We all understand the desire to get back at someone for their betrayal. Still the photoshopped images of a beatup Tiger Woods standing next to his wife as she smiles with a golf club in her hand have more the look of a lynching. Instead this time it is the white woman who attacks the black man herself. No mob of white men to "defend" her required, though there does seem to be a pack of grumbling guys gathering.
We all so strongly identify with celebrities that it is easy to take sides in their marital disputes, especially if we can make a parallel between our own deceptions as fans and what we imagine Elin Nordegren must feel. In the midst of all this projection and imagining, there is room enough for nasty violence to creep in the public representation of the marital scandal. Sure, everyone sides with the betrayed wife, Tiger Woods is up there with Prince Charles, yet I can't remember any talk of taking a stick to the Prince of Wales. I do remember there being jokes about Frank Sinatra arranging for Woody Allen to get whacked back in the Mia Farrow scandal. Still the pictures of Tiger Woods with a black eye, scars and his teeth knocked out suggest much more than a spectator's involvement in a celebrity sex scandal. They have a far more sinister connotation.
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