"Good" woman vs "bad" woman?

One aerobics instructor’s husband in the club I join passed away around a week ago. Last Saturday, some people talked about that. One member of that “exclusive” gang (Y) said that she went to the funeral with her husband. It made a woman—around mid forties—talk to a woman sitting next to me, “Hey, you said that she is still single. Didn’t you hear that she came to the funeral with her husband?”
I jokingly commented, “Whose husband?” (I don’t know anything about Y and the other members of exclusive gang’s habit. Well, people talk about their “bad habit”, but I don’t understand about it. I seldom have friendly chat and have small talk with other members of the club. Besides, I don’t like to find out other people’s personal problems.)

R sitting next to me responded, “Yeah, whose husband? Perhaps another woman’s husband but she admitted as her husband?”

Ups … I didn’t expect that my joke in fact caused other people to gossip.  It made me shut my mouth.

R continued saying, “Y said that she didn’t want to get involved with a guy for a long relationship. She did it just for fun with many guys.”

I didn’t comment anything coz I didn’t want to make the situation worse. But it didn’t mean that I didn’t go on listening to other people’s chat. LOL. Besides, I wanted to know more about the other members of the club.

This mid-forties woman continued saying, “I don’t understand why those women don’t feel shy to lie naked in front of many men. I myself feel very shy to my very own husband, that’s why I always do it in the dark.”

Apparently she followed the stereotyping people do; “good” women must not show their desire to men, including their own husbands; they must be passive; bad women are those who show their passion openly, moreover to do it with many men, outside wedlock.

In this patriarchal society, where women are considered to be successful if they can get husband, they’ve got to show to other people that they are “good” woman, so that they deserve to be married by a man. To be considered “good”, they must find the “contradictory”—“bad” woman, so that they busily find out the weakness of other women. Binary opposition requires two contradictory things, good versus bad; passive versus active, the oppressed versus the oppressor, etc.

I didn’t give any comment to what these two mid-forties women talked about. I didn’t like people to judge other people using their own perspective without trying to understand it from different perspective. I chose to keep quiet.

PT56 22.33 250606