Lady Gaga – "Born This Way" (2011)

Don't hide yourself in regret

Just love yourself and you're set

I'm on the right track, baby

I was born this way 

Carolyn Hax writes an advice column for the Washington Post and other newspapers.  Think of her as a latter-day “Dear Abby.”

The headline for one of her recent columns caught my eye:

What should you do about a spouse’s wandering eye?

I don't know who the headline writer thought he or she was fooling by using “spouse” instead of “husband.”  If you asked a hundred people to guess whether the spouse with the wandering eye was a husband or a wife, I'm guessing that one hundred of them would guess it was a husband . . . and they would be right.

Advice columnist Carolyn Hax

Here’s the letter to Ms. Hax:

Hello, Carolyn: 

I’m from the U.K.  I’m married to a man who is a self-professed arrogant liar.  He’s proud of it.  I  am not.

We have been together for 20 years.

He has joined a professional networking site and sometimes he deletes his computer history, but now and again I guess he forgets.  I’ve always had my suspicions.  He has checked out so many young, attractive women on these sites.  He says that it’s purely professional and that they have requested him.

(Yup.)

I’m not stupid.  All of the women are incredibly attractive.  I turn heads, but I’m certainly not as beautiful as these women.  I feel like such a mug.  We have two children.  I just need to know: Is it normal that men do this, or have I married an arse?

I Married an Arse

And here’s Ms. Hax’s reply:

I Married an Arse: 

You didn’t include a signature, so I provided one for you.

Anyone who describes her husband as “a self-professed arrogant liar” knows exactly who she married.

So the real question is, what are you looking to get from writing to me? Validation for your distrust? Done.  Sympathy?  Done.  Permission to go (or stay)?  You’re your own permission.

I suspect what you really want is “why” — why he does this, why you’ve stayed, why you’ve mistaken this for a beauty contest — and the overarching “what” they compel: What now?

Please get out of his history, and seek answers in your own emotional health.  Find a therapist, some supportive friends, some healthy outlets.  Find you.  Your confidence will speak for itself.

Advice columns are generally written by female columnists – the British call them “agony aunts” – and are aimed at female readers.  Ms. Hax’s column is no exception: it is written by a woman for other women to read, and most of the letters she responds to are from women.  

But I think she would be well-served to consult with a man before dispensing advice like her answer to “I Married an Arse.”  After all . . . when it comes to men, men are the experts. 

To wit . . . let’s consider the question at the end of the letter from “I Married an Arse” to Ms. Hax: “Is it normal that men do this, or have I married an arse?”

[Note:  Keep in mind that the issue here is the husband's practice of checking out attractive young women on LinkedIn.  There is no suggestion whatsoever in the letter that he had sex with these women, or did anything beyond looking at their LinkedIn profiles.]

Obviously, Ms. Hax believes that the writer married an arse.

But what about the first part of the question: “Is it normal that men do this?”

Carolyn Hax seems to believe that most husbands do not engage in the kind of behavior that this husband engaged in.  Her answer to “Is it normal that men do this?” seems to be “No.”

Let me disabuse you of that notion, Ms. Hax.

While not all husbands and boyfriends are checking out hot female lawyers and accountants and marketing professionals on LinkedIn, you can best believe they are checking out the women they see at work, on the bus or subway on their way to work, at the bars and restaurants they go to after work, at the grocery store, at the mall, at church, at sporting events or concerts, at the playgrounds and soccer fields and swimming pools where they take their kids . . . you get the picture.

Carolyn Hax and the British woman may not like that men are checking out women all the time.  But it's what men do.

In the words of Lady Gaga, we were born this way.

The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah famously asked, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?”

Would Carolyn Hax say that an Ethiopian is an arse on account of his skin color, or call a leopard an arse because he has spots?  Of course not.

So why did she choose to sign the letter from her British correspondent “I Married an Arse”?

She should have signed it “I Married a Man.”

*     *     *     *     *

Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” went all the way to the top of the Billboard “Hot 100” when it was released in February 2011.  It was the 19th single to debut at #1, and the 1000th #1 single in the history of the “Hot 100.”

“Born This Way” (which Gaga says she wrote in only ten minutes) says it doesn’t matter whether you are gay, lesbian, bi, or transgendered because “God makes no mistakes.”

I’m sure Gaga wasn’t thinking of straight males who behave like arses when she penned the lyrics to “Born This Way,” but if the shoe fits . . .

Here’s the official music video for “Born This Way,” which is really something.  (200,000,000 views and counting.)  Gaga spends half of it giving birth to alien creatures and the other half strutting around in a very small bikini.  (There’s no sign of the roll of belly fat that was so apparent in her recent SuperBowl performance.)

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: