SplashNews.com
Men have actually told me today that Sandra Bullock should take part of the blame for Jesse James cheating — because she left him alone while she filmed her hit movies , Blind Side and The Proposal.
I nearly fell over when one of my closest male friends actually said that. I hadn’t pegged him for a Neanderthal.
“Men need sex. You can’t leave a horny guy like Jesse James alone for months at a time, he’ll get up to no good,” the friend insisted. “The same thing happened to Elizabeth Edwards and Elin Nordegren — they let their husbands travel too much by themselves. They shouldn’t have allowed their men to be tempted!”
“Sandra Bullock should have known that she wasn’t Jesse’s normal ‘type.’ He clearly had been attracted to strippers, porn stars, women with tattoos and implants. She should have known men don’t change,” another male friend opined to me
Shockingly, a third male friend snapped that Sandra shared the blame. “She was probably so engrossed in her career - she was making out with Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal- and then she was campaigning for the Oscar, Jesse felt neglected.” Wow! I felt slapped in the face.
Weirdly, this situation seems to have empowered men to actually say what they’ve probably just thought all along. It must be something about Jesse’s obvious bad boy image versus John Edwards’ and Tiger Woods’ seeming propriety, that set them off.
But it also made me start feeling insecure and I wondered if Elizabeth Edwards, Elin Nordegren, Sandra Bullock and I are just naive about what really goes on inside the male brain and umm…nether areas! After all, haven’t social anthropologists decided that men really can’t help themselves from straying because they are biologically programmed to spread their seed around, in order to propagate their genes.
Maybe, us wives are really are taking too much of a risk when we leave our husbands alone.
So I called up “the experts” and told them about the disturbingly sexist responses I had heard from men, who until now I had considered enlightened and fully 21st century.
“It’s never OK to cheat when you love someone and you want to keep a relationship going,” retorted Cooper Lawrence, relationship expert and author of The Cult of Celebrity. “The only thing Sandra did wrong is choose a guy who happens to like strippers and porn stars, and she didn’t recognize the guy that he really was.”
Lawrence believes Jesse is impulsive with narcissistic tendencies. “He has zero empathy for Sandra. And he probably felt entitled to act on his impulses because Sandra was away. He felt abandoned. And when people are impulsive, they only think in the moment, they don’t think about the long-term consequences of their actions,” explained Lawrence, who certainly didn’t agree with my “primitive” male friends.
As for the “long distance” argument, Sarah Harrison, senior editor of YourTango.com, a relationship web site, wasn’t having any of that nonsense as a main excuse for cheating. “It’s easier today than ever to maintain intimacy when you’re away from each other . We have personal cell phones, skype, text messages,” she points out.
But she did feel that there must have been some underlying issues in the marriage — “Infidelity is a symptom and it’s actually pretty common. Couples do get past it, if they do the repair work together.”
That said, I’d bet no woman ( I obviously can’t speak for men) would blame Sandra if she didn’t choose to try and repair her marriage, after her public humiliation.
No one — least of all an Oscar winner who publicly thanked her husband — deserves to find out that he has bedded a tattooed stripper who then sold her tale to a magazine.
Sorry guys, no matter how much Sandra had to travel for business, Jesse James should have been able to keep it in his pants, even if primitive men couldn’t!
—Bonnie Fuller
Get More on the Jesse James cheating scandal:
- Hey BFFs — What A Burn! Watch Sandra Bullock Gush Over Jesse James!
- Shock! Sandra Bullock Moves Out! Is Her Marriage Over?
- Does Jesse James Have a Type … Tattooed? And Is Ink-Free Sandra The Odd Woman Out?
- EXCLUSIVE! The Day After The Oscars, Jesse James’ Alleged Mistress Complained About A Lack Of Sex
- Sandra Bullock Heartbroken! Will She Still Fight For Jesse James To Win Custody Of His Little Girl?
Tweedman
Posted at 5:03 PM on March 22, 2010
Okay, it’s not Sandra Bullock’s “fault” that Jesse cheated. Totally his responsibility, regardless of the circumstances. However, if she was surprised he cheated, she was probably the only one. Every single man who looked at Jesse and at his history knew he was cheating. He’s a cheater. A man who leaves his pregnant porn star wife for a Hollywood actress is going to cheat. When you consider that more than half of us (including the many of us who have never even met a porn star) cheat, no woman should be surprised when her man cheats. Good looking guys cheat. Ugly guys cheat. Rich guys cheat. Poor guys cheat. A man tends to be only as faithful as his options allow. The more opportunity a man has to cheat, the more likely he is to cheat. If you’ve been gone for two months, he’s been trying to cheat (successfully or otherwise) for about five weeks.
Guys are dogs. If you leave us in the yard and go out of town, we’re going to jump the fence. Am I proud of that? No. Is it true, no matter how much you wish it weren’t. Absolutely.