Should celebrity mistresses tell all?

Frederic Cirou, Getty Images

Where have all the good mistresses gone? The declining stock in decent women willing to sleep with another woman’s husband while simultaneously maintaining a dignified silence on the details of the betrayal can no longer be ignored. We’re at crisis level. On newsstands around the world, the integrity of infidelity is being assailed. 

No sooner does a sex scandal break then we’re almost immediately given the inside scoop from the other woman, who (for reasons that escape me) is willing to share her bedroom secrets with a tabloid, a TV reporter, or online. (One can only imagine what she’s told tell her friends, hairdresser and the cashier at the grocery store about her private life.) 

I must have old-fashioned ideas about infidelity because I always imagined that there was something like a code about kissing and telling, which is a polite euphemism for what most of these near-radioactive lotharios and the women who are willing to touch them get up to when nobody’s around. And basically the code is this: if you slept with somebody else’s husband you didn’t call Us Weekly or The Daily Mail with a post-coital play-by-play. 

There must have been a time when a game broad could be counted on to be a silent partner in a crime of unsanctified desire. But those days and those soulful secret-sharers are near extinct. Instead, we get Mildred Baena spilling her Arnold Schwarzenegger tales to Hello magazine this week. 

In the interview, Baena reportedly talks about the moment Maria Shriver confronted her with her suspicions about Baena’s son’s parentage. But the worst part about the whole thing has to be the fact that she poses for a picture with the child, who at 13 years old would be better served by a few more years of anonymity and roughly another thousand years of not hearing about the details of his mother’s sex life. 

Last year we were treated to a seemingly endless line of women who claimed to have slept with Tiger Woods. These women shared every inch of the strange animal that is Tiger with the public—and in Penthouse Forum-style detail. 

Should we expect more from celebrity mistresses? Or is it foolish to imagine that every once in a while an affair is the result of something more than simple opportunity? That occasionally the other woman cares enough about herself and the man she’s been with to keep the details of their forbidden trysts to herself.