Saturday, March 18, 2023 | 2 a.m.
If Eve were really the reason Adam ate the apple, then I guess Jada Pinkett Smith made her husband Will Smith smack Chris Rock during last year’s Oscars. And Meghan Markle masterminded Prince Harry’s departure from his royal family.
Now critics are claiming Jill Biden is behind President Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term. And Gisele Fetterman supposedly is orchestrating her husband’s political career.
Give me a break.
You’d think we would be past blaming women for the foibles and political ambitions of men. It’s such a cliché, not to mention misogynistic. But that’s a strategy certain right-wing commentators have been employing recently.
“So here you have Dr. Jill (Biden) and Gisele (Barreto) Fetterman, both cheering on their husbands’ political careers,” said Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the air recently. “Well, one is effectively incapacitated by dementia and the other one is literally in a mental hospital.”
As if that weren’t heartless enough, Carlson kept going. “Wouldn’t you think that a woman who loved a spouse, who loved her husband, would say no, it’s not good for him? Why is Dr. Jill not the villain in this story? What is her problem? What a ghoulish power-seeking creep, and the same with Gisele Fetterman. Her husband’s in a mental hospital. Like, what?”
“These women are monsters,” podcaster Candace Owens, his guest, replied. “Absolute monsters.”
She went on from there, but I’ll spare you the unnecessary vitriol.
Were I Gisele or Jill, I’d be apoplectic, defending myself and my husband.
Instead, Fetterman tweeted a Washington Post article headlined “How Gisele Fetterman became the right wing’s favorite super villain” and wrote: “In the worst moments of our lives, women are told it’s their fault. In case you need to hear it today: It’s. Not. Your. Fault. I will keep living and fighting with love. We all need more of it.”
It was a perfect response in the face of such ridiculousness. No one — not even Fox News commentators — knows the inner workings of other people’s marriages, or why they make the choices they make.
Besides, as someone who has been married for nearly 18 years and can’t get her husband to do anything he doesn’t want to do, I have a hard time believing these women are calling all the shots. Even if a man takes his wife’s advice about something, it’s still his choice, his actions, his decisions. So stop trying to pass the buck and blame wives for their husbands’ actions.
“If anything happens, they blame the woman,” Sabrina Kizzie, a professor of digital media at CUNY Baruch College, told me. “It all goes based off of our social and cultural norms.”
Sadly, blame-the-woman syndrome is a real thing. It’s one of the reasons why so many women who have been sexually assaulted don’t step forward. When Bill Clinton cheated in the White House, Hillary Clinton got scapegoated, which ultimately hurt her subsequent presidential runs.
More recently, critics have taken Gisele Fetterman to task, making her husband’s political decisions all about her, as if she’s a puppet master pulling his strings. I’ve been reading the many mean comments about her on social media, saying things like, “She should be ashamed of herself for forcing her husband to run for senator knowing he was not well,” and “Shame on her for pushing him to get elected when she knows how messed up he is.”
It’s just plain sexist.
I don’t know Fetterman. I interviewed her once in 2020 after she was pursued out of a grocery store by a vile woman who called her the N-word. Fetterman, who is from Brazil, showed a lot of grace back then. She continues to do so, even though you know she has to be going through it now.
I thought it was a pretty cool mom move to take her three kids zip-lining last month while their dad underwent treatment for depression. Instead of worrying about TV cameras parked outside their front door, she and her family embarked on a road trip to Canada. On Feb. 24, she wrote, “I am not really sure how to navigate this journey but am figuring it out slowly. 1 week ago today when the news dropped, the kids were off from school and media trucks circled our home. I did the first thing I could think of … pack them in the car and drive.”
The trip was more than a getaway, she explained online. “We talked about lots of hard things and how we will all have to face hard things. About the need to be gentle … with all and with ourselves.”
She took her children zip-lining and explained to them about “how joy and fun can and must still exist, even when someone we love is in pain.”
That’s such a great lesson.
Jenice Armstrong is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
