Vox Day on Charles Saatchi: Divorcing your wife after she’s already left you is a totally ALPHA move

I guess I’ll never quite understand this whole alpha thing.

Over on his Alpha Game blog, the reliably awful Vox Day is defending the ALPHA DOG honor of British art collector Charles Saatchi – you know, the guy recently in the news for choking his wife, TV chef Nigella Lawson, in a very public argument – sorry, a “playful tiff”– at a restaurant.

Lawson responded to Saatchi’s totally playful and not at all violent behavior by moving out following the incident; she’s reportedly been spotted without her wedding ring.

Saatchi, apparently recognizing that she was through with him, officially announced he was divorcing her with a whiny, self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing statement to The Daily Mail on Sunday. It read, in part:

I feel that I have clearly been a disappointment to Nigella during the last year or so, and I am disappointed that she was advised to make no public comment to explain that I abhor violence of any kind against women, and have never abused her physically in any way.

The row photographed at Scott’s restaurant could equally have been Nigella grasping my neck to hold my attention – as indeed she has done in the past, although not in front of Scott’s with a photographer snapping away.

I must stress again my actions were not violent. We are instinctively tactile people. Yes, my hands were around her neck, and they had been touching her arm.

Difficult as it may be to believe, for those who have seen the pictures, there was no pressure applied to her.

Having seen the pictures, I will agree that this is indeed difficult to believe.

Vox Day doesn’t seem to care if Saatchi choked Lawson in anger or just put his hands around her throat because that’s just what nice people like to do sometimes for fun when they’re eating out. He’s just blown away by what a total ALPHA DOG COOL DUDE Saatchi is for divorcing her. According to Day, the whole thing shows that

If you don’t show respect for and loyalty to an Alpha, he will wash his hands of you without thinking twice about it.

… several weeks after you move out and make clear that you want to have nothing to do with him.

Vox goes on, attributing Lawson’s refusal to publicly absolve Saatchi and back up his story about their “playful tiff” in the restaurant to … her worry about how she would appear to other women:

Lawson, instead of doing her part and presenting a united front to the media, was more concerned about how she would look to her female friends and audience if she didn’t play the poor abused victim than she was about her husband’s reputation.

In short, she made it clear her loyalties did not lie with him, but to her public image. This is the one thing a woman married to an ALPHA absolutely cannot do. The ALPHA always knows he has options, and in the absence of the one thing he absolutely demands, respect, he will not hesitate to exercise them. Once a woman shows herself to be disloyal in some manner, few Alphas are inclined to forgive or forget.

And what is true of Alphas is also true, in lesser amounts, of lower-ranking men. It appears that Lawson miscalculated and didn’t realize how important his reputation was to Saatchi. She is not the first woman to make this sort of mistake and she probably will not be the last.

I’m hard pressed to see how walking out on a narcissistic asshole who literally grabbed her by the neck during a fight in a restaurant can be seen as any kind of a mistake. But I confess I don’t fully understand how abusers, and those who make a points of defending abusers, think.

Lawson will go forward with her life and her career; Saatchi’s reputation will be stained forever by his actions at the restaurant, as it should be, and he has no one but himself to blame. I’m not sure what Vox Day’s excuse is.