These two articles, “How to be a Mistress, the 1/3 Method” and “How to be a Side Chick: 11 Steps (with Pictures)” from the Wiki How series are hilarious. Who is the audience for these two, people looking to get into the mistress biz? Really? Does someone actually think about being a mistress and research it before doing so? My guess is it is something that just happens, in most cases. Even if there were such an audience of advice seekers, what kind of advice or instruction do these articles give: To be whatever the married guy wants you to be? They assume that there are certain universals regardless of the parties to the relationship of husband, wife and mistress, that individuals cannot act otherwise because it is a mistress-married man relationship. But stereotyping and platitudes about human behavior are dangerous, often make for validating prejudice and de-humanization (think about history of any genocide attempt). The instruction needs to be first, decide on what is acceptable parameters to each of the involved parties, including a wife who knows but chooses not to know. The assumption is that adults cannot communicate about what they are doing and that they all act the same when it comes to sex and marriage.
The illustrations and instructions are amusing, but the generalizations and assumptions that men want what they don’t have and some women out there are “ambitious” enough to consult a Wiki How to make sure they know how to be what any man doesn’t have–someone who doesn’t wear sweats and sneakers in front of her man or ask him questions, of any sort because this is what these simpleton folks–men–want (since they’re cheaters)–are lame. I am hoping these articles are ironic or comical by intent. Otherwise, I smell some moralizing in the manner in which men and women to “this type of behavior” are assumed to be: selfish and low self-esteemed. Each basically intimates that if you’re going in for this type of thing, this is the crap you’ll get–and you deserve it or you just shouldn’t.
In the gaze of the other 
Wow. The articles ARE insipidity banal and yes, hilarious. That the authors actually seem to offer this pablum to readers as legitimate instructions and cautions is very telling. It reminds us that the Honey Boo Boo crowd is out there and most likely circling and rereading particular ones before primping in their trailer bath closets, picking out their favorite beer stained jeans, donning their best AC/DC 1974 Tour t-shirts and heading out to meet their beaus behind the restaurant at the Sloppy Pig truck stop on Route 69 in the next county.
But to bring in the genocide card is, to me, a bit of unwarranted hyperbole almost as (actually more) head scratching than the articles themselves. It reminds me of the Monty Python skit in which two hunters stalk their prey with bazookas and Lockheed fighter jets. Your regular readers, dear Blogger, will see the articles for what they are. But I’m pretty certain they’ll refrain from extrapolating all the way to genocidal fervor.
Genocide starts with stereotyping. Before Jews were ghettoized in Nazi Germany, there were innocent laws that codified what percentage of blood made up a Jew. Then there were other laws, more invasive about where Jews could reside. They were stereotyped money shysters and eventually tagged as the reason for the poor German economy, the bugaboo of a psychotic regime. Jews were merely stereotyped and caricatured at first. The rest is history.
It is not hyperbole to remind readers that stereotyping dehumanizes and the dehumanization is the only way genocide can be accomplished. To look a specific person in the eye and acknowledge her humanness, an other has to be cold blooded to deprive that person of basic human rights, to live where she wants, raise her family as she wants, make her living the ways she wants and live her life outside a ghetto or a concentration camp. Only when people are seen as a type, a concept, does it make it easier for a person and a nation to be hateful and killing.