Stephanie Salter

By Stephanie Salter
CNHI News Service

What surprises me most about the many reactions to Tiger Woods’ extramarital activities is that anyone at the end of 2009 is surprised. A wealthy, powerful and very famous man has been caught cheating on his wife.

And …?

The widespread astonishment from veteran journalists as well as fans — But he seemed so squeaky clean! — is like millions of people facing east in the early morning light and exclaiming, “Oh, my gosh! Here comes the sun!”
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Am I saying every wealthy, powerful, very famous man can be expected to cheat on his wife? No. That would be one of those sweeping generalizations that are easy to make, impossible to prove and — logic dictates — cannot be accurate. You know, like saying, “All liberals are atheistic socialists.”

As court records attest, poor men cheat on their wives. So do working-class, upper-middle-class and non-famous affluent men. In far fewer numbers, wives in each of these economic stratum cheat on their husbands.

Adultery knows no gender, economic class, political party or — as many sex scandals in evangelical and other religious circles indicate — particular spiritual bent.

However, it sometimes does seem as if the pool of wealthy, powerful, very famous men produces more than its share of cheaters. Partly this is because, when one of these guys gets caught, we all hear about it. (That’s the problem with being famous.) But part of the perception might mirror reality.

Wealthy, powerful and very famous men have disproportionate means to make it easier to play outside the foul lines. All the aspects of adultery that might dissuade a man of ordinary station from cheating — especially serial cheating — are not hurdles for men in the WPVF pool.

Money is never an object. WPVF men usually have peripatetic lifestyles that involve considerable travel away from home. They have loyal staff to help arrange and vouch for their absences. Even if they are as ugly as a mud fence, they attract an above-average number of willing partners in crime.

Perhaps most significant, WPVF men are accustomed to being treated as though they do not have to play inside the foul lines; many come to believe this is true.

Throw in the Woodsian element of a WPVF man who makes his living with his body, and there is even less reason for the public to be surprised that this one has seriously dishonored his marriage vows.

In a different incarnation, I spent many years covering professional baseball, basketball, football, tennis and golf. While doing this, I observed another pool: women of exceptional physical attractiveness who waft about pro athletes, their events and haunts like so much exotic vapor.

People who follow rock bands describe a similar pool.

Am I saying the ubiquitous presence of these comely, usually stacked and single females renders a poor, hapless pro athlete incapable of resisting temptation? No, that is Taliban thinking, which “solves” the downside of testosterone by blaming women for being female, and keeping them illiterate and swathed from head to toe in black cloth and a mesh eye screen.

What I am saying is, like the expansive array of cars and homes from which a rich person can buy, a WPVF man who makes his living with his body has an extra-disproportionate number of opportunities to go astray with hot-looking babes who already know he’s married and either don’t care or delude themselves into thinking he’ll be divorcing any day now.

Which introduces another obvious but ignored fact: Cheating males who break their marital vows do indeed deserve scorn; they are the promise breakers. But until women stop enabling men to diss and betray other women, cheating will continue. As Cori Rist, an alleged Woods paramour said on the Today show about Woods’ wife, “I can’t imagine the pain she is feeling now … I was selfish.”

Unfortunately, the odds of wiping out such enabling are about as good as the odds are of facing the west at dawn and being able to say, “Oh, my gosh! Here comes the sun!” Since the first cave-husband went out on his cave-wife, other women have enabled men to diss and betray their partners in life.

Women do it for many reasons, some venal, some stupid. For one segment of women, enabling helps increase their wardrobe, jewelry supply, the contents of their garage or their collection of mini-soaps from first-class resorts. These women rarely go for poor or middle-class guys.

For others, especially those who draw from the pools of pro athletes, rock musicians and national politicians, the enabling can be a notch thing. Guess who I’m ****ing?!! Or it can be that hypnotic cocktail of money, power and fame that causes some women to look at the aforementioned mud fence — who eats, snores, burps and goes wee-wee like everyone else — and behold Superman.

Ironically, as adultery moves down the food chain, where a man’s wealth, power and fame are measured in terms of ATM withdrawals, tenure and Chamber of Commerce vice presidencies, women tend to enable cheating for reasons of the heart and hormones.

This might seem a less immoral motive than bling, but it nearly always requires the enabler to buy into an ancient lie. (The cheater, himself, sometimes believes this lie to be true, especially when in the throes of passion.) “My wife doesn’t understand me.”

The funny thing is, that lie eventually becomes the truth.

A cheating man’s wife wakes up one day, finds a figurative smoking gun, and she really doesn’t understand him.

This happens in every pool of men, from the poorest to the most WPVF. As Tiger Woods has proven, all the money, power and fame in the world can’t help a man master one crucial element of seamless marital infidelity: How to keep from getting caught.

Stephanie Salter writes for The Tribune Star in terre Haute, Ind. She can be reached at (stephanie.salter@tribstar.com. CNHI News Service distributes her column.