You, Too, Can Be the Professional Wife of an Important Asshole

There is a lot—a lot—to disdain in this New York Times profile of Norris Church Mailer, Norman Mailer's "last" wife, starting with the fact that, to quote Shaker SamanthaB who sent the link, "I'm happy for her if she's been able to construct a reasonably contented life for herself in any fashion she has chosen, but that doesn't make it acceptable for the Times to shape the most phenomenally retrograde crap out of said life." But perhaps nothing else so much as this:

But one of the oldest stories out there is that beauty is no guarantee of a husband's fidelity. Norris says that in their first eight years together, she believes he remained faithful — more or less. By the time John Buffalo was 14, she discovered that Mailer had been cheating on her with "a small army of women."

…When Norris discovered the scope of Mailer's infidelities, she was struck by how many of the women were either his age — he was near 70 then — or significantly overweight. "He made the remark, 'Sometimes I want to be the attractive one.' I think he felt if it wasn't somebody young and beautiful, he wasn't betraying me as much. He just couldn't resist someone who told him what a great man he was and what a great writer he was. Every time he fell for it. After I found out, I kept saying to him, 'Why didn't I know?' And he said, 'It's not hard to fool somebody who loves you and trusts you.' "

That's rather devastating. She nodded. "You don't ever love and trust them the same way again. But by that time, I had been around town long enough to know the guys who were available, and I thought: Is there somebody else I want to make a life with? Is there someone else I want to be the father of my children? I couldn't think of one single person. If I had, maybe I would have taken that step."

UGH. Where to begin? The invocation of the Beauty Guarantees Fidelity chestnut. The treatment of fat and beautiful as mutually exclusive concepts. The regard for male insecurity and associated cruelties as pitiable. The idea that a life cannot be lived (or "made") without a partner. The notion that marriage and fatherhood are inextricably linked, but marriage and motherhood are not (that is, you're a father only as long as you're still married to a mother, but a mother is a mother always). It's such a clusterfuck.

And it's ever so much worse because the entire piece frames Norris Mailer as the ideal wife, positions these attitudes as not merely understandable in some particular context, but as appropriate—as somehow the key to her success as a professional ("amateurs and outsiders take note") wife. UGH.

We're so in the backlash, Shakers.