Photo by Flickr user Our Lady of Disgrace. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Quick follow up on a previous post, “Because Motivation Isn’t Enough Without Opportunity and, Especially, Means“ about Philip Weiss’s male-infidelity article in New York magazine a few weeks ago. Weiss rehearsed all the well-worn reasons why “only” men want to cheat, and also indulged the tradition of overlooking relative income and opportunity imbalances as the biggest reason for the imbalance.

Our tendency to experience only local economics might have something to do with that universalizing impression but… sort of by definition local conditions don’t necessarily dictate universal truths. I’m thinking of, for instance, about how in Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love, and the Sensual Years and I think at least one other book Pepper Schwartz has documented what amounts to sex tourism for women in, especially, the South Pacific. Affluent and… generally single women go to, say, Bali, hang out on the beach, take up with generally-financially-desperate but handsome young men, spring for their meals, clothes, and possibly lodging for the duration, and then say good bye when they head back to the U.S., Canada, Western Europe or wherever.

True, it’s not straight-up prostitution, but it is more like men keeping straight-up short-term “mistresses” relationships where the power, status, wealth, age (often), class, access to information, and most importantly the ability to leave are all in the hands of the provider and not so much in the hands of the provided for. The point being that Weiss (and a millions of others) claim that only men desire or participate in such relationships, whereas Schwartz’s data suggests it’s not a matter of gender** but instead a matter of relative privilege.

[** And just to be clear, though I don’t think I need to say it, this is not an assertion that “women are just as ‘bad’ as men.” Just that we frequently mistake privileged behavior for gendered behavior because privilege has accrued to men so consistently and for so long that people like Weiss can mistakenly equate the two. —fl]