So someone who’s about to get married wrote Svutlana to say she had a fling with her best-friend maid of honor, enjoyed it quite a bit, and now wonders if she could be a lesbian. Svultlana offers some great sex-positive advice… in her trademarked fractured English of course.

it seem for me that big question here no simple be whether you be lesbian or no, Ms Dyke. Svutlana be extreme sorry for say, but even though you no insert foreign penis anywhere in for your body, you just cheat on husband-for-be. It seem for me that this fact complete escape you, maybe because you cheat with best friend maid-of-honors and now be complete obsess with try for decide if you should buy L Word series value pack or no…

For sure cheat with maid-of-honors no seem like cheat at all…it simple seem like enhance maid-of-honors job describe that include give bride-for-be most incredible earthshake orgasm that, in Svutlana opinion, sure beat host bore bride shower. Need you for ask self why you feel need for make earthshakes with somebody other than your fiancé. Maybe it be fling or maybe be shades of flings for come and indicate that you no be ready for make lifetime commitment.

Source: Svutlana of Svutlandia.

Oh, by “sex-positive” did anyone think the advice would be “hey, if it feels good do it?” Obviously a lot of people can make very sound arguments in favor of changing the rules of a relationship without consulting one’s partner, a.k.a. cheating. It’s been all the mode lately to say “it doesn’t count if you do it with another chick.” And you’ll run into plenty of folks who say it would be “sex-negative” to expect someone to remain monogamous when they would rather not.

Sex positivity is considerably more complicated than that. In addition to being more tolerant of other people’s sexual natures, and more honest about your own, it also means being generally more responsible in the relationships you enter and choose to remain in. And that includes making and honoring agreement’s with your current partners, and seeking… even risking… renegotiations.

Sex positivity absolutely says it’s ok to have sex with someone of your own sex if that’s what you desire, if you’re both adults, and if it’s an informed, mutual decision. No doubt about that. But precisely because the sex or gender of your partner is irrelevant it’s also irrelevant who you cheat with.

Point being that real sex positivity says it’s ok to have sex with the partners of your choice… but it’s not ok to screw them over.

I’m not saying don’t do it, incidentally. I’ve cheated on a partner in the past, I’ve been cheated on in the past, and I’ve also had sex with someone who was cheating on her partner at the time. In no case was it the end of the world. (At least for me the end of the world has always been the loss of an authentic relationship, period. That might coincide with an incident of cheating, and so I think it’s easy to confuse the two. But relatively rates of self-reported sexual infidelity suggest most relationships aren’t damaged by cheating per se. But I digress…)

Just don’t confuse it with being sex positive. (After all, otherwise you’d have to accept that serial adulterers like Newt Gingrich and sex-worker customer/persecutors like David Vitter or Eliot Spitzer are “sex positive.” It doesn’t work that way.)

Razib Khan of Discover Blogs says

An urban myth, often asserted with a wink & a nod in some circles, is that a very high proportion of children in Western countries are not raised by their biological father, and in fact are not aware that their putative biological father is not their real biological father. The numbers I see and hear vary, but 10% is a low bound.

Read the quote in context here.

Khan quotes another biologist, Marlene Zuk, on how enormous people imagine cuckoldry to be

When asked to estimate the frequency of misassigned paternity in the general population, most people hazard a guess of 10%, 20% or even 30%, with the last number coming from a class of biology undergraduates in a South Carolina university that I polled last year. I pointed out that this would mean that nearly 20 people in the class of 60-some students had lived their lives calling the wrong man Dad, at least biologically. They just nodded cynically, undaunted.

Khan continues (emphasis mine)

What are the real numbers? Zuck asserts that they’re more in the 1-5% range, with 3.7% being a high-bound figure for one study. This varies by culture and socioeconomic group, and the segment of the population being surveyed. Studies which rely on a data set consisting of men who have requested paternity tests are strongly sample biased toward those who have a reason to have suspicions. ... And yet even in the cases of men who have suspicions only a minority have misattributed paternity.

Got that? The high figures you hear cited, generally instigated by bitter divorced men and other “men’s rights” activists, and abetted by tabloid cable shows, are heavily inflated because paternity tests are sought mainly by men who are already suspicious. And yet, as Khan points out, even when men imagine cause for suspicion the suspicions are usually unfounded.

Summary: The way we construct gender and morality screws both women and men: women for failing to be bastions of virtue, men for having no virtue at all.

It’s a step in the right direction. The staff at Lemondrop.com conclude an article on hetero men’s reaction to their partner’s infidelity with a list of women celebrities who’ve had (publicly acknowledged) affairs.

That’s a good thing because the chronic meme has it that only men are unfaithful to their partners who, invariably are blameless women who wish only to mother children and also, I guess, wear crinolines and eat crustless cucumber sandwiches. Leaving the (cough)Rule #1(cough) question of who, then, they’re being unfaithful with.

Getting across the idea that women are really people, real people, instead of marble fixtures and magazine-cover decoration has to happen sooner or later.

It’s a step in the wrong direction too, though. The main focus of the Lemondrop post was about how men are way less forgiving of their partner’s infidelity than women are.

If I started quoting disappointing paragraphs from the article I might never stop. So go read it yourself.

Here’s one, though:

“Men can forgive themselves for their indiscretions but find it harder to forgive their partners for the same,” therapist Phillip Hodson explained to England’s Daily Mail. “For a betrayed woman, an affair is an offense against her dignity. For a betrayed man, it’s an offense against his manhood. It goes right to the core of his identity.”

They said it here.

Men can “forgive themselves?” Hello? Everybody can forgive themselves for stuff they want to do! From cookie jars to corporate corruption people practically have “just this once won’t hurt” tattooed on their foreheads, backwards, so they can feel reassured every time they look in the mirror.

Screw that.

And Hodson gets his attribution completely backwards. For a betrayed woman an affair is an invitation for everyone else on the planet to impugn her dignity. For a betrayed man an affair is an opportunity for everyone else to question his “manhood.”

Screw that too.

Circling back to my first point, affairs are supposed to be an affront to women’s dignity (as opposed to, say, a simple uprooting of her trust and sense of place in her relationship) because up on those pedestals women are supposed to be dispensing virtue, restraint, and other civilizing influences on the men and children in their lives. In that mindset men’s infidelity is “solvable” by even more virtue and more scolding. That plus, having vested all that corrective authority in women society is likely to stand behind her whether she stays with or separates from him.

Meanwhile, I guess the idea must be, if a woman is unfaithful to a man there really isn’t much corresponding social scripting. Outside of a few very conservative, very patriarchal and primarily religiously-focused subcultures there’s not much tradition of men correcting women’s morality. In fact there’s really not a lot at all men in particular or society in general is supposed to be able to do about a “fallen” woman. Instead in social terms the man who’s hoisted the wrong moral beacon up onto his particular pedestal has no option but to drop her and replace her with someone more reliably stalwart.

Thus the proscriptive “intolerable” clauses in the bogus Two Rules of Desire.

Another step in the right direction, by the way, might be the startling idea that no individual adult is responsible for the morality or the behavior of another, and that therefore no one adult is ever responsible, nor is their dignity or “manhood” injured by the actions of another.

(Note: that this concept of individual responsibility is perpetually overlooked by Bill Bennett, Newt Gingrich, and myriad other social conservatives is yet more evidence of the inconsistency of their positions.)

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.)