Chapter 4: Villainy!
Chapter
four picks up where three left off, with the press conference rapidly descending
into chaos. Tiffany Lamour keeps explaining what she’s learned—how the couple
married at “Ye Olde Wedding Chapel in Nooseneck, Rhode Island” (47). Do I even need to go into how “Ye” isn’t a
word, and that it’s actually a corruption of an Old English “The” where the “Th”
sound was made by a letter called a thorn which no longer is used and looked a
little like a Y? No? Okay.
At
any rate, the two of them, aged 19 had been married in the middle of the night
at Ye Olde Wedding Chapel and Tiffany Lamour has found out. In order to salvage
the situation—which is to say in order to escape the press conference—Joe says
he guesses they’ve been found out and he grabs Emma, saying he’d like some time
alone with her, and they dash out the back way.
Then
something interesting happens. Emma and Joe drive off to Joe’s lawyer’s office
(no, that’s not the interesting part) and along the way, Emma asks Joe what he’d
done to Tiffany Lamour to make her angry enough to come after him like that.
(That’s also not the interesting part. In fact, as bitchy as Tiffany is written
to seem, acting all smug in her findings and such, she was actually doing her
job. Whether you respect a gossip reporter with a “Bad Boy of the Week” segment
is another thing, but it is her job and people clearly enjoy watching news like
that. The narrative tries to convince that Tiffany had taken “personal
satisfaction in publically embarrassing Joe and Emma” as a “personal-feminine-vendetta
sort of thing” (49) and maybe she had but I don’t know how Emma, particularly,
could have decided that.)
The
interesting part is Joe’s answer.
See,
Tiffany works for a news network owned by her father, meaning that she can do
no wrong, or rather she can do All the Wrong but not get fired. And evidently,
Tiffany enjoys sex with her interviewees. When Emma learns this, she asks if
Joe has been on her show. His negative answer has her asking if he’s afraid she’ll
sexually harass him. He explains that if he goes on her show and doesn’t sleep
with her, she’ll trash him on TV and within the NHL. Emma is surprised that no
one has stopped Tiffany from this behavior and here’s where it (finally) gets
(particularly) interesting
“First off, no self-respecting jock
is going to go to the media claiming he can’t fend off the passes of some
woman. He’d be laughed out of the country. And probably off his team” (51).
(The
secondly is that Tiffany is subtle so it’s impossible to prove.) Joe’s answer
seems to me dead on. Men (in general) have their masculinity policed. There’s
zero question that what Tiffany is doing is wrong.
(And I’m so glad that the book acknowledges that; that so far at least no one
is being all “Oh poor you, someone wants to have sex with you, you pussy” at
Joe.) But because there’s an expectation about how men act, the athletes who
don’t want to sleep with Tiffany—who in this particularly dynamic has all the
power—can’t complain without causing a stir and facing gender-based
repercussions. This is exactly why men who have been raped by women don’t come
forward. (I’m not quite calling
Tiffany’s actions rape, but it is sexual harassment.)
This
is why men need feminism, too, since true equality would mean that no one would
be trapped within society’s gendered expectations.
Tiffany’s
villainy is further exemplified when Joe tells Emma of a time when a producer
actually tried to blow the whistle on Tiffany’s behavior. Instead, Tiffany got
the producer fired and trashed her reputation.
Well
this is kind of exciting. Other than Sociopathic-Seth in Offside, we haven’t really had a villain before. (Oh, unless you
count “Rejoice: A Burden”, but… I try to forget that story…) Granted, there’s
still no real reason given for
Tiffany’s behavior. Joe says she’s never hit on him directly because he’s never
let her get close enough to do so. Thus there hasn’t been an out-right
rejections; ergo there’s (as of yet at least) no motivation for her villainy.
But still! Villainy!
