by Molly Borowitz
EW editor Amelia recently wrote about the double standards latent in societal attitudes toward extramarital affairs, which became especially evident in 2009 after a string of male celebrities fessed up to cheating on their wives. Why, Amelia wonders, does the public find unfaithful men so much more palatable than unfaithful women? Because of gender norms: we expect men to have high sex drives, to be competitive, to be dominant, and to exercise those traits by chasing new bits of skirt—whereas women are chaste, submissive, loyal, sexually uncreative.
Amelia’s post features a link to an article by Harper’s Bazaar writer Katie Roiphe about open or polyamorous relationships. Roiphe cites actress Tilda Swinton—who lives with her husband, her children, and her lover—as an example of a happy and functional open marriage, but explains that such arrangements often provoke scandal and disapproval because they challenge existing social rules. Monogamy is a very well-established institution in our society, and its opposite—the institutionalization of marital infidelity through arrangements like open relationships—constitutes a threat to the social order. For Roiphe, then, societal attitudes toward monogamy and infidelity are determined by convention.
I think both writers have a point, but I also think there’s a dimension to our conception of monogamy that’s being overlooked: sexuality. In the United States, we define sexuality in very narrow terms. People are assigned to one of three mainstream categories (straight, gay, bi) based on only one criterion: of what biological sex are the people with whom you prefer to have sexual intercourse? If the answer is the opposite sex from your own, you’re straight; if it’s the same sex, you’re gay; if it’s either sex, you’re bi. That’s it.
But if you read anything by Dan Savage or Tristan Taormino, you’ll quickly realize that sexuality actually consists of a much more complicated constellation of preferences: things like power dynamics (think bondage and dom-sub play), fantasies (staged scenarios and role play), fetishes (animals, objects, body parts, individuals), physical sensations (S&M, electric- and water-play), number of partners (monogamy, open relationships, threesomes, orgies), and so forth. There are myriad factors that determine which sexual experiences a person will find arousing and fulfilling—but because our society’s understanding of “sexuality” is so reductive, these factors are more often interpreted as kinks, personality quirks, or (pop psychology to the rescue!) neuroses acquired in childhood.
Although such sexual preferences don’t inform our immediate assignation of an individual’s “sexual preference,” they do influence our conception of gender norms. We can see them operating in both Amelia’s and Roiphe’s posts, where—although they are explicitly dealing with a social convention, monogamy—it’s clear that women are assumed to be submissive, monogamous, and fetish-less by nature. Why don’t women cheat? Why are open marriages so scandalous? Because women are supposed to prefer sex with one long-term partner—and since we’re submissive, we don’t seek that partner out: we let him find us. On the other hand, straight men are assumed to be dominant and to fetishize youth. Hence the “acceptance” Amelia describes; mainstream culture doesn’t exactly approve of Tiger Woods or Eliot Spitzer, but at least it can understand and explain their behavior. When a woman cheats, the gender norms we ascribe to straight-female sexuality (submissive, monogamous, fetish-less) are totally thrown off. As a result, people feel uneasy, and tend to accuse the woman or mark her as an exception, somehow deviant or depraved. (N.B.: this formulation of sexuality-related gender norms also explains the public’s recent obsession with and ridicule of “cougars”—older women who actively pursue younger men).
How does all this affect the feminist in h/er day-to-day life? Immensely. The sexuality trinary is essentially an extension of the gender binary against which we fight so passionately. We already know it’s unproductive to assume that women are inherently submissive and monogamous creatures; generations of women can attest to the fact that the social conventions such an assumption generates are restrictive and dangerous (look at the recent case of a Florida teen who committed suicide after being labeled a “whore” because she’d tried sexting). At the same time, I think we need to be careful about accusing people who prefer monogamy of being “conventional” or “closed-minded.” (Some readers may object that monogamous people aren’t really expressing a preference, but rather following the millennia-old lines of social convention. I think evolutionary biology and animal behavior provide compelling evidence to the contrary, but that’s a discussion for another post.) Feminists are all for challenging conventions, but that doesn’t mean we’re out to get monogamous people—just like we aren’t out to get men, straight people, pro-life people, or people who watch porn. Feminism is about the destruction of absolutes, not the creation of new ones—and one way to start breaking down the absolutism of “femininity” as a gender norm and a social convention is to accept and promote the idea that women can be sub, dom, fetishist, fantasist, mono, poly, and everything in between.
(photo from Keith Allison‘s flickr)
I think the degree to which people prefer pleasant illusions to truth is often underestimated. In the specific case of relations between the sexes, it is largely the women’s delicate sensibilities that determine what illusions we will all agree to use, the main one being the pretense that humanity isn’t driven largely by the animal impulse to be what the hip-hop community refers to as pimps and hos. But lest that comment be misinterpreted, let me first describe the psyche, as near I understand it (never having hired any), of the prostitute.
Liberals tend to see prostitutes as among the downtrodden, indeed perhaps the patriarchy’s lowest victims. Conservatives see them as sinners and threats to the social fabric. All those analyses fly out the window, though, if we are to believe the claim made by multiple pimps in the documentary American Pimp that their hos receive no money for doing their “jobs.” All the money goes to the pimp. And, if anecdotal psychological evidence is to be believed, this is not simply because the ho gets paid by the pimp in diamonds, shelter, and fur. Rather, many hos are psychologically dependent on their pimp in more the way we expect of cult members orbiting a revered father-leader. Many even get started on their “careers,” apparently, by doing sexual “favors” for the pimp’s friends. Something less pristine and far more sad than a cold transaction is taking place — or so it reportedly is in at least some cases.
But what it comes down to is that most men, far from needing to dominate women, may actually be more naturally prone to seek out an equal, an attainable partner, while women are naturally inclined to throw themselves in huge clusters at the one alpha male — or at a tiny handful of alpha males — at the top of the social heap. This makes evolutionary sense, since the one alpha male can easily impregnate them all, especially if he’s already killed off all his male rivals (whereas women basically can’t have babies any faster no matter how many rivals they displace, so there’s less point in a woman trying to amass a he-harem of ready males). Why settle for a lower-caste male, girls, when you can be one of countless harem-girls who gets a tiny portion of the endlessly-flowing sperm of The Best Guy? Most males, I think, simply want an acceptable, normal girlfriend.
This is the fundamental asymmetry at the heart of all human life, and any philosophy that purports to show that the two sexes are “equal” — or that they would behave the same way if only the cruel, arbitrary rules of the “patriarchy” were somehow abolished — is hopelessly at odds with fundamental human nature and social reality. Any honest examination of human life ought to start from this evolutionary psychology insight about the differential behavioral implications of wildly different sperm and egg production/usability rates.
Otherwise, feminists are doomed (and the rest of us along with them to the extent we have to listen to them or abide by the laws they inspire) to be shocked and offended anew each time, say, a Bill Clinton (or someone else with the most resources or power) amasses an army of fellatrices even while talking the talk of feminist empowerment, or all the women in some ostensibly egalitarian art- or free-love-oriented collective all rotate through the bed of the one male guru in charge, or yet another Tiger Woods amasses a bevy of swooming women yearning for his five-iron, or countless amoral she-yuppies become mistresses to one rich already-married businessman while turning up their noses at more sincere romantic overtures from lower-caste, single, monogamous males.
The power of women to delude themselves into not noticing these patterns even while engaging in them would be breathtaking were it not by now so familiar. But all talk of “equality” is nonsense so long as women continue to behave like harem-girls, and the evidence is ample that their doing so has nothing to do with some slight income disparity or tragic but temporary bought of low self-esteem — this, Dr. Freud, is what women want.
QED, I don’t really know where to begin with the hot mess that is the above comment, so I’ll just say this:
1) We’re not really living in caveman times anymore.
2) I think many (if not most) girls want an acceptable, normal boyfriend too. Methinks you’ve been looking for female partners in all the wrong places…
Here’s some double standards to chew on…
How about Mary Kay Letourneau? (and the politically incorrect comment about how men would love to have been molested)
Prison life for men vs. for women? (women braid each other’s hair, men rape and stab each other)
Firefighters? (Men need to carry a 220 lb. pack to pass the CPAT – Candidate Physical Aptitude Test, women 130 lbs. Who would you want rescuing your child?)
Lesbians? (Lots of lesbians say they dated men and it turned them to women, my wife asks: How come you never hear a man saying, ‘I’m sicking of women, I’m going to start dating men!)