Orlando Bloom will hold a special place in the hearts of many women after this week. The “Lord of the Rings” star made headlines for clocking rocker brat Justin Bieber at a club in Ibiza, Spain, where the two were attending a star-studded party.
Stories differ about how the altercation started. According to one account, Bieber made a rude comment to Bloom about supermodel Miranda Kerr, Bloom’s ex-wife. According to another source, Bloom snubbed Bieber first and then Bieber responded by saying something about Kerr like, “She was good.” Later Bieber tweeted a photo of Kerr, just to rub it in.
The bad blood between the two men began a couple of years ago when Kerr was seen flirting with Bieber after a Victoria’s Secret fashion show. Kerr is reportedly “embarrassed” by the whole incident between Bieber and Bloom. (This is the same woman who is posing half-naked in advertisements for jeans, though, so perhaps her sense of embarrassment is a little off.)
At any rate, the public seems to have sided with Bloom in this conflict, giddily sending around pictures of him wielding arrows and threatening to destroy Bieber, Middle Earth-style. Many onlookers are just fed up with Bieber’s shenanigans and reveled in the idea that someone would take him down a notch. But for others, Bloom seemed to be defending a woman’s honor. “I never thought I could love Orlando Bloom any more,” one woman tweeted. “Gorgeous, talented and now this?! Give that man a knighthood!”
Knighthood? What a quaint idea. In a week where we saw video of a football star beating his own fiancée in an elevator and a “Bachelorette” contestant decided to tell the world about his bedroom activities on national television, maybe the bar has been set too low.
But just wait. It’s only a matter of time before Orlando Bloom gets lumped into the category of Neanderthals like Ray Rice. Soon the feminists will descend to explain that Bloom is a patriarchal remnant of medieval times. And that his backward attitudes deserve nothing but scorn from modern liberated women.
How do I know? About six months ago, I wrote a column calling rapper Jay Z “a poor excuse for a husband.” At the Grammy Awards, he stood up on stage egging on Beyoncé as the mother of his child straddled a chair and shook her rear end for other men’s titillation. When I suggested that a good husband would object to sharing his wife’s bootyliciousness, I received hundreds of angry emails and tweets, accusing me of trying to stifle Beyoncé’s, ahem, artistry. And many particularly irate readers wondered where I got the idea that a man had any right to “police” his wife’s “sexuality.”
Men who care about how other men see their wives (or ex-wives or girlfriends . . . or mothers or sisters, for that matter) are not authoritarian lunatics. They are not demanding that the women in their lives wear only burqas out of the house. They are gentlemen. They want to protect the reputations of the women in their lives from exploitation by crude jerks. Not out of some sense that women are property. But precisely because they are not.
Even though Orlando Bloom is plainly not in a relationship with Miranda Kerr anymore, he still doesn’t want to hear other men putting down the mother of his son, let alone talking about what they’ve done with her in the bedroom.
Radical feminists aside, women are swooning over Bloom now because they like the idea of a chivalrous man defending a woman’s honor. A rare find these days.