, her debut novel about a young woman having an affair with a married colleague, and I highly recommend buying it). The person who is being unfaithful is the one who has broken their partner’s trust, not the mistress, and the suggestion that men are too in thrall to their primitive desires to resist temptation is both infantilising and insulting. But I’m not sure that it’s a great act of feminism to absolve the other woman of all responsibility either. What if they enter into the affair with full knowledge of the man’s commitment to someone else? That he has made vows, that he has children? What if the other woman knows the wife or partner, or if they’re already friends?
What do we owe to one another, not as women but as human beings?