Let’s just go ahead and get this out of the way, eh? Aren’t feminists who embrace the “slut” label (e.g., “Slutwalk“) all about empowerment and liberation? And if you are an empowered liberated woman, what difference does it make if you’re married or your partner is married? All those silly vows — “Forsaking all others” and so forth — are just oppressive tools by which the patriarchy subjugates women, and anyone who buys into moral ideals of marital permanence and lifelong fidelity has succumbed to what the Marxists would call “false consciousness.”
Stipulate that adultery has occurred and continues to occur even in the most traditionalist societies, as for example the infamous Beecher-Tilton scandal. We can’t blame feminism for everything.
Still, doesn’t it just make sense that the cheating husband will have more opportunities to cheat in a culture where rhetoric about the sexual empowerment of women is so widely accepted that anyone who dares question it is condemned as a misogynist or a puritanial religious fanatic? In the case of Gen. David Petraeus and his affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, is there no one who can defend the marital rights of Holly Petraeus, the general’s wife of 37 years, without being accused of hypocrisy, prudery or sexism? And what about the husband — father of her two sons — whom the slut Paula Broadwell betrayed?
Taylor Berman at Gawker examines the evidence that Scott Broadwell suspected his wife was cheating with Petraeus and wrote a letter to New York Times advice columnist Chuck Klosterman and received a published answer informed by political correctness and moral relativism:
Don’t expose the affair in any high-profile way. It would be different if this man’s project was promoting some (contextually hypocritical) family-values platform, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. . . . This is between you and your spouse.
Right: Adultery is only a scandal if it involves hypocrisy, and only Republican “family-values” spokesmen are capable of hypocrisy, so the adultery of an important Obama administration official should be viewed as strictly a private matter. If it weren’t for double standards, liberals would have no standards at all.
According to her Wikipedia page, Broadwell remained an Army reserve officer while she was knocking boots with the CIA director and was only recently elevated to the rank of lieutenant colonel, a promotion she never would have gotten had her illicit affair been exposed earlier. And it appears the slut was very cunning in her seduction:
Paula Broadwell, 39, has said she often conducted interviews with Petraeus while jogging. The pair met in 2006, when she was attending the Kennedy Center for Public Leadership at Harvard.
Ah, yes — the elite institution, and the ambitious West Point graduate using her sexuality to gain advantageous access to the Alpha Male, who had conveniently tucked his wife into a political sinecure with the Obama administration’s pet bureaucracy:
His wife, Holly, the daughter of a West Point superintendent, heads the office for service-member affairs in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created by the 2010 financial-regulation law.Give the Missus a do-gooder job to keep her busy while you’re keeping busy with other things, eh, General?
Of course, the feminists will cry foul that I am interpreting this tawdry human drama ideologically, even while they themselves view it through the lens of their own narrow ideology. My point is not that feminism causes adultery, but rather that the feminist rhetoric of “empowerment” provides a convenient rationalization for such behavior, and that feminism privileges the interests of a relatively small cadre of women (elite careerist strivers like Paula Broadwell) over the interests of others.
The inherent selfishness of feminism — its meaning as the expression of the power-oriented ambitions of a self-interested elite — is what needs to be examined. As is so often true in radical politics, the demand for “equality” is a precursor to the demand for hegemonic superiority.
