Gender Essentialist Rielle Hunter Speaks To Tabloid

The preface to the Rielle Hunter Tells All About Her Love Life with John Edwards story in GQ goes like this: “While everyone else in the Edwards drama has said their piece, in books and/or television interviews, the mistress and campaign videographer and mother of his child has, in her own words, ‘kept my mouth shut.’ Until now (as they say in the tabloids).” As they say in the what now? Heh. But the interview itself is a funny thing, and if the commenters at the Post are to be believed, she’s a horribly human being and a trashy whore and all kinds of things. But actually she’s an old-fashioned gal who’s not that different from most of us, except with some very rigid ideas of who women are and who men are.

For instance:

1. “One thing I’ve learned about relationships and men is that you can never walk across the room for a man.”

And:

2. “It’s beyond difficult. To allow a man to be a man. The biggest mistake that I find is that women attempt to make men women. You know, we want them to be like we are.”

Wow, more retrograde than Patti Stanger! And:

3. “I would change nothing about him. I would change, within myself, my, um, inability to be more accepting in certain areas. I get frustrated. And when I get frustrated-all under the story line that he’s not doing what I want him to do or he’s not acting the way I want him to act-I lose patience. So I would wish for more patience. Having a child helps with that. But it’s not him, it’s me. Because he’s doing the best he can. With the awareness level he has. He’s a man.”

Annnd also, enjoyably, she’s a media critic! On the subject of the National Enquirer:

4. “To me it shows, as a society, how cut off from the truth we are, that a magazine that pays their sources and every once in a while gets something factually correct is now eligible for a Pulitzer. Wow, we’re all going to hell.”

Well, here we are.