This article, along with On Despair, is one of the most widely read pieces on this site. It was commissioned at the end of 2010 for a women's magazine. The sequel to this piece, written one year later, can be read here.
One year on: the consequences of betrayal*
On 1st December 2009, at the full moon lunar eclipse in Gemini, I found out that one of my favourite friends was a philanderer. It seems funny, like a cheesy detail from a Seventies play about wife swapping. It seems exploitative to bring it up, since I was collateral damage rather than a major player. And it seems naive to be shocked, since I had always known in theory that lying, cheating, games and deception are relatively common. I even wrote about it, here, for the Guardian.
A very close friend of mine, a brilliant woman I'd studied with in London, was cheated on by her partner for a year. During the six years that followed she absorbed the fallout in waves. Her trust and happiness were replaced with something wired and watchful. She became like an animal by the side of the road, hunkering close to the kerb and the drains, every sense prickling, feeling stunted and hunted. Of course, in time, she recovered and rebuilt herself with all her natural panache, wit and intelligence. Women are strong, as everyone knows. But she lost the career that she had loved: she had been an exceptionally gifted film-maker working in equal partnership with her ex, in the company they created. When the revelation came it was too humiliating to go to meetings, knowing that everyone knew. There was a particular look people had - of revolting open-eyed pity for her, but (strangely) no censure at all for him. Seeing that wonderful 'liberal' industry for the abuse protection racket that it really was poisoned her career. Magically, the perks and job offers went to him and she was frozen out. Her ex’s career flourished. He was awfully embarrassed, of course, though not remorseful, and it was all rather a mess, but frankly he enjoyed himself. He enjoyed his affair. He enjoyed the drama. He is now rich, famous, thriving, happy and busy. The same process of realisation happened to me after the discovery about my friend's deceitfulness. We worked in the same industry ...and then everything, absolutely everything, was tainted.
The temptation is to laugh it off and to dismiss the whole topic as none of one's business. But in the shattered and devastated nothingness that followed, I finally understood how the personal is political. I’ve observed the consequences play out with excruciating, crushing depth. It’s called cheating not because specific rules have been broken but because the lover has been cheated out of their good faith, their trust, their delight and their peace of mind. They have been cheated out of their restfulness, their sleep, and wretched humiliated nightmares follow. The obscenity resides here: how could the friend laugh, talk, joke and socialise with such clear-eyed cheerfulness? How could he deceive, plan, enjoy, act? How could he say all those things? How could he write love letters he didn't mean? How could he pretend to be a nice guy? How could he take a woman's love, pretend to cherish it, pretend to feel it mutually, use it as a smokescreen as he abused her trust, then throw it back in her face? How he must have gloated as his friends chatted with him innocently. How he must have triumphed to himself, savouring that particular sharp tang of sadism, as the woman looked at him with love and delight. And how quickly that simple delight came to look like rank naivety, even stupidity. I am always rather admiring of people who, after a devastating discovery, get angry and pour paint on the perpetrator's car or bag up their belongings and dump them in the street. Revenge doesn't work and isn't worth it but I do appreciate a show of spirit. How do they find the energy? If it happened to me I'd be too destroyed to get angry. I'd just feel incredibly stupid and uncomprehendingly, speechlessly baffled.
2010 has been a good year for infidel pickings: Gordon Ramsay, Vernon Kaye, Wayne ‘john’ Rooney, Avram ‘john’ Grant, Sting/john, Ashley Cole, Tiger Woods, Mark Owen, that chap from the One show. Whenever a story about a famous cheat breaks I feel my skin itch all over with the desire to out the ones I know. All are well known in their industries, fawned over by slavish women, promoted and aided by other men, said by all (including themselves) to be decent, liberal, ‘lovely’, stand-up, caring guys. The brighter the wedding ring the bigger the cheat. The cheats are always the ones who go on about how ‘amazing’ their wives and daughters are. A sleazy colleague of mine cheated on his pregnant wife but was described as “a dear” by a female colleague when I, instinctively rattled by his vibe, privately asked her if he was “a good guy” or not. Later he helped his own image by talking about how much he loves his baby; if a woman did that in the workplace she’d be dismissed as a lightweight who couldn’t keep her mind on her job. Another colleague who was like a desperate panicking skunk spraying his odour everywhere was described by an ex employee (male) as “an absolute diamond geezer.” At a party a female colleague said of him, “You know, he was always tarting it about because he was in an unhappy marriage.” No. He specifically, deliberately and repeatedly hurt his wife and made her, not himself, unhappy, because he was a cheat and a liar. At work he created group projects in which there were no women at all. At the same time he took all the public benefits of being known as a husband and a father and all the rest of it.
There are so many more, and if I actually named names (a) I’d be sued to high heaven and (b) such is the intensity of witch-naming and victim-blaming, I would have a range of misogynist insults hurled at me (take your pick from the classics: bitter, over-reacting, jealous, shrill, interfering…) as a deliberate way of diverting attention from the perpetrators. So I’ll drop hints instead. There are three poets: one is O, an erudite, high culture young Turk type, a kind of young fogey, short, wordy, with pretensions to greatness. The second is L, a wily Londoner, loose and warm and friendly, a little buzzed, streety and voluble. The third is S, a salt of the earth type, accessible and germane, frank in manner (though not actually honest, obviously), who, like all philanderers, writes marvellous odes to his wife. There is J, the strong, brutally down-to-the-line TV presenter who tups every researcher stupid and submissive enough to think that will help her career. There is CM, referenced here, the award-winning science fiction writer whose entire public persona is built on his ‘great’ women characters, his sturdy leftist politics, his niceness, his beauty, his strength, his productiveness, his decency and solidity, his integrity and the way he mentions his sister, girlfriend and late mother in every interview and occasionally, once in a while, even shows that he has read one or two books by women too. He is an emotionally abusive man, a dedicated liar and a longterm multiple cheat, but no karma has punished him. He hates women, or he would not abuse them, but women grovel to him and help his career. He has not paid, he has been rewarded; we have paid. From the other side of the glass ceiling I watch them collect all the awards the world has to give. I watch them exploit women and help and cover for other men, often themselves woman-abusers. Seeing this, I no longer think I will make it. There is the columnist and film-maker, J, who, again (spotting a theme?) has helped his own career through writing about his family life, as though he’s some hapless dad just bumbling along delightedly in the realm of the women and the babies. He has been cheating on his wife since their son was little. There is the chef whose easy to make bakes are a staple of every student home, and whose wife and seemingly dozens of their children surround him when he collects his accolades before shagging his way through his staff and groupies. Know why they have so many babies? Because they were trying for a son. Because that’s the only type of child that counts.
There is the publishing guy, J, who went straight up to a friend of mine at a reading and said the following: “Hello! I’m Harry Pseudonym, my wife lives in the country, my mistress lives in London. Do you want to be mistress number two?” Ten years later, not knowing this, he contacted me for a work project and I sat through the meeting, the bile rising in my throat, unable to look at him for wanting to spit in his face, skin crawling, as he sat with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest and a load of hairy uncooked-pastry wan skin oozing out and talked about his ‘fantastic’ wife, who always looks as miserable as shit whenever I see her. Oh, and his ‘great’ daughter too, of course. Everyone knows about this guy; nobody does anything at all. If we all withdrew, he would have no career and he would rightly be reduced to nothing – since he has treated his wife, daughter and countless other women as nothing. But he flourishes. Neither men nor women step away from him. He called a meeting at which were present two close personal friends of his: one of the cheating poets I mentioned above, and a broadcaster who has had a sexual harassment case proven against him, not that it has hurt his career.
Now that the scales have dropped from my eyes I’ve been horrified by the protectionism which surrounds these people. Everybody knows, male and female, that they are abusers, but it simply does not matter. The misogyny of the beholders runs so deep that they just don’t care how much these men abuse, because their women victims are not human, it seems. Women are not even animals, for if any of these men had been witnessed mistreating a dog or a cat, people would be appalled. I have sat back in astonishment as ‘nice guys’ easily, happily praise and defend abusive men, in comically identical language. In fact I have never heard any man describe another man as 'wonderful' except when the second man was abusive towards women.
Chap: “George Best, what a wonderful, wonderful footballer. My father [who was a doctor] treated him, you know.”
Me: “For alcoholism, or for wifebeating?”
Chap (reddening): “Oh – for alcoholism.”
About V S Naipaul, who I witnessed at a book reading openly jeering at any woman who asked a question about his work, a male colleague said, “Yes, he was a rotter to women wasn’t he but my God, what wonderful, wonderful books.”
It is in this world and by these people that women artists’ work is ignored, talked down and sneered at. They will never help women, in private or in public, and it is my realisation of this, and the fact that so many of the abusers know and help each other, which has led me to realise that my career is probably over. There is no point in me writing books or pitching documentaries or lobbying for more women in the areas I work in. That is the long consequence of my friend’s brief backstab: the total destruction of everything. In the classic phrase, I (and so many other women) am running as hard as I can to stay in the same place, and every so often the glass ceiling looms up and smacks me in the face to keep on sprinting, to see if I can get to the edge of it. Meanwhile the real business, with all its corruption and injustice, is happening elsewhere; the prizes and opportunities and perks and places are being exchanged far from here, behind our backs, over our heads, while we are looking the other way... or even just in front of our faces.
It is not about who touches whom when and where, it is about the trick, the game, the entire architecture of the deception which makes the deceived person into a total fool. It is fashionable to say that for all the men who cheat, an equal number of women ‘must’ also be cheating in the same way, deceiving and gameplaying in the same way, as though the world of sex is completely symmetrical practically, mathematically, symbolically, morally, socially, culturally and in terms of power. In twenty years of watching and putting all the pieces into place I have known no serial female cheats and countless serial male cheats who are old enough to know better and abuse their partners' trust without a second thought. I have witnessed messy situations, of course, in which neither sex comes out well at all: sordid affairs that cause ‘everything’ to fall apart, cheaters and cheatees of both sexes behaving in humiliating and cruel ways, various pickles too predictable to go into. I am not talking about those things, I am talking about serial, dedicated cheats, long-term cheats. I'm talking about callous repeat traitors. I’m talking about shaggers. And as for those who, desperate to excuse these men’s abusiveness, argue that the deceived women ‘must’ know, ‘on some level’, no, no, they don’t know. They are decent human beings who act in good faith, demonstrate sincere love, give time, attention, affection and labour to those they love, and trust them.
Even when I have outed abusers to colleagues, the colleagues do not then refuse to work with the abusers. When I have confronted the abusers myself they have laughed in my face because they know that their abuse is not only protected but rewarded by both sexes. To them, women are groupies, admin assistants, maids, enablers, secretaries, cleaners, free prostitutes, caregivers and other types of exploitable, highly efficient and uncredited labour. We are not artists, intellectuals or equals. If they respected us and thought that we were human beings, they would not abuse us. They have such derision for us that they will not even touch our books, watch our films or visit our exhibitions. These media types, politics types, arts and culture types, they're never going to play any role in fighting discrimination against women, or marginalisation, or the double standard, because they are perpetrators and apologists themselves, in broadsheets and in bedsheets.
I could never look my friend in the eye again. That was the most painful thing – the speed with which the person I most wanted to see became the person I least wanted to see, the one I dreaded seeing, the one whose name made me feel physically sick. When I walk down a street or enter a party I scan it to check he's not there. When I am at an arts event I check every roster in fear and coarse, grating humiliation. Once I worked my way down through all the various layers of deceit - the shifting storylines, fudges, feints, conditions and tales a liar has to tell to keep themselves steady on wobbly ground - there was nothing left. He lied about everything and all I knew, in the end, was his name. It was dizzying to contemplate the massive distance between that kind, beautiful and intelligent face and the incredible sadism behind it. How could anyone do that? And how is it that apart from some surface static electricity, a bit of hubbub, there was no ill consequence for him in the outer world? He flourished in every way. Women and men flocked to serve and enable him, to invite him onto projects, shortlists, trips, commissions, jaunts, perks, jobs and events in which he was one of eight men (with a token lady of course). Everything was given to him and, typically, he took everything he could get. I felt derision and coarse physical disgust. But that is just bravado talking. I am jealous, cravenly jealous, because I too wish to flourish. I love to speed through the universe, enjoying its gifts. But what I had once thought of as my purity, my untouchability, my vocation, my alien Messiah complex, my destiny and my power were always, I realise now, just total and utter rank egotistical stupidity. I am nothing. What did I think I would achieve, with my icy-but-twinkling charisma and varied range of outfits, which were bullshit? What were we all doing, attending the parties, the meetings, the brainstorming sessions, participating and entertaining tirelessly, only to see all the credit and honours go elsewhere. I do not think I will flourish, because I have watched in disbelief as the injustice played out before my very eyes. I am going to be thrown away just like all the others. Underneath, after the blind shock, the nausea, the dread, after the humiliation and the political realisation and the awakening, there is just dumb, seemingly neverending pain and puzzlement. I want to say to him: congratulations. You are everywhere. You won every prize there was. Men and women will help you for the rest of your life and, don't worry, when you abuse a woman you will never have to suffer for it. Instead, she will.
There is another eclipse, on Tuesday 21st December 2010, again in Gemini. A time when secrets come out. I wonder what it will bring.
*Thanks, Wikipedia, for the rare moment of accuracy in your entry on Betrayal:
Betrayal at any stage of the socio-developmental cycle results in extreme biopsychosocial distress far beyond the event itself. It disrupts the person’s established mental model by which he or she views, understands, and responds to his or her environment and life events, destabilizes the co-occurring psychological contracts by which one trusts, and negates important aspects of viable strategies by which the person copes with life events. Planful problem-solving coping strategies often become non-viable, resulting in activation of primitive biologically based, amygdala-driven coping mechanisms that are often long-term maladaptive....otherwise summed up (by me) as 'THE TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF EVERYTHING'.
