The Other Woman wasn’t the most fantastic film. Beyond Cameron Diaz’s razor-sharp tailored office wear and those ridiculous bits from Nicki Minaj, it wasn’t up to much. But at the very least, it involved women rallying against a common evil – the man who had cheated on all three of them.
However, it seems in real life, or at least online, some women are nowhere near as progressive as even a silly buddy-movie which proposes to be pro-women but doesn’t even pass the Bechdel Test.
Step in Ariella Alexander (that’s a pseudonym, by the way), who, in 2012 created ShesAHomewrecker.com (no, we’re not linking to it), a website where women can post testimonials about the other women who ‘wrecked’ their relationships.
Posting photos of the ‘homewreckers’, using their full names and naming which state they live in, jilted women will tell their stories using language like: ‘This gem is one of the lowest human beings I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing about in my life’, and it’s as mean as it sounds.
The site isn’t exactly new. In fact, it’s depressingly old. But now Alexander has come out to explain/justify why she started it. ‘After you are cheated on, you will never trust again,’ she told First Coast News, before explaining that she’s had a long history of infidelity wrecking things for her. ‘My dad had an affair with my mother and my mother separated from him when I was a little girl.’
Her goal with the site? To get women to stop hooking up with men who’re involved with other women: ‘Maybe a woman will think twice about involving herself with someone who is married or someone who is involved because she fears having her picture getting put up on my website,’ she said.
‘I would like women to come together and say, you know what, we aren’t going to let these men go out after work and get drunk at the bar, sleep with us and then go home to their wife because as women we have the power to change that. All we have to do is just not sleep with married men.’
The Facebook page has 360,000 likes and the website contains 421 pages of ‘homewreckers’. We kind of wonder how it’s still going on. And yeah, by all means feel bad that your dad cheated on your mum, and feel bad that you’ve been cheated on, but this is a totally fucked up way of seeking revenge.
First of all, it’s not even going after the men – the ones who broke their presumed commitments to the jilted women in the first place. Second of all, who’s to say some of the claims aren’t just lies or assumptions. And, um, thirdly, even if the claims are true, how has anyone got any right to ‘out’ people like that?
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.