Love and lust heed no one. But they do piss a lot of people off, especially those who don’t get to do the lusting or the loving.
Jeff Bezos was going through his extra-marital amour all nice and quiet when flashbulbs exploded on him and his married girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez.
He soon separated from his wife and she soon divorced her husband, and now Jeff and Lauren are officially an item. He even tried to preempt the release of his near-nude pics—oh, what WhatsApp makes grown men send!—by tweeting about his upcoming separation. He was attempting to establish a better-looking sequence for on-lookers; the dalliance followed marital estrangement.
Tut-tut, went the crowds anyway, reading their daily tabloids. At night the trolls come out to play, social media is their playground. And everyone here is holier than thou.
Along came Katie Hill, the US Representative for California’s 25th congressional district from January to November this year, who had to resign when her husband indulged in a spot of revenge porn, releasing her nude photos to the media.
As part of a consensual throuple (when three people love each other), she had been with a staffer—a fact that broke the rules—though her husband was very much a part of this new intimacy set-up.
But the photographic evidence supplied by her husband of a tryst that perhaps should have been only her business has clinched matters against her. There is one of her smoking a bong and another of her tenderly combing her girlfriend’s hair.
The bigger crime of tattling for material benefits by a spiteful spouse is overwritten by this affair of the heart on her part.
Canoodling with a campaign staffer en route to the 2018 midterm elections was a bad idea, one that cost Katie her job.
She has to go back to the end of the queue as far as her political career is concerned. The debate on her rightness or wrongness is still on even as the moralists hi-five their computers in glee.
Fast-food chain McDonald’s CEO, too, found out that playing away from home doesn’t get you any applause.
At 52, Steve Easterbrook is not only sacked for his affair with a junior colleague, but has his brother-in-law call him ‘a naughty boy’ in public to boot.
MacKenzie Bezos must consider herself well-rid of an unloving spouse and that is victory enough for any human being but public hysteria focuses on her new millions, all that she bagged post-divorce.
Jeff finding new love was humiliating to MacKenzie, it was decided for her, and therefore she needed to be compensated. Most reports spoke glowingly of her and disparagingly of Lauren, the other woman. Of course, if MacKenzie now goes on to date a married man the trolls will come trolling.
These unpaid, untiring keepers of our conscience don’t believe love or lust to be a sudden attack of the hormones or the heart. To err is human, to not forgive is also human. They have declared any activity between consenting adults the new spectator sport. One that must draw blood.