Hooray for the Baby Daddy

I like Jude Law, I really do. He's handsome, he has a great voice, and he's a wonderful actor. But it disturbed me when the many press stories that he was about to become a father for the fifth time was  greeted with nothing but hoorays and congratulations and what-a-wonderful-person comments on Facebook. Literally every celebrity, media outlet and even my friends were posting this as good news.

I'm thinking, if this was a woman having her fifth child with the third father, two of whom she not only didn't marry but didn't even stay with long enough to still be in the relationship when she got pregnant, after cheating on her first husband and leaving her first family, we would crucify her. She'd be called a slut, irresponsible, a horrible person, and not fit to be a mother. And those are probably the nicest things she'd be called.

Courtesy zimbio.com

"Whilst they are no longer in a relationship," Law's rep said, "they are both wholeheartedly committed to raising their child."

What? He's wholeheartedly committed to raising a child with this woman, the last woman and the first mother of his three children? Seriously? Is anyone buying this? It's just not logistically possible if what we're talking about is raising a child. But then I realize that isn't what we're talking about. All he is expected to do, as a man, is to pay for the cost of raising the child and show up every once in a while to take them on an outing. And that's the other side of this double standard: What a woman does for her children is never enough and what a man does is insignificant as long as he pays up.