Max Baucus has a girlfriend.
John Ensign has a mistress.
This engendered some lively discussion around our breakfast table this morning. I took the position that the usages are correct. A mistress, to my way of thinking, is the paramour of a married man. “Married” in the sense that the other person in that marriage is of the opinion, either actually or formally, that the marriage continues.
Baucus’ marriage was apparently on the rocks when he began his relationship with his girlfriend, while Ensign’s family values marriage remained strong and vibrant while he cavorted with his mistress.
My wife feels that the term mistress is not so restricted, and that Baucus’ girlfriend can as easily be considered his mistress. I say the dictionary is on my side, at least the dictionary in my Iphone, which defines a mistress as a woman who has an ongoing extramarital relationship with a man. My American Heritage Dictionary is a little equivocal, defining mistress as a woman who has a continuing sexual relationship with a usually married man who is not her husband and from whom she generally receives material support. But in a usage note that dictionary goes on to say that the term is now most commonly to refer to a woman who is involved in an extramarital sexual relationship, which I consider support for my position.
Of course, some questions remain unanswered. Is a married woman who has an affair with a single man a mistress. And what, pray tell, is the term for the man in that situation? As the American Heritage usage note points out:
English has no shortage of terms for women whose behavior is viewed as licentious, but it is difficult to come up with a list of comparable terms used of men. One researcher, Julia Penelope, stopped counting after she reached 220 such labels for women, both current and historical, but managed to locate only 20 names for promiscuous men. Murial R. Schultz found more than 500 slang terms for prostitute but could find just 65 for the male terms whoremonger and pimp. A further imbalance appears in the connotations of many of these terms. While the terms applying only to women, like tramp and slut, are almost always strongly negative, corresponding terms used for men, such as stud andCasanova, often carry positive associations. Curiously, many of the negative terms used for women derive from words that once had neutral or even positive associations.
One of those formerly positive terms, by the way, is mistress, which once referred to a woman in a position of authority, and still does, in some archaic contexts.
This has real world implications of course. We have no acceptable term to apply to a person like Ensign. (I am granting the loathsome Baucus a pass here, since he was merely corrupt but not hypocritical). Without a term such as mistress, or the more piquant slut, we are unable to properly pigeonhole him. Thus he goes scot-free, semantically speaking, for where there is no name for the offense, there is hardly an offense. Without a negatively charged word to apply to him, it is more difficult to get agreement on the seriousness of his crimes, for in this day and age, the formerly pejorative hypocrite, describes such a common political criminal that it is considered less than a misdemeanor.
