STFU, Drew Peterson

I know lots of you who are reading are Chicagoans; for those of you who aren't, I'll throw you a little background on this one first:

Stacy Peterson is a wife and mother who disappeared about three weeks ago. Her husband is a police officer in suburban Bolingbrook--or was, til he resigned today--and he is a suspect in her disappearance. What makes this story unusual is that the missing woman is his fourth wife, and that his third wife died under suspicious circumstances several years ago. The death was ruled an accident at the time, but her body has now been exhumed in an effort to link Peterson to her death.

Peterson has criticized the media roundly throughout the search for his wife (in which he has not participated) but this morning, he went on a local news show and said, among other delights, the following:

Drew Peterson said Stacy would ask for a divorce on a regular basis "based on her menstrual cycle" after her sister died.

If that, and that alone, doesn't make every one of my female readers want to slap this man til he cries like a two-year-old...

I'm not saying that women don't get hormonal. I don't think there's a woman around who can deny that at least once in her life, at a certain point in the month, she's singlehandedly polished off a half-gallon of ice cream, an entire Eli's cheesecake, or three bags of Milano cookies--in bad cases, all three--while sitting on the sofa sobbing over a peanut-butter commercial. And yeah--we get angry sometimes.

But sometimes? We even get angry when it's NOT our period.

Sometimes we actually get angry in--hold on here, Drew--in RESPONSE to the actions of those around us. Like, maybe controlling husbands. Or people who make us feel threatened, or (as you yourself put it) "cornered".

And frankly, Drew, even if Stacy's requests for divorce WERE "based on her menstrual cycle"--why is that information you felt you needed to share? Why couldn't you just say "she asked for a divorce periodically" or "she'd mentioned it several times"...Why does the whole question of hormones need to be brought into this discussion--unless it's to paint Stacy as a "flighty", "emotional" female who couldn't make up her mind--in other words, a stereotype? Because it's much harder to have sympathy for a stereotype, isn't that right?

I don't know if he's got anything to do with Stacy Peterson's disappearance, or whether there's good reason to suspect him of being involved with the death of wife #3. What I DO know, though, from this quote alone, is that there IS good reason to suspect him of being a vile, chauvinistic, macho-bullshit assclown.