Once we take a look at the connection between 73-year-old legendary soccer coach Invoice Belichick and his girlfriend and enterprise companion, 24-year-old Jordon Hudson, it’s laborious to know precisely what we’re seeing. Two grown-ups in love forging a dynamic enterprise partnership? Elder abuse, as some have wildly speculated? Or is it, because the vitriolic feedback in Hudson’s social media posts would have it, good old school gold digging?
Gold digging is a misogynistic and retro time period, however this scandal is a retro one. It’s a weird, barely off-putting thriller that matches remarkably nicely into our present age of newly regressive gender politics.
Hudson and Belichick, the six-time Tremendous Bowl-winning former NFL coach, met on a flight in 2021 and went public with their relationship final December. Whereas their practically 50-year age hole has raised eyebrows amid observers, the scandal has solely grown as Hudson has taken on an more and more central function in Belichick’s skilled world.
It’s a weird, barely off-putting thriller that matches remarkably nicely into our present age of newly regressive gender politics.
However hypothesis across the relationship reached a fever pitch when Hudson interrupted throughout Belichick’s interview on CBS Sunday Morning in April. “How did you guys meet?” host Tony Dokoupil requested Belichick, referring to Hudson. “We’re not speaking about this,” Hudson minimize in tersely from off-camera. “Jordon was a continuing presence throughout our interview,” Dokoupil informs viewers in voiceover, in a second that launched a thousand TikTok response movies.
Within the midst of this controversy, the couple has been manufacturing social media content material about their relationship that isn’t alarming a lot as it’s evenly uncanny, particularly given Belichick’s famously gruff public persona. On Hudson’s Instagram account, she has posted beachside footage of herself balancing athletically on Belichick’s outstretched legs, and of Belichick, dressed as a fisherman, reeling in a mermaid-tailed Hudson from the surf. (“Ouucchhhh!!!” goes the caption on that one.)
A couple of have defended the connection between Belichick and Hudson. Sports activities media persona Colin Cowherd has mentioned that Hudson’s option to hop into Belichick’s interview was regular for PR administrators, if “form of a cringy factor.” Proper-wing sports activities outlet The Outkick has rallied to Hudson’s facet on the grounds that she triggers the libs, saying, “If Jordon needs to spend her weekends at Invoice’s home on Nantucket, absorbing the solar and having fun with Cisco Brewery on Invoice’s dime, I say GO FOR IT.”
However the commonest response to the spectacle of Hudson and Belichick’s relationship is the one outlined by sports activities media persona Katie Nolan on a podcast in February: That is bizarre and looks like it has sinister undertones.
“We’re already going, ‘You’re how a lot youthful than him?’ And then you definitely present up in a business. And then you definitely hear that she’s in cost in his profession.” Nolan mentioned. “It looks like you possibly can be benefiting from the man. And he’s clearly benefiting from the lady.”
Notably, it doesn’t seem like a lot of a head-scratcher why a strong septuagenarian would select to be with a latest faculty graduate and pageant contestant. However the nefarious purpose implied about why Hudson needs to be with Belichick is the one persons are misogynistically and freely throwing round: gold digger.
The resurgence of the gold digger
I don’t know something about Hudson and Belichick’s non-public relationship, and most definitely, neither do you. I don’t wish to make any claims about who’s utilizing whom or what their non-public life is like. However as a feminist popular culture critic, I’m to see the time period “gold digger” swim again up from the collective unconsciousness once more, prepared and keen to go to work.
There’s one thing nearly old school about it. The final time “gold digger” was thrown round in popular culture a lot was when teenager Courtney Stodden skyrocketed to fame in 2011 after they bought married at age 16 to 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchison. Stodden would later describe their marriage as one characterised by grooming and sexual assault.
Earlier than that, the nice popular culture gold digger was Anna Nicole Smith, the mannequin turned paparazzi obsession who married oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II in 1994. Since Smith’s premature demise in 2007, she’s discovered a spot within the pantheon of wronged ladies of the Nineteen Nineties, somebody we got here to consider over the past decade was publicly mistreated — partly by her tarring as a gold digger.
“It’s a bit provincial to look down one’s nostril at a girl wanting one thing from a person and provides a cross to a person who arguably would have by no means given her a second look had she not been a gorgeous, blonde Playboy Playmate,” essayist and intercourse work activist Laura LeMoon argued in 2023, writing about Smith in Salon. “Quite than singling out and condemning Anna Nicole Smith, we ought to be pointing our fingers on the inequities and systemic failures that put folks like me and Smith in positions the place acquiring cash and sources from males, straight or not directly, is our greatest choice for survival.”
“Gold digger” is a euphemism that permits us as a tradition to speak round these systemic failures. It’s a option to deride ladies once they take significantly the concept that their monetary well-being ought to rely on their relationships with males. So it’s odd to see the time period turning into so fashionable throughout a second when fashionable tradition has grow to be fairly infatuated with the concept that life is most nice, easy, and simple when ladies’s funds do rely on romantic relationships with males.
TikTok is stuffed with tradwives explaining how their lives turned higher as soon as they bought out of the 9-to-5 grind to make cereal from scratch for his or her kids and let their husbands do the breadwinning. (That essentially the most profitable of the tradwife influencers are literally the first breadwinners of their houses is an irony the influencers themselves seldom focus on.) Or there are the stay-at-home girlfriends cooing over how caring for their boyfriends with out even the monetary security web of a wedding contract has been their ticket to the mushy life.
The gold digger is the tradwife as seen by way of a funhouse mirror: a girl residing off her capacity to draw a person, solely right here completed crassly.
In the meantime, a few of President Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters are arguing that his tariffs will pressure ladies out of the workforce and make them as soon as once more financially depending on males, both by way of marriage or by way of intercourse work, life paths these males deal with as equal. Trump’s enchantment to the dream of a misplaced American manufacturing economic system is a nostalgic one. It’s an interesting fantasy to a few of his extra incel-adjacent followers: that underneath this economic system, the sexes will revert to an older, allegedly extra pure financial relationship, one through which ladies commerce their sexuality and childrearing capabilities to males in alternate for monetary safety.
The gold digger is the tradwife as seen by way of a funhouse mirror: a girl residing off her capacity to draw a person, solely right here completed crassly, with out the present of affection to melt the crude edges of the transaction. The gold digger is just a determine we will blame for a way uncomfortable this dynamic makes us really feel, with out having to suppose by way of simply what’s so uncomfortable about it.
So if we’re offended at Jordon Hudson, it’s price asking the query: Are we offended together with her, or with the truth that highly effective folks wish to make gold digging considered one of a girl’s most viable profession paths once more?
