The XX Factor

I find all this Rielle Hunter bashing troubling. Sure, she is trashy. Sure, she is not that sophisticated or wildly intelligent in her analysis of the affair, but lots of celebrities in magazine profiles are equally New Age-y and pose for pictures in equal states of undress. There is something in all of this bashing that to me has a Hawthorne-like quality. Think of Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter . There is a nasty female cattiness to all of this, and a retrograde moral subtext to the school-yard fierceness. Women always blame women in questions of betrayal, and I think this tendency should be examined. Who cares if Rielle Hunter is sort of silly? What does the extremity of our reaction to her say about us?