This post is about Ken and Ariel and Hillary and Bill. Really.
Ken, of Ken and Ariel:
Whenever guys “step out” on their girlfriends or wives, the reaction — whether we like it or not — is typically, “Hey, it’s guys being guys.” After all, we’re the ones being led around by out trouser snakes. We can’t help what the little guy gets us into; he’s clearly steering the ship.
When women cheat, however, it’s a different story. Here, we get the guys in labcoats and slide rules, with their Venn Diagrams and four-color pie charts, who toss off such conclusions as, “There must be something missing in their lives.” Or, “Clearly, she’s rebelling against the traditional role.” Or, “Her father probably never bought her a pony, so she’s acting on long-suppressed childhood rage.”
Garance Franke-Ruta of TAPPED (The American Prospect’s blog):
I want to retract my instapunditry of Tuesday morning about the New York Times article on Hillary Clinton’s marriage. I momentarily forgot to put on my political journalist hat and reacted to it as a woman. As a woman, I find it impressive and admirable that she’s been able to preserve her marriage and turn it into something that, by all accounts, works for her. She has a friend, advisor, and peer in Bill Clinton, and the article’s unprecedentedly detailed accounting of their days showed that they somehow manage to find a way to spend a substantial amount of time together for a congressional couple, while still being mindful of not getting in each other’s way. It may not be perfect, but whose marriage is, marriage being the union of two imperfect beings after all? She has a real marriage, and if you consider only her role in it — which is the only thing that ought to matter at this point, since she is the political candidate, not her husband — it’s hard not to be impressed by her achievement in building something workable on top of a foundation we all watched cracking.
But that view is one that, I suspect, will be infrequently heard. The political media world will always look at her marriage from the perspective of him, forever placing her in the role of victim or deficient wife. The focal point of discussion will never be her happiness, but his, and whether or not she is living up to her responsibility to provide for it. And that is a disaster for her. The moment she once again becomes, in the public discussion, little more than the wife in his marriage, all her efforts to define herself on the public stage begin to crumble, too. Rather than being an actor, she is the subject of actions. Her capacity to make choices and decisions is negated, and her control over her life and fate and career rendered secondary to her capacity to control him. Instead of being the first female senator from New York, and the first serious female presidential candidate (requisite caveat here) in American history, the conversation becomes: Hillary Clinton, doormat or shrew?
...
... The moment people start discussing Sen. Clinton as a sexual being rather than an intellectual one, they take her down a notch. That’s how it’s always worked for women in public life.
Got that? For whatever reason the New York Times [Subscription required —fl] decided to run a front-page story about how much time Hillary and Bill Clinton spend together, given that she’s a U.S. Senator and he’s now a globe-trotting head of a billion-dollar foundation.
Franke-Ruta says her first reaction was “good for her” for finding so much time to spend with her husband. Her second reaction is also perfectly natural: WTF is up with that? Anybody know how any days, other public figures spend with their husbands or wives or significant others? Bill Frist? Jon Stewart? Tom DeLay? Rush Limbaugh? Alan Alda? Olympia Snow? Donald Rumsfield? Al Gore? Kay Bailey Hutchenson? Bill O’Reilly? How about in the blogosphere? Matt Drudge? Amanda Marcotte? Figleaf? Twisty? Ken or Ariel?
The answer, I suppose, depends on what you’re measured by. Also by what you choose to be measured by. If I say I’m a totally monogamous house-partner, or an every-night-a-different-bed sybarite, then it might matter. If I’m just a business person, though, (like Ken’s co-worker) or an author, or a blogger, or a generic Senator from New York, it’s not really necessary or appropriate to hire detectives to find out, nor necessary to put it on the front page as if it were “all the news that’s fit to print.”
Weird double standards we have here.
Men? Eh, they’re just led around by their cocks. Women? Ooh, we need to get to the bottom of something.
I’m just sayin.
(p.s. as long as I’m being cranky about stuff like this, why the tendency to refer to one New York senator as “Hillary” and the other as “Sen. Schumer?” Or the tendency among progressives here to speak of a local congressman as “McDermott” and our two Senators as “Patty and Maria.” And, letting the stops all the way out, what’s with the people who say things like “men do X while females do Y” or “women and males agree that…?”)
Submitted by 771 (not verified) on Sat, 2006-05-27 03:11.
Weird double standards we have here...Men? Eh, they're just led around by their cocks. Women? Ooh, we need to get to the bottom of something.
It is demeaning to men to assume that the only time they can be upstanding citizens is when they are having erections.
Even though I have been a feminist for almost thirty years, it has taken almost thirty years to discard the false assumptions about men and women that I grew up with. When we are growing up, we want to understand the world we live in. We are told, men and women are different, and that is true, to a limited extent. But to assume that one sex is more morally superior than the other is sexism, plain and simple. And false assumptions lead to bad choices: at home, in school and in the workplace.
In their book Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationshipos, Our Children, and Our Jobs, Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers describe a large scale study of mating behavior that was publicized in 2003.
Desire and DNA:Is Promiscuity Innate? asked the Washington Post. The paper reported that for men, the answer was yes...The article discussed a study of 16,000 college students from every continent except Anartica. It found that males everywhere said they wanted more sexual partners than women did. Because these differences seemed so *universal,* the media reported, they must be *hardwired.*
But the researcher, David Schmitt of Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, argued that the press got it *exactly wrong* in reporting the finding that men were promiscuous and women weren't. Both sexes, he claimed, have a promiscuous streak; women, however, tend to be more selective. Critics also noted that what someone says he wants is one thing; what he actually does is another. Schmitt asked the men and women only about desires and fantasies...And it turns out that men and women don't differ that much in their actual behavior.[p.56]
What I like about this book is, rather than offering psuedo science, the authors take a critical look at the actual surveys and studies to determine if they are statistically reliable. And so far, the statistics do not support the notion of inherent moral superiority of one sex over the other. So keep on debunking the myths, fl.
["...what someone says he wants is one thing; what he actually does is another. ... And it turns out that men and women don't differ that much in their actual behavior." That's my point in a nutshell. Actually half a dozen points are wrapped up in there, particularly the notions around that what we fantasize about is not the same as what we wind up doing. Oh, and yeah, assuming one gender is somehow naturally morally superior to the other places extraordinary burdens on both genders -- a sense that one's sense of morality must be a mistake for men, and a sense that one's moral purity is below standard in (ordinary, human) women. Thanks, Kochanie! --fl]
Submitted by 771 (not verified) on Sat, 2006-05-27 09:12.
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.' -Gloria Steinem
And I have yet to hear or read anything criticizing an influential man for failing to put his marriage before his career. The only time you hear about a man stepping down from his position to 'spend more time with his family', he's either gotten caught embezzling or he's about to.
[The tough thing is that the people (not all, not only, men) who stint on the family side are just missing so much. I've laid snuggling or, more recently, sat holding my children's hands till they fell asleep nearly every night for the last nine and a half years. I can't imagine a life spent not doing that. Or anything else I've done on my "mommy track" path. Thanks, Nancy. --fl]
Submitted by 771 (not verified) on Tue, 2006-05-30 19:55.
I can't possibly claim to sound as sophisticated as your other posters, so to hell with it:
I'd assume that men seek out other partners for the same reasons women do -- reasons that vary with a thousand minute factors that they themselves might not even be aware of. Just dismissing them as "boys being boys" is ignorantly overlooking a whole complexity of emotional life that's ... degrading, frankly. If women are more than baby-making machines, men are more than their penises; it's not sensible to just toss out that tired old line any time male behaviour warrants a raised eyebrow.
["...it's not sensible to just toss out that tired old line any time male behaviour warrants a raised eyebrow." *Thank* you Sara! I appreciate that so much. I appreciate everything you said, actually. --fl]