Free Republic

Dial up your local Country and Western station and you may soon find your fingers tapping out the beat of Carrie Underwood's latest hit, "Before He Cheats." Underwood suspects her boyfriend is probably cheating on her (in matters of infidelity, I guess "probably" is proof enough). This how she extracts her revenge: "I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive, Carved my name into his leather seats... I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights, slashed a hole in all four tires..." Trashing your boyfriend's car has little to do with sugar and spice...

If you've been driving around listening to pop radio stations this spring and summer, you'll have noticed three songs that are pretty much unavoidable, and each of them is a long way from puppy love. First, there's "Before He Cheats," by Carrie Underwood. This is a song about a woman who catches her boyfriend in a bar fooling around with someone else. But she's not wounded or insecure. She's got nothing but contempt for the slobbering, cologne-wearing jerk. She's disgusted by the bleached blond girly-girl who's leading him on and who doesn't even know how to drink whiskey.

"I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped up 4 wheel drive, carved my name into his leather seats...I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights, slashed a hole in all 4 tires..."--from Carrie Underwood's hit single "Before He Cheats."One of the ways the double standard about domestic violence manifests itself in our popular culture is the female revenge motif. Women who are wronged (which, to some, means all women) exact revenge in a way which, were the genders reversed, would be widely condemned. One example is country singer Carrie Underwood's hit single "Before He Cheats",...