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Interconnections: Women, Men, Infidelity, Morality, Betrayal, Dignity, "Manhood," Etc.

Sat, 2009-12-26 18:44 — figleaf

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.)

Call Cosmo: Alleged Tiger Woods "Mistress" Invents New Form of Slut-Shaming

Sun, 2009-12-06 17:44 — figleaf

Leaving aside the question of just how many alleged “mistresses” Tiger Woods allegedly has, had, or will have, Hortense of Jezebel turns up some… reverse slut shaming from one of the people who’ve come forward. (Emphasis mine.)

[Mindy] Lawton, meanwhile, has given a tell-all to the News of the World, spilling details of her sex life with Woods and stating about Woods’ wife, Elin, that “It must be awful for her to know her husband was going behind her back for sex with so many girls. She must feel very dirty knowing that when he was trying for a baby with her he was having sex with me. I guess she will be pretty devastated but in the time I knew Tiger I never got the impression that the marriage was happy.”

Read the quote in context here.

I’m not sure what Lawton’s point is supposed to be here. Is it sort of like the homophobia thing where some men freak out kissing a partner who’s ever given someone else a blowjob? Some kind of accusation of by-proxy promiscuity?

All I know is Lawton seems to be arguing that another person should feel shamed because she (allegedly) had sex with that person’s partner. Whereas, near as I can tell, Lawton herself doesn’t feel shamed that someone she had sex with was in turn also having sex with someone else.

I don’t think I’m missing something here. Your comments are particularly welcome on this one.

—-

Also, dear aunt petunia can we please come up with some other word for women who have relationships with partnered men than “mistress?” It’s the flipping 21st Century here.

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!

This Ensign Not Exactly Flying Proudly

Wed, 2009-06-17 11:10 — figleaf

David M. Herszenhorn of NYT’s The Caucus reports that

Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, on Tuesday admitted that he had an extramarital affair with a member of his campaign staff.

...

During college at Colorado State University, he became a born-again Christian and he and his wife, Darlene, were active in the Promise Keepers, an evangelical group.

Read the quote in context here.

For what its worth Sen. Ensign didn’t support Rick Santorum’s homophobic “Defense of Marriage” amendment to the constitution (which during the high tide of the Republican dominance of the government was the stick that beat so many otherwise progressive politicians like Sen. Clinton into voting for the under-the-circumstances less onerous, but still odious alternative, the Defense of Marriage Act.)

Update The NYT article was evidently mistaken… or maybe just not looking at the right time frame. In 2004 Ensign’s office issued a press release that said “protecting [marriage] is, in my mind, worth the extraordinary step of amending our constitution.” (Via ThinkProgress.)

Also for what it’s worth, during the so-called Monica Lewinsky scandal when Ensign was running against Sen. Harry Reid in 1998 David Rosenbaum, also from the New York Times, wrote

No one knows how the scandal involving President Clinton will affect the race. A Democratic poll this month showed that Mr. Clinton is seen in a worse light by voters here than he is nationally.

Mr. Ensign has called for the President to resign. But he does not bring up the matter unless he is asked, and he is rarely asked.

He said it here.

The good news? Ensign may be conservative but he appears to be fairly live and let live about people’s personal affairs… and, I guess, Affairs.

On the other hand he did call for President Clinton to resign over his peccadilloes and so, I suppose, if he was honest he’d resign from his office as well.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight says

Remember, senators don’t have to govern, or to preside over any legislature. They don’t have any particular use for political capital, and other than their ability to be re-elected, they don’t have any particular reason to popular. That’s why Eliot Spitzer resigned and David Vitter (whom many Louisanans seem to have forgiven) didn’t. It’s why Roland Burris is still in the Senate.

He said it here.

Final thought though, goes to Matthew Yglesias, reflecting a few weeks ago on the different standards progressives and right-wing extremists are held to by constituents, peers, and the press, said

Logically speaking, since there’s only one of the two parties that puts a very high premium on the idea that state regulation of individual sexual behavior should be the main role of government, these allegations should be more damaging to Republicans. Hypocrisy on the part of the media is part of the story. But part of the issue, I think, is just partisan and ideological solidarity. A politician can survive a great deal if his co-partisans are willing to stand by him, and conservatives are much more inclined to stand by their man than are progressives.

He said it.

I too wish Ensign would either resign or else not resign but apologize instead for having sided so often with prigs in his party.

I’m not holding my breath for either.

See also Echidne who (half-seriously, she says) asks a serious question

Why does Senator Ensign need to apologize publicly for his affair but not for having belonged to Promise Keepers?

She said it here.

Good question, E.

*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.

Infidelity and Its Aftermaths

Mon, 2008-11-24 17:00 — figleaf

B of B is for blog, wrestling with a problem between her partner and his most (and evidently only mostly) recent ex-partner, raises little-discussed problem with infidelity (emphasis mine.)

I had always trusted them explicitly, I’m not the jealous type. Earlier this year R admitted (after I had found some damning evidence on his phone) that they had ‘nearly’ slept together in our bed. I haven’t spoken to her since, although not out of my doing. She has been avoiding me.

She said it here.

Think there’s a corollary of the Washington-D.C. maxim that “it’s not the scandal that brings you down it’s the coverup” in there somewhere? Oh yeah!

I think in a lot of cases the real consequences don’t arise from what the “betrayed” partner feels about betrayal (especially if it’s undiscovered.) It’s how the betrayers feel, and consequently behave, about the betrayal.

Thoughts?

Instead of Finding Time to Post About...

Sat, 2008-10-11 13:46 — figleaf


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

All kinds of people have “Links I Liked” kind of digests of posts they didn’t have time to write about in more detail. I think they use some kind of service… maybe De.licious? Anyway, I often have things sitting around my RSS reader until they finally expire so I thought I’d experiment with a hand-rolled version.

1) In “Knowing Best, Doing Good” Laura Agustin of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex said

[Christian] Lander takes off the way ‘helping’ makes people feel good about themselves and how they assume that if everyone were to live the way helpers do – making the Right choices – then the world would be Good.  

Read the quote in context here.

See also Agustin’s follow-up What’s Wrong With Helping, Another example from the world of sex work.

2) In “Why Am I Supposed To Date Older Men, Again? [It Makes Us Laugh]” Megan of Jezebel said

Like most women, most of my dating life, I’ve dated older boys and men. It’s almost what you’re supposed to do, right? Men mature more slowly, they’re less ready to settle down, they’re less self-confident when they’re younger. Older man are supposed to be more settled, more confident, more mature, more relationship-ready. Well, I’m 30 and I’m calling bullshit on all those theories. At this point, some of the most fucked-up men, the ones who treated me the worst, were older than me — often a lot older. And maybe I’m getting less mature by the day, but I could give a shit right now if some dude is living in a group house or making no money or thinks fart jokes are hilarious if he’s also smart, funny and treats me with the respect and, I’ll admit it, deference I’m sort of into right now. And I’m just not getting that from the older guys.

Read the quote in context here.

3) In “Mostly because we need a break from non-stop election stuff” Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon said

Men can like cats nowadays for the same reason that men can find Tina Fey really sexy —-because feminism has loosened the gender bindings of masculinity enough that they can find something other than dumb adoration appealing.  You’re welcome, men.

Read the quote in context here.

4) In “She’s a beauty queen” Sarah of Season of the Bitch said

But what the hell is wrong with us that a simple unretouched photo is enough to set the right wing howling that it’s unfair coverage? What’s wrong with showing a 44-year-old woman’s skin? Do they honestly think someone’s going to decide not to vote for her because they can see her laugh lines?

Read the quote in context here.

5) gURL of sex_ed_blog said

Ever try to masturbate with less than stellar results? You’re not alone. Read about one gURL’s failed attempts at masturbation.

Read the quote in context here.

Note: She assumes that it’s easy for men because everything’s right “out front.” My experience figuring out how to masturbate was pretty similar to hers. The (perfectly understandable) slip doesn’t detract from the familiarity of her version.

6) In “Why Men Cheat” Michelle Cottle of The Plank says

So, yeah, the details of [Peter] Cook’s betrayal [of Christie Brinkley] may be more colorful than average, but the motivation behind the betrayal is hardly unusual. No matter how pretty Brinkley is—in fact, perhaps because of how pretty she is—she didn’t make poor Peter feel important enough. That was something he just couldn’t handle. Which definitely makes him a loser, but, alas, doesn’t make him remotely unusual.

Read the quote in context here.

For ruminations on the same general effect see also “A Winning Mentality” by Phila at Echidne of the Snakes and “Testicular Implosion” by Infra at Skin::filter().

Extramarital Statistics Bleg

Tue, 2008-10-07 10:52 — figleaf

“To bleg is to write a blog entry or comment for the sole purpose of asking for something.” — Bloglossary.com.

Paul Nyhan of Working Dad: An Unauthorized Guide to Parenting finds a genuinely eyebrow-raising angle on the standard statistics of infidelity: there’s not much difference between men and women’s infidelity after they become parents compared between all men and women in relationships.

After writing about Sex and the American Dad last week I thought I should dig up a slightly older survey that suggested 34 percent of mothers have cheated since they had kids.

The percentage of moms and dads who stray is nearly identical – 32 percent of dads said they had an affair in last week’s survey. Mothers and fathers also think about cheating in similar numbers, with 53 percent of moms admitting they thought about it and 54 percent of dads saying they did, the Cookie/AOL Health surveys found.

Confirm the quote here.

The most-frequently cited numbers for men vs. women overall is roughly a third of all married men have outside relationships and roughly a quarter of all women do. That there would be even closer parity between the subset of partners who are also parents would be pretty interesting, and pretty satisfying (intellectually!) for me. If true.

Since it’s a report of a report I won’t say much more at this point except that I would so love to find either corroboration (ok, or refutation) from another source. Anyone have better numbers?

[Note: Nyhan hits a potential flat note when he says of married women’s fantasy partners “Moms fantasize about a range of men. George Clooney, Tom Brady and believe it or not Barack Obama are at the top of the list.” I’m guessing he may be more surprised than the 30,000 ethnically, socially, geographically, and chronologicallly diverse women surveyed for the study… but he wouldn’t be alone. Our obsession with what constitutes “worthiness” seems to obscure for men what’s attractive about other men. —fl]

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.

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