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If we learned anything from Anthony Weiner's latest sexting saga this week, it's how quickly the spotlight swings to the betrayed wife when the subject is infidelity.

Huma Abedin announced on Monday that she would be separating from Weiner – who resigned from the U.S. Congress in 2011 after his first sexting scandal and torpedoed his New York mayoralty bid with more of the same two years later – after the New York Post published a new set of crotch shots her husband had fired off to another woman. Inexplicably, one photo featured his four-year-old son sleeping in the background.

A fundamental line had been crossed for Abedin, who would no longer be pulling the stand-by-your-man routine. "After long and painful consideration and work on my marriage, I have made the decision to separate from my husband," she said in a statement.

Abedin, Hillary Clinton's top aide, has finally exited a marriage many observers had been perplexed by for years. She took the high road with a simple statement that stressed the well-being of their son. Even so, what followed for her was a pile-on that was as fast and furious as it was retrograde.

The first jabs came at her skills as a mother.

On Monday, we heard that Abedin's career on the road with Clinton – and away from her husband and child at home – may have factored into Weiner's latest forays into sexting. Over at The Washington Post, Amber Phillips mused, "[Weiner's] questionable decisions are ensnaring his wife, one of Hillary Clinton's top aides, by raising questions about her decision to leave their son in a potentially dangerous situation."

The New York Post described Weiner as a "stay-at-home cad."

"While his wife, Huma Abedin, travels the country campaigning for Hillary Clinton, the disgraced ex-congressman has been sexting with a busty brunette out West," the tabloid story read. It also described the worst of the sexual photos as "baby-sitting – Anthony Weiner-style."

What's the message here? For women, it's that if you flip traditional gender roles and work the big job while your husband raises the children, cheating is the probable result. Not only is that cruel to working women everywhere, it also denigrates involved fathers who might actually like spending time with their kids.

In a March podcast, Abedin said her husband's willingness to be a stay-at-home dad helped allow her to go out on the campaign trail with Clinton. Weiner himself seemed to relish the family-man label in a lengthy post-scandal profile for The New York Times. The reaction to their marital unravelling reveals just how backward we still are in our collective thinking about these issues.

Of course, the other swipes at Abedin were purely partisan. Conservative pundits coiled themselves into pretzels as they argued that not only did Weiner's erectile selfies reflect badly on his wife, they also tarnish her presidential candidate boss. Two threads emerged here, both a real stretch: one, that Clinton can't be trusted with state secrets if there's a Weiner in her midst; and two, that Weiner's infidelities necessitate Clinton addressing her own husband's philandering.

"It's just another example of Hillary Clinton's bad judgment," Donald Trump told The New York Times. Conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh topped even Trump with this noxious nugget: "[Abedin's] going to be Hillary's chief of staff. But she has not been chief of her husband's staff." And so another, even lower, attack: that a wife's supposed frigidity forced a man to broadcast dick pics far and wide for years, across multiple platforms.

It's painfully clear that women are still held accountable for the bad behaviour of men. What about Weiner's agency as a sentient being who makes bad choices, pathologically often? Writing in Think Progress, Judd Legum asked readers to recognize this story for what it is: "The story of a man who is no longer in political power and who has exceptionally poor judgment. It is not, at its heart, a story about any woman  – either Abedin or her boss, who happens to be running for president, Hillary Clinton."

On Tuesday, we got a further glimpse into Weiner's own thoughts about his "busted marriage," as the New York Post shared more of his conversations with the latest other woman. During their first Twitter exchange in January, 2015, Weiner told the woman that he envied her divorced status. Asked whether he'd move to DC with his wife were Clinton to become president, Weiner reportedly replied, "That is a very big Q. Honestly don't know what she will do."

In the end, Weiner was leaving the decision-making up to his wife, this as he kept on doing "the dumb thing," as he referred to his cheating throughout the riveting documentary Weiner. Having survived two scandals already, Abedin did the heavy lifting again this week, this time with a divorce that's forced her into Weiner's sleazy spotlight one more time.

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