FORBESWOMAN
What Did Maria Know And When Did She Know It?
May. 20 2011 - 10:46 am | 7,199 views |
by Kiri Blakeley
Did She Know?
Last night, CNNs Showbiz Tonight posed the question Did Maria know? The question refers, of course, to Maria Shriver and whether or not she knew about her husband Arnold Schwarzenegger fathering a child with their long time housekeeper, Mildred Baena.
Possible reasons given that Shriver may have known about the dallianceand stayed with Arnold anywayincluded that shes stupid, that she had an open marriage, that she thought she could change him, or that, being a Kennedy, she was bred to look the other way.
There has been a lot of chatter of this sort since the scandal broke. The blog The Alternative Feminist asked, Why do we insist the poor wife was merely an innocent victim of this lascivious cad? and proclaimed, It takes two to have a sham marriage
There is almost no way to convince me that Maria Shriver had no idea of her husbands philandering.
A typical message board post goes like this one here on Disboards by Halloweenqueen, who states: Im not buying the idea that Maria didnt know. I think it was a combined effort from the both of them to conceal this.
To be fair, Shriver did paint herself in this corner a bit more than your average philandered-upon wife. For one, when Schwarzenegger, who was running for governor of California at the time, was accused of groping women on movie sets, Shriver came stridently to his defense, declaring, Are you going to take the word of people who have met him for five minutes or take my word?
The voters took her word, and now they seem to resent it.
But I cant help sympathizing with Maria against her detractors, for I have a deep familiarity with the you must have known routine. When I appeared on The Joy Behar Show in January to promote my book Cant Think Straight: A Memoir of Mixed-Up Love, which is about the discovery that my fiance had long been cheating on me with men, guest host Lisa Rinna asked, her voice ringing with incredulity, You had no idea whatsoever? No clues?
By that point Id done enough publicity to accept that this was going to be a major theme: people are simply unable (or unwilling) to process that a woman couldnt know her man was living a double life. This seems to be a mentality that applies primarily to personal betrayals. After all, how many average folk who had their life savings drained by Bernie Madoffs Ponzi scheme were accused of being complicit in his crime and turning the other way?
What is really going on here is that people, mostly women, are comforting themselves: Saying, you must have known is another way of saying I would have known, which is another way of saying, This couldnt happen to me.
I also find this line of thinking distinctly sexist. Saying that a woman who has been betrayed by a man she trusted must have known isnt that different from saying that a woman who has been raped must have asked for it. Either way, its somehow the womans fault.
Lets all grow up and place the blame where it belongs: On the man. And check out Lisa Rinna questioning me on The Joy Behar Show here:
Lazy journalism.
That is so true!
