Is it OK for Women to Disparage Their Ex-Husbands in Print?

Is it OK for Women to Disparage Their Ex's in Print

  • Yes, it is cathartic

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  • No, it is classless

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Toro

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Sep 29, 2005
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Surfing the Oceans of Liquidity
These aren't guys who did bad things, like say, Tiger Woods. These are guys whose biggest crimes, according to their wives, are that they are boring.

Consider Elizabeth Weil's husband, Dan. On Sunday, in the New York Times Magazine, Ms. Weil previewed a memoir she is writing about their effort to improve their marriage. She doesn't stint on the frisky bits—or rather, what she proclaims to be the insufficiently frisky bits. The conjugal part of their equation is apparently "not terribly inventive." Ms. Weil derides their "safe, narrow little bowling alley of a sex life" and tells us that she and her husband "hadn't been talking to each other while having sex. And not making eye contact either." One thing's for sure: If that hesitation to make eye contact suggested a certain reticence, Ms. Weil has overcome it.

Dan's wife is just one of the legion of women scribblers eager to divulge the intimate details of their marriages. The hot new genre is the tell-all of sexual disappointment written by women having their Peggy Lee moment: "Is That All There Is?" ...

Ms. Loh, who published a memoir about mommyhood last year, is one of those writers whose husbands you have to pity. In her 2008 book, "Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!," she laments that her "salt of the earth" spouse, Mike, is too even-keeled and practical to give her the steamy loving she craves. You can guess where that was heading. This summer Ms. Loh began chronicling her divorce in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, sharing with all and sundry that, after the thrill of a hot and heavy extramarital affair, she decided not to go to all the trouble—the "arduous home- and self-improvement project"—of falling back in love with her boring old spouse. "I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband," she wrote. Poor Mike. One would think that having a wife cat around would be enough of an assault on his manhood. But just to twist the blade she has to explain to anyone willing to pick up a magazine that his marriage failed because he couldn't cut it in the passion department.

Perhaps the most savage example of this genre is Julie Powell's recent "Cleaving." Her first book, 2005's "Julie & Julia," was something of a stunt project—Ms. Powell chronicled her attempt to work her way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The book was a huge success, as we know, making her name and fortune. What to do next? Ms. Powell decided to embark on a double-stunt: apprenticing with a butcher and indulging in "rough and tumble" infidelity. "Cleaving" is an excruciating read, in no small part because of the humiliation it heaps upon her cuckolded husband. Eric Powell, to whom she has been married for years, is spared no embarrassment. By contrast, the man with whom she has a kinky and obsessive affair is identified with only a "D." For him, she is discreet.

In his De Gustibus column, Eric Felten writes about women who expose the details of their marriages in print. And why men would never do that. - WSJ.com
 

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