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An idiosyncratic theory of the Woods marriage
Personally, I find Mark P.’s theory too odd and speculative to be believable. But it is coherent and original, and worth posting.
Mark P. writes:
What really took apart Tiger’s marriage is Elin finding out that the man she married was not the alpha-male she thought he was. This is a typical problem for a man who is attractive for what he has (celebrity status; money), instead of for what he is. For all the things that men do to be able to score a quality wife, it is truly ironic how marriage negates those same achievements.
What Elin wanted was to live with the billionaire celebrity that is Tiger Woods. She wanted the life she saw before the cameras to be the one she lived on a day-to-day basis. Tiger represented a princess fantasy par-excellence for her. Whatever she imagined Tiger Woods to be, however, was simply a construct of the media, something given to him by others. It could not possibly be the “real” him. Once married, the things that Tiger had mapped directly onto Elin, negating the advantage that he had. He was now simply Tiger Woods, everyman.
Elin probably discovered that Tiger Woods really wasn’t all that good with women. On a day-to-day basis, he probably reminded her of the dorks she used to to fend off at the bars and clubs she used to go to (imagine a man talking to a woman above his league.) This registers in her mind as a collossal betrayal. To salvage the situation, Elin had probably tried to bring out his inner-alpha by testing him. At first, she started by making innocuous comments. Then she escalated to minor criticisms. Then she escalated to inconsistent demands. Then she started withholding sex. Tiger failed every test, probably responding as a supplicating, “Yes, dear,” so afraid to lose his wife that he could not assert his place as the head, dominant figure in his own household. The home-life consequently deteriorated.
How do I know this? The women Tiger was cheating with were simply not as attractive as his wife. A man doesn’t go out for hamburger when he has steak at home. But the homelife had so deteriorated, that the lower quality women offered him the same magic he had with Elin when she was still enamored with his celebrity. What probably prompted the divorce was not the cheating; it was the embarrassment of being passed over for lower quality women.
Tiger should really not be hated, either for his lack of marital fidelity or marrying a white woman, or any other reason. He is a victim of the modern, unleashed woman and the rapacious, draconian divorce industry. There are millions of men suffering the same fate that Tiger has without the cushion of his remaining wealth and his comfort women.
- end of initial entry -
Mark P. replies to LA’s comment at the beginning of this entry:
I think the issue is that many traditional conservatives are traditionalists with regard to women. It seems many of them have not accepted the fact that women drive much of the destruction within family life that we see today. Real social conservatives tend to lay the blame at the feet of men.
LA replies:
That may be true of some conservatives, but it’s obviously not true of me, given the highly critical things I post about women.
The reason I doubt your theory is that it is counterintuitive to an extreme. The idea of looking at Tiger Woods’s extreme adulterous behavior, and then turning him into the poor, innocent victim of his wife, is just wild, and can only come from a mind with an exaggerated notion of women as the source of all ills.
September 7
Clark Coleman writes:
Mark P.’s theory is quite creative in one respect, and not the least bit creative upon reflection. It is a parroting of the Gamers’ party line about modern relationships. I think we need to create a computer program that accepts as input any story about a male and a female and produces as output an interpretation of that story with the stock Gamer complaints about alpha males, beta males, hypergamous women, anti-male divorce laws, traditionalists don’t understand what younger men face today, and so on. Then, whether we feed the program the story of Tiger and Elin, or Bill and Hillary, or any other ill-fated couple, no matter how dissimilar the stories, the explanation will sound the same. In fact, that program might already exist and might have generated this novel theory about the Woods marriage.
Gintas writes:
When you’re a hammer everything starts looking like a nail. I saw one post where someone was positing that opening doors for other people is beta, with following comments detailing the different ways doors can be held, and possible non-beta ways to do it. The most funny thing were the comments about how alphas hold the door open to signal dominance, with other comments about how betas hold the door open to signal their subservience to women. It’s alpha and it’s beta!
September 9
Mark P. writes:
Clark Coleman writes:
Mark P.’s theory is quite creative in one respect, and not the least bit creative upon reflection. It is a parroting of the Gamers’ party line about modern relationships. I think we need to create a computer program that accepts as input any story about a male and a female and produces as output an interpretation of that story with the stock Gamer complaints about alpha males, beta males, hypergamous women, anti-male divorce laws, traditionalists don’t understand what younger men face today, and so on. Then, whether we feed the program the story of Tiger and Elin, or Bill and Hillary, or any other ill-fated couple, no matter how dissimilar the stories, the explanation will sound the same. In fact, that program might already exist and might have generated this novel theory about the Woods marriage.
Well, Bill and Hillary’s marriage has not resulted in a divorce, has it? Explanation: Bill is a true alpha male and Hillary simply cannot replace him. The few fleeting moments she had with such a man was worth the infidelity and separation.
LA replies: If I were your interlocutor in this debate, rather than your moderator, I would have to say: Touché.
Which is not to say that I agree with your argument as a whole.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 05, 2010 06:25 PM | Send
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