Last week, ABC rolled out its new summer series, Mistresses. A televised version of a trashy beach novel, the show is described by ABC as a “provocative, sexy and thrilling drama”. According to the network, Mistresses follows the adventures of a “sexy and sassy group of four girlfriends, each on her own path to self-discovery”. That description sounds familiar…pretty sure Samantha, Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte shared their own outrageous adventures over the years in Sex and the City, a show in which at least two of the women cheated with a married man.
Of course, infidelity is not new to network television. The supercouple of Derek Shepherd and Meredith Grey on Grey’s Anatomy started out as a drunken one night stand when Derek was still a married man; once his wife came to town, the audience was compelled to root for them to split up for good and to embrace any opportunity Der-Mer had to hook up in secret. A few months ago, an episode of HBO’s Girls explored the fleeting sexual relationship one character (Hannah) had with a much-older, married man. Perhaps the most talked-about affair on television these days is the one going on between crisis manager Olivia Pope and the President of the United States Fitz Grant on ABC’s Scandal.
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Women who cheat need to grow up and respect relationship boundaries.
It seems counterintuitive to think women would ever consider shows featuring–and sometimes focusing on–infidelity to be “must-see TV”. Yet, week after week, season after season, shows with these themes become highly popular. ABC’s message boards were bombarded back in the day with rabid Der-Mer fans wanting to see his wife kicked to the curb and to see him and Meredith merge into the supercouple they have since become. In recent months, Scandal has become a trending topic on Twitter on the nights their episodes are aired. How does this happen?
There are ground rules most shows follow in order to push their affair agendas. First, the wife must fit one of the following stereotypes: shrewish, bitter harpy; flighty, immature nitwit; or cold, distant ice queen. If the wife is seen as a monster, a joke, or a villain, it’s that much easier for audiences to root for her dismissal and replacement by the always-cooler mistress. Of course, those who take the time to think about such things are often left wondering why the husband ever married this kind of wife in the first place; very little groundwork is laid to make viewers sympathetic to the cheated-on wife. On Grey’s, Derek’s wife was introduced as a witch who had previously cheated on her husband. On Scandal, the First Lady is described as “cold and calculating”, a woman aware of her husband’s indiscretions but willing to stick it out to keep her status and position. An interesting overlap is the fact that a woman, Shonda Rhimes, created both Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, both shows with primary relationships that began as affairs between single women and married men.
Beyond having undesirable wives, shows celebrating or otherwise glamorizing affairs minimize any references to the children in these scenarios. Either the married men engaging in the affairs do not have children, or the children are almost never mentioned or featured in the stories. It makes sense that showrunners would want to make the wives as off-putting as possible and to avoid mention of children. It’s not sexy to think of a man cheating on his loving, devoted wife, or breaking the hearts of his children as he breaks up their family.
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Infidelity: Not a Punch Line to a Joke
This is what bothers me most about the way affairs are portrayed on television. There is often this image of the mistress as a strong, confident, take-charge kind of woman who will let nothing stand in the way of her getting what she wants–even if what she wants is to bed a married man. Women are urged to get behind this female character as she pursues and eventually captures the object of her desire, obstacles be damned. She’s adventurous! She’s daring! She’s sassy and sexy!
Of course, these are characters in stories, not real people. The reality is often quite different. Sure the mistress may think she is living her life on her terms, grabbing that brass ring and refusing to let it go. But in reality, what she is reaching for is a man who is already committed to someone else. A man who has taken vows to honor and remain faithful to his wife until death parts them. Often, she is wrapping herself in the arms of a man who is not only a husband, but a father. A father whose children do not think Daddy sleeping with another woman is sexy or sassy. It’s sad, it hurts, it’s devastating. Affairs aren’t awesome. They aren’t “deliciously scandalous”. Affairs are a violation of the trust of a marriage and of the promise, spoken or unspoken, that Mommy and Daddy will always be together and that the kids will have the security of an intact family. Countless marriages end every year over affairs. While it may be true that many of these marriages were in trouble already, affairs don’t make things better, they only make things worse. A man cannot focus on fixing his marriage while simultaneously sleeping with someone else. It simply isn’t going to happen.
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Shows supporting infidelity? Not cool.
Just once, I’d like to see an affair storyline depicted more honestly. Intermixed with scenes of the married man and his mistress having a romp, there should be scenes of the wife putting her kids to bed, trying to find new ways to avoid their oft-repeated question, “Where’s Daddy?” As the unfaithful couple basks in the afterglow of their latest encounter, the scene should cut to the wife, crying on the couch, checking her phone for messages that never come, wondering where her husband is and yet knowing the answer, as much as she dreads acknowledging the truth of her situation and the status of her marriage. I am not naïve enough to think this will ever happen, because storylines like these are not the sexy, sassy stuff networks are looking to produce. However, I would hope that more female viewers would take a moment to think about what they are really supporting when they watch television. We are better than this, we deserve better than this, and we should not support shows that encourage us to root for women hurting other women.