Home

cheating

Cheating and Natural Inclinations: It's Not What We Don't Know, It's What We May Force Ourselves to Do Because of What We Assume

Fri, 2009-12-04 17:22 — figleaf

Summary: Part two of a two part post. The consequences of confusing gender assumptions for established fact can result in drastic neglect that… in turn reinforce those gender assumptions.

Continuing in the theme of bad gender assumptions affecting research...

In comments about yesterday’s post about women as pumas, cougars, and cheetahs (oh my), Zeborah raised the concern that the description of “cheetah” behavior involves a woman the authors call “Dana” having sex with men too drunk to reject their advances is pretty much the description of a broad class of date rape. (See, for instance, how the story reads after translation through Regender.com.)

To which Tlt added a highly relevant question

Assuming that “Dana” isn’t a made-up composite of behaviors that Morgan disapproves of, she is, indeed a rapist. Only…wait….men are supposed to be happy to have had sex they didn’t/couldn’t consent to because sex is so exquisitely rare and under normal circumstances must be so dearly bought that they should just be glad to get ANY....right?

What a beautiful summary of the problem of confusing what we assume with dead certainty (about men in this case) based on stereotype with what we… don’t know very well at all based on hard data.

Hypothesis: Echidne mentions a study saying 25% of all married men report cheating while 15% of all married women do. There’s actually quite a bit of variation in percentages depending on studies but in almost all the variation in men who cheat vs. women who cheat is relatively close. I propose that most of the reported differences are the results of two errors, one procedural and one perceptual.

Procedurally I suspect it’s difficult to construct survey questions that accurately overcome pressure on men to overreport, and corresponding pressure on women to underreport. Secondly, though, based on Tlt’s point, some of the difference in actual affairs can be accounted for by men acting based on their own perceptions that they’re supposed to_ act, and women not acting when based on perceptions they’re not supposed to act.

With the result that the differences are even smaller than reported, and would be even smaller if people somehow (magically?) responded less to perceived social pressure. Discuss Research.

(Note: Sometimes I get gigged for appearing to claim people’s choices are somehow independent from social influence. I’m perfectly aware how improbably that would be. I am however, also aware that if the social assumptions and resulting narratives were altered then the pressure on people to act on them would sort of by-definition be relieved. Submitting to social pressure might be inevitable. Altering sources of social pressure, on the other hand, is entirely possible.)

Cheating and Natural Inclinations: It's Not What We Don't Know, It's What We Know That May Not Be True

Fri, 2009-12-04 16:47 — figleaf

Summary: Part one of a two-part post. Gender assumptions interfere with… and sometimes outright blind.. our understanding of heterosexual infidelity.

Echidne of the Snakes on an article about Tiger Woods and “why men cheat.” She points out that numerically speaking for heterosexual men to cheat there sort of have to be heterosexual women cheating too.

I guess the question of why people cheat isn’t as interesting as the question why men cheat, especially men who are rich and famous and can have as many girlfriends as they wish, right? That’s the hook in the story, my dear reader.

But the hook only works as long as those girlfriends are viewed in the abstract, in the way we’d discuss fast cars or expensive wines, the other kinds of things rich guys can have which poor guys only dream about. Women get objectified in that view, though, and if you step away from the objectification you end up with a story about why people cheat.

She said it here.

I think Echidne really nicely articulates the problem of gendered assumptions: it’s enough to know that men cheat because, the assumption goes, only men exercise sexual agency. Similarly it’s unnecessary ever to examine who exactly they might be cheating with. Or why.

The dominant paradigm has it all wrapped up. To explore further would only rock the boat.

Of course I think it’s always a great time to rock that particular boat.

Both of them, actually, since not only would it be a good idea to critically examine our assumptions about women’s agency (in cheating and otherwise) it’s not like our assumptions about men are exactly anchored in bedrock either. Discuss! Research!

*Real* vs Ideal Consequences of Infidelity

Sat, 2008-12-06 08:46 — figleaf

So whenever I riff off one of Em and Lo’s Daily Bedpost posts I always feel compelled to include a disclaimer that I actually like them a lot but I just disagree with this one thing. When I balk at something it’s usually about some uncharacteristically heteronormatively gendered assumption. This morning I finally noticed that shows up when they link to their Glamour magazine columns and suddenly felt better. All magazines have editorial constraints that favors mating an often-narrow target demographic with an equally narrow-focus advertising revenue stream in a way that, often necessarily, requires favoring the latter even when it’s at the expense of the former. Eh. I get that Glamour won’t hire anyone to write about how men prefer the flavor (flavour?) of bare skin to the flavor of cosmetics. I regret, however, that they insist that writers maintain conventional gender narratives.

For instance, check out the introduction to this post, about how cell-phone logs make it really easy to catch a partner’s infidelity. (Emphasis mine.)

We have an article in December’s Glamour magazine called “Guys’ Weird New Habits: Why? Why?“ One habit we looked into was why guys still insist on cheating when they can so easily get busted in this age of technology.

...

Why do men (and, I must add, women) think that they can’t get caught even though they leave an electronic trail more obvious than Hansel & Gretel’s cookie crumbs?

Read the quote in context here.

The three reasons listed in the post hint at but never hit one big, highly gendered reason: men really do have a tendency to assume their partners are technologically clueless. (Hmm… maybe our moms made our dads change lightbulbs not because it’s so technical but because it’s risky to get up on a wicker-bottom chair in even moderate heels. Maybe it was because they wanted to feel like there was some element of housework they could get help with.)

But the real howler for me was the confidence of the assumption that only men cheat. And/or that only women find out. Well, they are writing for Glamour Magazine’s overwhelmingly younger, more single, and female target demographic and presumably that demographic would rather dwell more on insecurity about their own partners than receive tips about evading detection of their definitely lower but only modestly so rates of infidelity.

—-

That said, if you filter out the gendered bits the list is pretty instructive.

1) Men who cheat with a capital “C” tend to be narcissistic. They lack empathy and think mainly about themselves and their own needs. They also think that every day rules do not apply to them. Since they think they are above everyone else, it stands to reason that they think other people are not as clever as they are.

[and]

3) When men are being deceptive, they spend a lot of mental energy on concealing their actions and words. They are distracted. Because they are distracted, they may forget to do simple things like erase their computer history or email.

Take out the “men who cheat” part, and the circularity that people who cheat don’t follow agreed-upon rules, and item #1 is a great, real-Em-and-Lo insight into infidelity: people who cheat have an extraordinary tendency to create justifications for their infidelities. It’s much easier to say “well, I’m not really like that but he/she’s such a jerk about…” than to say “Even though I genuinely love and respect my partner I still get the hots for other people.” In other words we’re often willing to sacrifice our actual real relationships rather than question what we’re taught to believe about ideal ones.

In item #3 Em and Lo nail the other side of the equation very nicely as well… minus the “men who…” bit. Just like an anti-virus program makes your computer run 10-20% slower, running “anti-detection” processes makes us run slower too! Heck, just maintaining the adversarial “did I slip?” and “does she/he suspect” in every conversation can create enough alienation in a partner to then justify one’s own feelings of distance that… we use as further excuses for our infidelities. Rinse and repeat a few times and you have to start asking yourself whether our ideology about monogamy is worth some large fraction of a 50% divorce rate.

If you’re going to stick with the “pretend I’m strictly monogamous” model item #2 is useful regardless of you or your partner’s gender.

Practically speaking, electronic devices are small and personal. A cell phone is easy to conceal. It’s simple to make calls in the privacy of one’s office or car without being seen. And because they are small, they are relatively easy to lose track of. So the cell phone gets left behind on the foyer table, and the rest is history.

I know at least five people, men and women, who were caught through cell-phone mishaps (phone-bill call records, snooping actual phones, and answering calls on a left-behind phone.) As Glamour’s editors might prefer I spin it, almost half of the five caught were men.

See what I mean, though? Minus what I’m pretty sure are externally imposed editorial filters Em and Lo are as insightful as ever.

Men, Women, Monogamy and "Cheating"

Thu, 2008-11-13 10:11 — figleaf

Em and Lo of Daily Bedpost have a nice Q&A feature where they ask three different men, usually a single straight man, a single straight man, and a committed gay man, for their take on a question. Their take on the question “Do you think guys cheat more than women?” was pretty interesting.

The straight single respondent, “Max,” said men are just lousier than women. Also, succumbing the dominant women as the “no-sex” class ideology, he adds


A girl, on the other hand, is more likely to be satisfied with the attention and flirtation alone. She doesn’t NEED the physical confirmation to get an ego boost.

Read all about it here.

“Matt,” the straight married respondent, also bashes men, blaming what he sees as more cheating as a result of poor impulse control. He also says “variety is a more constant drive” for men. Also, without considering, say, this point by Audacia Ray he says (emphasis mine)

They would sleep with someone different every day—maybe even several times a day. I just don’t believe that would be appealing to most women over the long term. (I’m not talking about on occasion here, I mean different partners every day, for years. If you offered women the choice between that and a daily massage, they’d take the massage.)

And, getting closer to what I think the real answer might be, adds

This inherent desire for variety is a constantly suppressed impulse for pretty much every guy I know—even the ones who would never, ever stray.

Hmm… really? Wonder if anyone besides men has to spend time suppressing impulses?

Finally, though, “Terrence,” the gay committed man, brings up the most interesting points. (Emphasis also mine.)

Do men cheat more than women? My intuition is screaming yes. But I also think our perception of men as cheaters feeds their cheating behavior — which is another column entirely.

...

[I]f we’ve got to look at it in absolutes, then I believe yes, technically, men cheat more than women. But with life’s continuous chaos and change, I’d rather stick with a partner who may have some random shags here and there if he’s consistently emotionally monogamous with me.

Actually I’m with Terrence on the cheating question. Sure, men cheat at… rates only a little bit higher than the rates women cheat.

What’s the difference then? Why do men (at least Euro/Anglo men) get the label? I think Terence touches on that but doesn’t land square.

There are any number of kinds of intimate relationships where sex isn’t involved at all. Think lifelong platonic friendships, family ties, and partnerships in intensely competitive and/or adventurous environments. Conversely, sad to say, in many monogamous relationships the partners themselves can be quite distant from each other.

What (heterosexual) monogamy does have going for it is a guarantee that men’s family’s property will be inherited by the “right” person’s offspring. For most of the history of marriage, in virtually all history-leaving cultures, that’s been the biggest consideration behind virginity, abstinence, fidelity, and monogamy. (Compare the meanings of the words “adultery” and “adulterated” for instance.)

Anyway, in cultures where men and their families have tended to control economics, and where it matters to their families that offspring really is “theirs,” and where women have been kept completely economically and even legally dependent on men (even here their fathers “give them away” to their husbands at wedding, remember, a vestige of what used to be cold, hard, Common-Law legal truth) the deck has been substantially stacked against women who cheat (stoning, anyone?) and… stacked pretty flipping indifferently against men who do.

Anyway, since the rules of monogamy were initially created to protect men’s interest in women as their property (“thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife… no his house nor cattle nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s!) you’d sort of expect to see two things: first, that men wouldn’t see much wrong with collecting a little extra “property,” or even that they’d judge each other’s status by how much “property” they could accumulate (unless, of course, they were married to that “property” in which case it would be “theft.”) And second that as the metaphorical, and sometimes real property even when women did cheat they’d have to be a lot more circumspect — the consequences, at least of being caught, (stoning, divorced, faced with raising children on their own) have tended to be way, way, way higher for them.

Anyway, I think all that adds up to explain why men have the greater reputation for cheating… and the statistically significant but not that much higher actual rate of cheating than women. A difference, by the way, that’s therefore more cultural and not nearly as “natural” as Matt and Max suggest. Take away those cultural different consequences, and throw in more legal and economic parity, and I’m pretty sure the statistical difference largely disappears, with men not feeling sex with multiple partners is a status builder, and women not seeing fewer partners as a survival mechanism.

I happen to think, by the way, that if we could get closer to real economic, social, and legal parity we’d wind up with Terence’s position: perhaps a little more sexual “cheating” (which might not even be considered cheating) but a lot more room for intimate and emotionally monogamous partnerships inside relationships.

Because Motivation Isn't Enough Without Opportunity and, Especially, Means

Wed, 2008-05-21 11:24 — figleaf


Photo by Flickr user fmarq. Used under a Creative Commons license.

The Reverse Cowgirl pithily corrects Philip Weiss’s biology-laden male-infidelity apologetic

Men cheat because they can.

Read the quote in context here.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon expands on why those sorts of biological-imperative explanations are so full of shit

Women cheat nearly as much as men. This is not an unknown fact.
...

I’m always shocked at people who act like adultery is basically a male-only temptation, because who the hell are men cheating with? Prostitutes, sometimes. That might be enough to explain the gap, sadly. But I suspect—especially in our day and age where the older-men-preying-on-younger-women model has had a wrench thrown in it by feminism—that mostly men who cheat do so with peers. Which would probably be mostly equally married women.

...

To be fair, he quotes a feminist who points out that women pay a higher price for infidelity than men, so are more motivated not to cheat. I’d point out that the price women pay goes down the less financially dependent they are on men, and if we could ever get accurate numbers on cheaters, it would be interesting to see if the already smallish cheating gap closes.

Read the quote in context here.

The problem for sociobiologists and their evolutionary psychology brethren is that economics-based explanations really do explain the behavior of men and women better than genetics do: for instance a genetics solution would have be be more complex to account for differences in gendered behavior in the face of changing social and economic status whereas such an answer is built into an economics-based solution. And please not that’s not to say there couldn’t be selective pressure for infidelity, just that such a theory would have to account for the fact — unlike the standard sociobiology narrative — that both sexes are, in fact, faithful or unfaithful in nearly equal proportion.

Infidelity and Power

Thu, 2008-03-27 23:45 — figleaf

Earlier this month during the Eliot Spitzer kerfuffle a married blogger[**] who writes a lot about her experience with and appreciation for infidelity Ms Inconspicuous of The Seduction of Infidelity had a cool point about why, especially, powerful, successful men cheat.

I think it’s because, really, though they may appear to have everything to lose, they have less to lose overall—or less risk in being caught. I’m no stranger to the concept that the most financially successful partner is the one that often is the cheater—even Yahoo! News picked that up at one point. Why would that be? They could lose their wives, kids, etc., in a divorce settlement—essentially everything. First off: a successful person, at the heart of the matter, has the skills to offset the bad press of an affair. At the very least they can rebuild their lives and recoup their costs. Secondly, how many wives or husbands would stay by their spouses—stand by them in a press conference, even—because they’ve provided a comfortable lifestyle to which they have become accustomed?

She said it here.

Ms Inconspicuous’s point makes sense on its own: the more wallpaper you can afford the less you worry about needing some to paper over a scandal. But I thought it works very well with a post about successful men and affairs this evening from Amanda Marcotte’s of Pandagon

The most likely explanation, albeit the least conducive to essentialist sexist arguments, is that there are simply a lot less female leaders. Women do, after all, cheat almost as much as men, and so if every adultery turned into a sex scandal and representation was 50/50 in the halls of power, we’d see an equal number of women getting outed as adulterers. But I’m not going to dust off my hands and call it a day with that, because I think the Newsweek article does make a good point about the qualitative difference. Women have been outed for garden variety adulteries, but with men, it’s often about sex with prostitutes, interns, grooming the next younger wife while the current one is sick with cancer, etc.

Read the quote in context here.

What I especially appreciate is that neither Inconspicuous or Marcotte are buying the “men think with their little heads” theory of infidelity, or, once again, the “men have sociobiological imperatives to spread their seed as widely as possible” theory, both of which might also explain why, despite roughly equal numbers of men and women in affairs, men have more spectacular flameouts: society in the form of scolding non-feminists and anti-feminists, and even scientists make all kinds of excuses for us that say, in effect, what do you expect? (And, after all, gung-ho sloganeering notwithstanding, people in general are extraordinarily good at rising only to expectations. And so if you expect men to be unable to resist cheating, well, that’s what you’re going to get. But I digress…)

Instead of making excuses the two bloggers assemble the case that it’s not just a matter of having no power to stop themselves, it’s a matter of them having enough power not to bother.

(For the record after making her case for power over mere horniness Marcotte takes her argument further into the realm of masculine entitlement and paying for the appearance of dominance. I’m not exactly disputing her further arguments so much as saying I was already convinced before she gets there.)

[Attribution updated. —fl]

Syndicate content