Speaking of mixed marriages, is the stunning blonde wife of Tiger Woods, the Swedish model Elin Nordegren, deserving of sympathy? After all, she did physically attack her husband. If she were a man, assault charges probably would have been filed by her spouse. On the other hand, her sudden lack of self-control is not difficult to understand. Not difficult at all. Here are two views.

A male reader writes:

I see her as having attacked him in screaming rage and humiliation. I see her, in 60 seconds of intense fear and hatred, as defending her pride, her dignity and her honour as a beautiful young wife cheated and betrayed; as a young mother defending her home and her children. 

During her 60 seconds of violence she forgot about the private jets, the cars, the houses and the yachts. She forgot about the money. I like to imagine that for those few seconds she wanted to kill him for being a rat instead of a man. I respect her. I like her for it.

Mrs. N. writes:

I was grieved to see the comment of the male reader in your blog. Why on earth would we applaud a woman for forgetting herself so completely as to think she had the right to resort to physical violence? Mrs. Tiger is hardly the first woman to find herself married to a man who has been unfaithful to his vows. As a society, we discipline our sons to the point of emasculation for exhibiting any form of aggression and yet we encourage our daughters to give vent to every emotional whim and applaud them, when a truly devastating blow comes, for devolving into hysterical lunatics thrashing around without control. Tiger may have been deserving of a punch in the nose, but not from his wife. It is unfortunate that shame has lost much of its usefulness as a behavior modifier in our culture because they are equally deserving of a healthy dose of its benefits.  

Laura writes:

I agree with Mrs. N.  Apparently Mrs. Woods’ relatives and children were in the house.  It was outrageous behavior, as was that of her husband. His wrongdoing was far more serious, but she acted like a child having a tantrum and should not be excused for it.

The male reader writes:

Concerning the violence by Tiger Woods’ wife, I stand (partly) corrected. My apologies for seeming to condone violence in their home. The possible presence of the children changes the whole thing. You are correct: she forgot the money but she may also have forgotten the children. I had not considered that the little kids may have heard or seen what I imagine to have been her outburst of violent rage. 

However.

My focus was on something else: the inevitable effect of sexual betrayal, humiliation and jealousy. This is enormously powerful, toxic stuff: Othello and Desdemona come to mind, do they not? To pretend otherwise is delusional. The effect is not always overtly violent but is always just as poisonous. I think that her 60 seconds of rage illustrates this. President Clinton’s misadventures with his female employees elicited the standard glib liberal responses: “It’s only sex; everyone lies about sex; get over it; move on; what’s your problem,” etc. etc. Tiger Woods’ wife shows this to be a lie; she showed that the sexual ‘revolution’ was a lie. Her instinctive, violent, lizard-brain response showed that what her husband did to her is risky business indeed. 

What was she supposed to do? Cry? Plead for him to stop? Beg? Reason with him? Get all sneaky and passive-aggressive? Have revenge affairs of her own? A novena to Saint Cunegonde? Sit there and take it? What? How does she deal with something so ugly and deceitful and keep her family intact? She tried it the way many men (and also many women, two of whom I know) have done it down through the ages: She hammered the guilty male into submission. Crude but simple, brief, direct and sometimes surprisingly effective. And sorta fun too, in a perverse way, no? It has a certain satisfyingly symmetrical quality to it, does it not? I’m asking for trouble here, I know, I know. 

Men may be stupid about many things but they fully understand all the nuances of physical force. (Please do not misunderstand me; it does not, repeat NOT, apply to the guilty female. Ever). Even if Desdemona had done it, Othello should have turned and walked. Makes for lousy drama but them’s the breaks. But if he does the violence, he does not pass go and goes directly to jail; and so he should. But not her, doesn’t work that way. Why? Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Might not be fair but life’s not fair. He smacks the girl he pays the price, and so he should. He’s bigger, stronger, faster, meaner. And if she’s bigger, stronger, faster and meaner, then he can run for his life down to the shelter; maybe meet a nice girl down there. 

Tiger Woods publicly humiliated his wife so she publicly and physically humiliated him. In liberal terms, she “sent a message”, a direct message, by special delivery via nine iron applied upside the brain-pan. I must admit, I like her style. She might not have a lot of class, but the girl’s got style. Maybe Boy Tiger will understand, maybe not. I doubt it, but I bet there are 100 million women (and maybe one Swedish father) who would be smiling over their morning coffee if it weren’t for those two little kids in that great big house.

Laura writes:

The male reader is right in saying the law should not view male and female domestic violence the same. Since men are naturally more aggressive and potentially more dangerous, penalties should be harsher and more immediate for men. Having said this, I also recognize that feminism has brought in a wave of extremism in enforcement of domestic violence laws and abuses of these laws.

It is crushing for a woman to get this kind of news when she is caring for very young children. She is especially vulnerable – no matter how many houses or closets full of clothes she has. I can understand why she would lose it in a moment of rage and despair. Wouldn’t it suggest that her marriage meant nothing to her emotionally if she just took this with calm composure? Nevertheless, I can’t cheer her on. I can’t say it was excusable behavior.

Or can I?  He had stolen what mattered most in the world to her: his loyalty. He possessed everything he could possibly want and yet he betrayed her, not once but many times. What a brute. I’m sorry.  Both Mrs. N. and the male reader make some valid points. Mrs. Woods lost her temper, but she did not seriously injure her husband. She did come to her senses. I have lost my temper (on rare occcasions) over less significant events than that which provoked Mrs. Woods. But I have never hit anybody with a golf club. We are not made of clay, but flesh and blood.

M., another male reader, writes:

I find myself completely indifferent to the sufferings of Elin Woods. In my opinion, she committed the worst kind of betrayal a woman can commit against her people short of actual espionage: she gave herself to a man of another race to make children. This angers me on a very deep, existential level. It is a serious threat to the survival of our people, dividing our loyalties at the family level and destroying an obviously very beautiful genetic line. A line of what may be thousands of years of beautiful blondes comes to an end with her. She is a perfect example of what happens when young women are not kept under the control of their fathers until they are married, but allowed to follow their romantic and sexual whims regardless of how destructive they are to their own lives and to our identity and survival as a people. 

I have a close friend, a woman I’ve known since college, who had a romantic idea about Mexico (which I have never understood) and who went there during and after college to work. Predictably, she was wooed by dashing Mexican men looking for some easy sex with a white girl (Mexican fathers don’t let their daughters run around unsupervised like that), got pregnant, and married the Mexican who fathered her child. After having another child with him, she discovered that he had another white woman kept in a place up the hill as his mistress. He was irritated with her when she confronted him about the mistress, telling her that it was none of her business. And I suppose in Mexican culture it wasn’t. 

So she brought her very Mexican-looking children back to her small American hometown and the American taxpayer and her family have paid a significant part of the price of raising and educating them. She has admitted she made a mistake getting involved with Mexico but nevertheless now makes a living by teaching illegal immigrant children (compounding her treason, in my opinion), again paid for by the American taxpayer. Meanwhile, the Mexican who fathered her children got the white mistress pregnant, married her, and then moved on again, cheating on that woman with another, teenaged white girl he met in Mexico. That’s three white women’s lives ruined by that one man, because our culture allows young women free rein to indulge their foolish romantic passions without the control of their fathers. 

(And get this: the friend’s half-Mexican daughter is dating a white boy, which drives her Mexican father crazy – he doesn’t want her dating outside her race. There is a small bit of justice.) 

So I have no sympathy for Elin Woods. She turned her back on us and I really couldn’t care less how unhappy she is with her choice. I suspect that most men would understand how I feel. This situation, where we are expected to stand mute while women like her flaunt their betrayal of our people is unnatural and I part of the emmasculation of white men that’s occurred over the last generation or two. I would say I feel terribly sorry for Elin Woods’ father, except that being a Scandinavian man there’s a very good chance that he thinks it’s perfectly splendid that his beautiful blonde daughter married a non-white.

Laura writes:

M. gets at something that has been alluded to here, but not fully articulated: Feminism and miscegenation are interconnected. Only a society which has emasculated  men would openly condone intermarriage. Let me change that. Only a society in which white men have been emasculated would see the sort of tolerance for and celebration of intermarriage we are experiencing today.

Mrs. N. writes:

I would like to address a few points in the first male reader’s response. I will agree that sexual betrayal, humiliation, and jealousy are powerful inducements to criminal behavior. Let us be absolutely clear on this matter: Mrs. Tiger’s behavior was criminal. Tiger’s was not in most states. 

I do not know what the appropriate response to his infidelities should be as I am neither Tiger nor his wife. However, I do know that assault with a weapon that could kill, or damage beyond repair, another person is NOT it. The only thing she could hope to accomplish with such an action was to selfishly gratify her own feelings of rage. She wasn’t going to change what happened. She wasn’t going to improve her marriage. She wasn’t going to help her children. She wasn’t going to improve her husband’s income potential. Only a foolish woman goes about tearing her own house down. She was, however, fortunate that the best of all scenarios played out. She will not go to prison. She will not have a dead, brain injured, nor disfigured husband to deal with being reminded daily that she caused it. Nor will her children. 

” She tried it the way many men ( and also women, two of whom I know) have done it down through the ages: She hammered the guilty male into submission. Crude but simple, brief, direct and sometimes surprisingly effective. And sorta fun in a perverse way, no?”

 I think perverse is the correct word, indeed. Submission, however, does not describe the relationship, but oppression does. The human spirit rails under oppression and will require increasing amounts of pressure to keep the status quo. What next, she pulls out a driver? 

I do not believe that women should be treated any differently under the law as regards physical violence because the intent is the same. Women may not be as big, strong, or fast, but we don’t have to be as Mrs. Tiger clearly exhibits. A man is an easy target when society snickers behind its hand at the thought of one being abused. Men must suffer silently or bear humiliation on all fronts. If a woman is willing to lift her hand in a violent act, then she should be ready to suffer the consequences of such an act and not pull the “but I’m just a poor, little, scorned, woman” card. It is disgusting.

 The male reader writes: 

Mrs. N. takes issue with my glib defence of Elin Woods’ behaviour. Point taken. I was asking for trouble. However, I might suggest that Mrs. N. bends the issue ever so slightly by opening her discussion with her characterization of Elin’s behaviour as “criminal.” Once you do that the discussion is effectively closed. One cannot defend criminality right?

 On the other hand, in most Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions the criminal law makes place for what is often called “provocation” using language like “in the heat of passion” and “wrongful act or insult of such a nature as to deprive an ordinary person of self control,” and so on. There are defences against a charge of murder in some cases, let alone assault, and last I looked Tiger was still well above room temperature. ( I don’t want to get into some nitpicking squabble about this; I practised law for over 25 years and I’m bored stiff with it all.) 

Mrs. N. says she doesn’t know what the appropriate response should be, only that it’s not violence. Maybe so, but we live in a fallen world with violence all over it, and even the criminal codes recognize and make allowance for some of it.  Again, what is the wife, any wife, supposed to do? She’s all alone in the wreckage of her family, humiliated in sight of the entire world.  know a sweet Italian woman who took a hockey stick to her cheating husband and chased old Guido the casanova at high speed on foot down the middle of the street in broad daylight shrieking in Sicilian. The point being that everyone laughed about it once they cooled down, including Guido who was a good boy from then on. That was 15 years ago. Heat of passion might have done a bit of good, no? That story is merely anecdotal, but the universally recognized legal defence of provocation is not.

Mrs. N. says it’s all about “oppression,” implying that Boy Tiger is the Oppressed, the Victim in his 3 round losing bout with his 102 lb. betrayed, humiliated, cheated young wife. “The human spirit rails under oppression and requires increasing amounts of pressure to maintain the status quo.” The image of Tiger Husband-and-Father as the “human spirit” struggling under the yoke of oppression is too strange. I don’t wish to seem impolite but this sounds like a wierd inversion of something by Germaine Greer I vaguely remember reading years ago. No offence meant; I simply fail to understand it.

Don’t misunderstand me either, I sympathize with all the guys whose lives were ruined by abuse of criminal procedures in the meatgrinder divorce industry. I know some of them and what was done to them was inhuman. Nor do I feel all that sorry for a pretty young blond with 50 million dollars who could rebuild her life in an instant.

 But I do think Tiger got a taste of the public physical humiliation he fully deserved.

Diana writes:

I’m surprised that you would judge Elin Nordegren before all the facts are in.

We don’t know for sure if she behaved violently towards Woods. The  bizarre story about the crash keeps changing. Now it seems that the police found him snoring! What? First he crashed, then she freed him with a golf club, now they found him peacefully snoring. The fact is we don’t know what happened that night.

Now it seems that his harem is up to ten women. This was not a discreet affair that he tried to keep under wraps (not that that is right) – it was completely and utterly compulsive disgraceful behavior. If she erupted, I can’t blame her. I don’t say it’s model behavior, but I wouldn’t blame her.

Mrs. N. writes:

Diana is right. The facts are not all in yet, but this is not just a discussion of this particular case, but of the hypothetical situation. It is easier to use this context than to make one up. Indulge us for the sake of the discussion. 

I will concede that the law makes allowances for provocation. But I think that we could agree that the provocation allowance is squishy at best because of its changeability. We live in a fallen world and we find it more palatable to “soften” our laws than to stiffen our spines. 

The male readers continues to say that Elin Woods is humiliated in front of the world. It may seem odd to you, but I have much more respect for a woman who bears up under difficulty than one who goes to pieces. This was the point I was trying to make in my first comment. A woman who is used abominably can and should do everything in her power to retain her dignity. It will only help her to cope with the inevitable feelings of unworthiness and failure. It may also help the husband to repent of his wrong when he sees her as the injured party and himself as the one causing the problem. In any case, my hope is that she will forgive him and work to keep her family intact. Much easier if you hadn’t cracked your cheatin’ man with a golf club and now require his forgiveness as well. I wonder, though, if our differing views are more a function of our sexes than anything else. The male reader seems to be very concerned about her public humiliation and I am significantly more concerned about her feeling unloved and a failure. [Laura writes: Good point. It’s probably a natural difference in emphasis. The male reader is almost expecting Mrs. Tiger to act like a man.] 

I wondered if I had gone too far with the use of the word oppression. However, I still think it applies. If a man uses physical threats as a way to force his wife to do something, be something, or act someway, then is he not oppressing her? Why would it be any different for the sexes to be switched in the above scenario? Isn’t the same force being used? The sexes do generally behave differently when confronted by infidelity though. Men generally leave and women generally stay. [Laura writes: Today, it’s the women who do the leaving, especially in the event of their own infidelity.]  If you have a word that better expresses this thought, I am certainly willing to entertain it. 

All this to bring us back to the beginning. Tiger may deserve a crack upside the head but she was not the one to give it.

Diana writes:

I suggest you take a gander at this article for some background. I have worked in sports management. The spoiling of these brats is something fearful. The article points out rightly that Tiger is spoiled not only as a man but as a player, and is allowed to get away with unsportsmanlike garbage that no other player would be. Did they put up with this nonsense from Jack Nicklaus? No way!!

I must admit to a small amount of Schadenfreude, and I repeat that I will reserve judgment of Elin’s behavior until all the facts are in – which they may never be. I’ve heard that she has scorned his shoddy offer of more money and has cleared out, although that too might be a story.

James Wilson writes:

The Swedish model did not fall in love with a caddy, or a struggling golfer trying to find a sponsor for his motel and travel expenses. And Woods, who knows if he is capable of falling for anything. 

When bad things happen to us, we can understand our part in it, or we can repeat it. 

And may I say, this ridiculous need to equalize violence in women with men is…ridiculous. If you cannot take a few swings from a woman and laugh about it, you need to move down in weight class. If women are more dangerous than men, it is because they are weaker.

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