Dana Perino: Only Male Politicians Commit Adultery
June 28th, 2009 by Robert Franklin, Esq.Well, that didn't take long. With the unfortunately predictable political sex scandals continuing to grab headlines in the MSM, and the astonishing amount of commentary on them, I'm only surprised that a blog like this one from former Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino in the National Review didn't come out earlier (National Review, 6/25/09).
From Clinton and Spitzer to Ensign and Sanford, and with plenty more in between, there's nothing the MSM likes better than a good, preferably kinky, sex scandal involving a highly placed public official. For MSM reporters, these stories have everything - sex, power, betrayal, weeping wives, disgrace and lots more. Perhaps best of all, they require no thought on the part of the reporter. There are no tedious issues to grapple with, no statistics to sort out, no ethical gray areas. It's simple.
But in Perino's case, she does think, and that's where she runs into trouble. According to her, the salient feature of these scandals is that it's men who are the wrongdoers. And what that means is crystal clear to her - elect women to office and poof! no more sex scandals. Because for sure, women don't commit adultery. Perino knows this because "No woman I know has the time for such trysts, nor do I know any who say the (sic) desire one. They’re too busy trying to keep all the plates spinning at home, at work, and at the gym to make sure none fall and break." (If anyone can explain the meaning of that last sentence, let me know.)
Who could argue against such irrefutable evidence?
OK, I know what you're going to say. Senator Ensign's tryst was with the wife of his chief of staff, so that's one woman who did commit adultery. But only one! And presumably Perino doesn't know her, so her cherished beliefs are intact.
The inconvenient truth contradicts her mythology of female virtue and male perfidy. Although most studies of adultery in America show that men do it more than women, others show it to be a dead heat. This summary of studies gives a pretty good idea of who has sex outside of marriage.
For my money, the best study of sex generally is Sex in America: A Definitive Survey by Michael, Gagnon, Laumann and Kolata. It found that about 25% of men and 15% of women have ever in their lives had sex with someone to whom they weren't married, while they were married. But, as the linked-to piece makes clear, that almost certainly undercounts the number of female adulterers.
I won't go into all the permutations of all the studies. But suffice it to say that the paucity of female office holders getting caught with their pants down is more a function of the paucity of female office holders than it is of female virtue.
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June 28th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Robert--
"Keep all the plates spinning" references the old circus act in which, from various points of the body, one spins plates atop sticks. It's a metaphor akin to juggling.
I enjoy your work. Keep it up;)
June 28th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Oh, of course Dana is right -- women have far, far too much respect for marriage to cheat. Instead of cheating, they simply initiate divorce and terminate the marriage altogether whenever they get the whim (after all, divorce is a money-maker for women). To hell with how divorce affects the children. You see:
Man who strays in marriage = Slime.
Woman who ends marriage for any or no reason at all = enlightened, empowered and especially enriched.
June 28th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Whoa, ref call a time out. From 25 years of personal experience as a hairdresser i have to say no way. Not only do married women cheat and regularly (not all), most all divorced women I have known not only knew who their new husband was going to be before divorcing, they were already having sex with them before hubby ever had a clue wifey was unhappy. Please my brothers believe this, im not making it up.
With politicians, their in a league of their own caught up in power, money and unaccountability. In politics, when a wife cheats on her husband it is an embarrassment and both the politicians and media sweep it under the rug. When a husband fools around its a financial, media and political heyday. I suppose they do deserve what they get by their not having represented mens issues but there is still a gender imbalance at how it is looked at.
Many gave Clinton a tongue lashing because of Monica but is has been common knowledge that Hillary had the same boyfriend for decades until he died several years ago. No matter how often this comes up the media still leave it alone.
June 28th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Good article, Robert.
miggy is spot-on.
Any marriage counselor will tell you that the rate of female infidelity, while still trailing male infidelity, is fairly close to male infidelity now. Women are cheating, alright, they are just far better at keeping it quiet and not getting caught.
As for busy professional women not doing it, that's just a bunch of nonsense. Sanford's tryst partner was a single mother of four who worked as a TV reporter. Edwards was sleeping with a video producer. I guess Perino missed the Newsweek article from a few years ago where busy professional women bragged to the female reporter writing the story that they would regularly have trysts on business trips and so on, or the eye-opening book by Michelle Langley "Women's Infidelity".
But more fundamentally, for those of us who have been on the receiving end of female infidelity, attitudes like Perino's are completely infuriating, to say the least. It's just very annoying how women continue to spread a smoke screen around the reality of their own sexuality.
June 28th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
In The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss
one PUA type says:
"I wasn't a mysogynist when I started this"
"but when you get good and start sleeping with all these women who have boyfriends,
and you stop trusting women."
a side effect of sarging is it can lower one's opinion of the opposite sex. You see too much betrayal, lying, and infidelity. If a woman has been married three years or more, you come to learn that she's usually easier to sleep with than a single woman. If a woman has a boyfriend, you have a better chance of f*cking her the night you meet her than getting her to return a call later. Women you eventually realize are just as bad as men--they're just better at hiding it."
June 28th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Robert Franklin, Esq. says "Although most studies of adultery in America show that men do it more than women,"
My response: If men do it more than women, then who are these men doing it with?
June 28th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Also noted are the number of scandals involving doctors - always male doctors. I suppose women doctors never do anything unethical.
And then there's all those slimy business deals done by crooked business executives. Again, always male execs. (Madoff comes to mind. So does his wife).
And again, those monstrous dictators (Saddam comes to mind, as well as his wife and daughters, who are all wanted for murder, torture and extortion, but no-one seems to be bothered looking for them).
Now I could go on, and if I was gullible I would believe that men were just a sorry lot. Or I consider the possibility that the media is filtering out bad news about women - a remnant of that old-fashioned chivalry that defends a woman's honor.
June 28th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Not only do women respect marriage far, far too much to put a strain on it by cheating (but not enough to completely destroy it on a whim by filing for divorce for any or no reason at all), but enlightened, modern women, like Dana What's-Her-Name, have overcome the primitive urge to call the "other woman" a "homewrecker!" The "other woman" is never at fault any more; she was simply acting under the oppression and subjugation of the scumbag, slimy male politician who is cheating on his wife. It used to take two to tango; now it takes a cheating scumbag male and a poor oppressed woman.
June 28th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
USN Retired - If a married man has sex with an unmarried woman, he commits adultery and she doesn't. Therefore rates of adultery for men and women can be, and are, different.
June 28th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Robert says:
Yes she does.
June 28th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Robert Franklin, Esq. Says: - If a married man has sex with an unmarried woman, he commits adultery and she doesn't. Therefore rates of adultery for men and women can be, and are, different.
My response: I guess that depends on which definition of adultery that you are using.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adultery
June 28th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
An interesting, if not that valuable example is from a forum I saw once. It was from 'The Student Room', I was on there looking for university application advice and it's full of, generally intelligent young people. Someone did a survey, asking for the gender of the respondents and whether they had cheated on their boyfriends/girlfriends. Not only did girls respond in much higher numbers, they also admitted to cheating far more than boys proportionally to the number who responded. The ratio was something like 5 girls to every 3 boys who had cheated. Of course, some people were shocked, others (particularly girls) weren't shocked at all. Considering this was anonymous survey, it gave some pretty interesting results.
Maybe a generational thing?
June 28th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Okay...
No one wants to acknowledge the elephant in the room so I guess I will….
Most of these male politicians who have committed adultery and their wives are in their fifties. When women reach menopause (i.e. early fifties), their desire for sex often goes to zero. It doesn't always happen, but it usually happens. What is a fifty-something year old man to do when his fifty-something year old wife tells him that she is no longer interested in sex?
June 28th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
If a female politician is caught cheating the media will be much more apt to talk about whether the marriage was already failing. They'll probably even speculate whether he is good to her or not. Maybe he's seeing someone too, or maybe he abuses her.
June 28th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
i used to think..i'm 45...that men that cheated were so bad....but there is never any rationalization on why men cheat....ofcourse when women do there is....i think the problem starts in the dating ...men have to chase women , do what they want, and the relationship usually revolves around the woman...after awhile who wouldn't get tired of that....especially when a nice looking woman comes along and starts treating you nice....hey if theres a feminist reading this...you wouldn't inderstand......actually you would....hes cheating on you....LOL
June 28th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
To jump on USN retired side
The Uniform Code of Military Justice explicitly forbids an enlisted man to have an affair with an officers wife. This isnt the case the other way around or is the wife looked at being an instigator or consensual partner in any affair. If the enlisted man is single makes no difference as to who the adulterer is. This aspect of the UCMJ always let me know where I stood when I was doing service.
So when Robert Franklin, Esq. Says: - If a married man has sex with an unmarried woman, he commits adultery and she doesn't. Its a legal position from a civilian perspective.
June 28th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
You guys leave me speechless! And the following comment takes the cake:
"Most of these male politicians who have committed adultery and their wives are in their fifties. When women reach menopause (i.e. early fifties), their desire for sex often goes to zero. It doesn't always happen, but it usually happens. What is a fifty-something year old man to do when his fifty-something year old wife tells him that she is no longer interested in sex?"
He should find a friggin' hobby!
June 28th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
That is such a poor excuse for men who commit adultery. Besides, women do NOT lose their sex drive after age 50-ish~!
June 28th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
You all are being unfair -- women are held to the same standard as men. Remember how Barbara Walters was condemned when she revealed that she had an affair in the 1970s with Edward Brooke, then a married United States Senator from Massachusetts? Oh, wait -- I'm wrong: that revelation was viewed as a -- sigh -- romantic tale, and Barbara was applauded for revealing it. I do not recall that it did the slightest damage to her career, despite the fact that by any objective measure, her conduct was at least as slimy as Gov. Sanford's.
June 28th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
MENZ are compiling a survey that will be used to score the status of men and boys in different countries.
The aim is to put a number on the practise of misandry throughout the world, and to expose the worst offenders. This may be important to you if you are considering emigrating to a less male-hostile environment.
A number of suggestions have been made, but they need to be short-listed. At the following site, you can see all suggested survey questions, and can vote for the one question that is most important to you.
Please feel free to post any comments you would like to make.
http://www.vcclan.org/forum/showthread.php?t=11448
June 28th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
My ex-wife is a doctor. The stories of male doctors that have a starter wife and family then dump them for the 20 something secretary are legion. The tale is such a part of popular mythology that nobody needs to explain any further.
In my case, when I tell people that when my ex became rich and did not need me any longer so she just tried to take the kid and dump me. Many people have a hard time making this mental leap. The are so invested in feminist victimhood racket that it is almost impossible to have a discussion with many of them. It is easier talking to a wall.
June 28th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
i am 60. i have been to hell and back and back to hell again. married women do everything men do, they just aren't held to the same standards, including my second wife! i took my own poll. it was easy, just like married women.
June 28th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
#21...i was married to a high end nurse manager at a large city hospital. same stories from there too. who is kidding who here? do men honestly believe women just flirt?
June 28th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
As David Buss documents authoritatively in *The Evolution of Desire*, women are attracted to men with power and politicians have power. Though nothing excuses adultery, politicians generally acknowledge their own irresponsibility once the affair is made public. They don't blame the seductress.
The great tragedy is that philandering politicians extrapolate from their own experience to assume *all* men are the guilty parties in matters of adultery or sexual misconduct. They fail to realize that many of us who lack their power and influence don't have women falling overt themselves to get us into bed. As a result they legislate laws based upon the principle "men, bad...women, good" merely because it conforms to their *personal* experience.
Confessedly, if I had the power of a billionaire or a major politician, I too would find it difficult to repeatedly decline numerous advances from stunningly beautiful women. However, as a commoner I also realize that most men aren't presented with opportunities from ladies with movie-star good looks, and would see no need to advance a "men, bad...women,good" political agenda even if I were a powerful politician.
June 28th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
miggy Says: The Uniform Code of Military Justice explicitly forbids an enlisted man to have an affair with an officers wife. This isnt the case the other way around or is the wife looked at being an instigator or consensual partner in any affair. If the enlisted man is single makes no difference as to who the adulterer is. This aspect of the UCMJ always let me know where I stood when I was doing service.
My response: Very true. Here's a good example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Flinn
Kelly Flinn was single and she had an affair with a married man.
June 28th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
but who would cheat with the feminists...lol
June 28th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
donnie #22 ...is right...women are not suspected as cheaters or child molesters...but...time will tell...and even the feminists won't be able to hide them
June 29th, 2009 at 6:01 am
This could have something to do with women in high public office, being more mature, are simply not attractive enough to gain a lover. But men the same age at least have wealth and power to attract women.
June 29th, 2009 at 7:30 am
#28.. i get your point. men aren't attracted to money and fame like women and that's for sure. i' m not going after the mayor because she has political clout if she's a fat pig with a butch hair cut and a bad attitude. nope, i' m more interested in the waitress @ the diner with the nice butt and great walk. i guess that gives the man with power and the chick with a sweet ass the juice and leaves ugly women and loser men suckin' wind. that is, if your counting heads.
June 29th, 2009 at 8:08 am
Funny, Out of the last 6-divorces I know, in my circle of friends and associates, the wives cheated in 5 of the cases and husband cheated in one of them.
June 29th, 2009 at 8:56 am
I think women have S&x outside of marriage just as much as men. I was watching a week long set of shows on the discovery channel about that in general and was suprised at the all the info and how it seemed our species has evolved around female permiscutiety.
Example: Some of the shows mentioned studies that found women are hardwired to find a stable partner, then seek out affairs to disversify her offsprings genetic code.
That Men have evolved to have killer sperm that on a subconscious level will kill other males sperm.
That women are more likely to seek out another when they are most likely to get pregnant and in some african villiages they send their women to an special area during that time (close to menstration time).
The shows were very good.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Burke Says:
June 29th, 2009 at 8:56 am
I think women have S&x outside of marriage just as much as men. I was watching a week long set of shows on the discovery channel about that in general and was suprised at the all the info and how it seemed our species has evolved around female permiscutiety.
-------------------
I believe women cheat just as much as men if not more nowadays.
If a woman cheats there are not as many consequences. She will get the kids and the house and keep her lover. The man loses his house, he is relegated to visitor status in his children's lives, and on top of that he has to pay child support and possibly alimony.
She can say she was in a loveless marraige and needed someone.
A man can't say he was in a loveless marraige. He is suppossed to just suck it up.
Also, several people have said that women are better at hiding their affairs.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:49 am
"Example: Some of the shows mentioned studies that found women are hardwired to find a stable partner, then seek out affairs to disversify her offsprings genetic code.
That Men have evolved to have killer sperm that on a subconscious level will kill other males sperm.
That women are more likely to seek out another when they are most likely to get pregnant and in some african villiages they send their women to an special area during that time (close to menstration time). "
Yes.
Some of this is based on Robin Baker's more controversial book "Sperm Wars? (the bit about killer sperm), but the rest is more generally observed as well. Statistically, women are more likely to have extra-pair sex when they are fertile. Women also tend to dress differently when they are fertile, and studies have shown that women are attracted to different kinds of men when they are fertile as opposed to when they are not (fertile = more stereotypically masculine, infertile = softer men). There was also a University of Michigan study which showed that women are attracted to different kinds of men based on whether they anticipate a short-term relationship (for which they prefer more emotionally/sexually exciting "cads") or a long-term relationship (for which they prefer more stable "dads").
Michelle Langley's book describes very well the rising tide of female adultery, and documents very well how it is extremely well hidden in the vast majority of the cases -- women are very, very, very good at hiding adultery because they evolved to be good at it. In the past, being discovered as an adulteress meant being killed, so women have evolved to be extremely good at hiding their infidelities from their husbands. But the infidelities are happening, and more today than ever because women have opportunities that they did not have even a few generations ago -- most women work in close proximity with other men, and probably spend more time with these men than they do with their mates. Most affairs happen at work. You can connect the dots pretty easily.
June 29th, 2009 at 10:13 am
those shows indicated that they are better at masking affairs. The most crafty of the women were very good at hiding such things, as I assume those who were not were killed by brutish hunters husbands? It didn't really come out and say that though, it was just a general theme.
Men had evolved to subconsiously battle the affair. (although it clearly said that men are hardwired to spread their seed to as many as possible too). They examined small villages because there were theories that we are not designed for monogamy and being bombarded with so many of the oposite sex. Then they found in villages, even the very small ones, afairs were common place.
I seem to recall it has been going on even with our genetic cousins the chimp and othe primates. The female would litterally wait for their mate to look the other way and jump in the bushes with a stray primate from outside the group and get seeded... then jump back out of the bushes (this was all part of the reasoning on how it's hard wired into female humans).
June 29th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Oh. I should also mention that the discussion about the female organsim was even interesting and related to their own design for cheating.
The female orgasm by it's nature allows the woman to increase her chances of getting pregnant. The pheramones resistance with their current life partner makes them less likely to orgasm with them. So the show went on to state that female are MORE likely to cheat at key moments in their cycle (when they are most fertile) and more likely to orgasm with a lover (whom we assume they are more excited with due to pheramones and other things). That increases the chances of them getting pregnate by the outside lover while maintaining a stable home.
So what is interesting is that although men are wired to spread.. women have evolved things to help them.. and men have evolved counter measures.
In short women cheat as much as men if not more and it's been going on a very long time. In the past they had serious consequences.. today there are hardly any consequences.
June 29th, 2009 at 10:41 am
http://www.canadiancrc.com/Newspaper_Articles/Time_Magazine_infidelity_in_genes_15AUG94.aspx
Here is a link and the article that speaks about similar things to the shows I watched :)
Virtual Library of Newspaper Articles
Infidelity--It may be in our genes. Our Cheating Hearts
Devotion and betrayal, marriage and divorce: how evolution shaped human love
Time Magazine, 1995, By Robert Wright, August 15, 1994
ROBERT WRIGHT, a senior editor at New Republic, adapted this article from his new book, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, to be published this month by Pantheon.
The language of zoology used to be so reassuring. Human beings were called a "pair-bonding" species. Lasting monogamy, it seemed, was natural for us, just as it was for geese, swans and the other winged creatures that have filled our lexicon with such labels as "lovebirds" and "lovey-dovey." Family values, some experts said, were in our genes. In the 1967 best seller The Naked Ape, zoologist Desmond Morris wrote with comforting authority that the evolutionary purpose of human sexuality is "to strengthen the pair-bond and maintain the family unit."
This picture has lately acquired some blemishes. To begin with, birds are no longer such uplifting role models. Using DNA fingerprinting, ornithologists can now check to see if a mother bird's mate really is the father of her offspring. It turns out that some female chickadees (as in "my little chickadee") indulge in extramarital trysts with males that outrank their mates in the social hierarchy. For female barn swallows, it's a male with a long tail that makes extracurriculars irresistible. The innocent-looking indigo bunting has a cuckoldry rate of 40%. And so on. The idea that most bird species are truly monogamous has gone from conventional wisdom to punctured myth in a few short years. As a result, the fidelity of other pair-bonding species has fallen under suspicion.
Which brings us to the other problem with the idea that humans are by nature enduringly monogamous: humans. Of course, you don't need a Ph.D. to see that till-death-do-we-part fidelity doesn't come as naturally to people as, say, eating. But an emerging field known as evolutionary psychology can now put a finer point on the matter. By studying how the process of natural selection shaped the mind, evolutionary psychologists are painting a new portrait of human nature, with fresh detail about the feelings and thoughts that draw us into marriage--or push us out.
The good news is that human beings are designed to fall in love. The bad news is that they aren't designed to stay there. According to evolutionary psychology, it is "natural" for both men and women--at some times, under some circumstances--to commit adultery or to sour on a mate, to suddenly find a spouse unattractive, irritating, wholly unreasonable. (It may even be natural to become irritating and wholly unreasonable, and thus hasten the departure of a mate you've soured on.) It is similarly natural to find some attractive colleague superior on all counts to the sorry wreck of a spouse you're saddled with. When we see a couple celebrate a golden anniversary, one apt reaction is the famous remark about a dog walking on two legs: the point is not that the feat was done well but that it was done at all.
All of this may sound like cause for grim resignation to the further decline of the American family. But what's "natural" isn't necessarily unchangeable. Evolutionary psychology, unlike past gene-centered views of human nature, illuminates the tremendous flexibility of the human mind and the powerful role of environment in shaping behavior. In particular, evolutionary psychology shows how inhospitable the current social environment is to monogamy. And while the science offers no easy cures, it does suggest avenues for change.
The premise of evolutionary psychology is simple. The human mind, like any other organ, was designed for the purpose of transmitting genes to the next generation; the feelings and thoughts it creates are best understood in these terms. Thus the feeling of hunger, no less than the stomach, is here because it helped keep our ancestors alive long enough to reproduce and rear their young. Feelings of lust, no less than the sex organs, are here because they aided reproduction directly. Any ancestors who lacked stomachs or hunger or sex organs or lust--well, they wouldn't have become ancestors, would they? Their traits would have been discarded by natural selection.
This logic goes beyond such obviously Darwinian feelings as hunger and lust. According to evolutionary psychologists, our everyday, ever shifting attitudes toward a mate or prospective mate--trust, suspicion, rhapsody, revulsion, warmth, iciness--are the handiwork of natural selection that remain with us today because in the past they led to behaviors that helped spread genes.
How can evolutionary psychologists be so sure? In part, their faith rests on the whole data base of evolutionary biology. In all sorts of species, and in organs ranging from brains to bladders, nature's attention to the subtlest aspects of genetic transmission is evident. Consider the crafting of primate testicles--specifically, their custom tailoring to the monogamy, or lack thereof, of females. If you take a series of male apes and weigh their testicles (not recommended, actually), you will find a pattern. Chimpanzees and other species with high "relative testes weight" (testes weight in comparison to body weight) feature quite promiscuous females. Species with low relative testes weight are either fairly monogamous (gibbons, for example) or systematically polygynous (gorillas), with one male monopolizing a harem of females. The explanation is simple. When females breed with many males, male genes can profit by producing lots of semen for their own transportation. Which male succeeds in getting his genes into a given egg may be a question of sheer volume, as competing hordes of sperm do battle.
The Trouble with Women
Patterns like these, in addition to showcasing nature's ingenuity, allow a kind of detective work. If testicles evolved to match female behavior, then they are clues to the natural behavior of females. Via men's testicles, we can peer through the mists of prehistory and see how women behaved in the social environment of our evolution, free from the influence of modern culture; we can glimpse part of a pristine female mind.
The relative testes weight of humans falls between that of the chimpanzee and the gorilla. This suggests that women, while not nearly so wild as chimpanzee females (who can be veritable sex machines), are by nature somewhat adventurous. If they were not, why would natural selection divert precious resources to the construction and maintenance of weighty testicles?
There is finer evidence, as well, of natural female infidelity. You might think that the number of sperm cells in a husband's ejaculate would depend only on how long it has been since he last had sex. Wrong. What matters more, according to a recent study, is how long his mate has been out of sight. A man who hasn't had sex for, say, a week will have a higher sperm count if his wife was away on a business trip than if she's been home with the flu. In short, what really counts is whether the woman has had the opportunity to stray. The more chances she has had to collect sperm from other males, the more profusely her mate sends in his own troops. Again: that natural selection designed such an elaborate weapon is evidence of something for the weapon to combat--female faithlessness.
So here is problem No. 1 with the pair-bond thesis: women are not by nature paragons of fidelity. Wanderlust is an innate part of their minds, ready to surface under propitious circumstances. Here's problem No. 2: if you think women are bad, you should see men.
The Trouble with Men
With men too, clues from physiology help uncover the mind. Consider "sexual dimorphism"--the difference between average male and female body size. Extreme sexual dimorphism is typical of a polygynous species, in which one male may impregnate several females, leaving other males without offspring. Since the winning males usually secure their trophies by fighting or intimidating other males, the genes of brawny, aggressive males get passed on while the genes of less formidable males are deposited in the dustbin of history. Thus male gorillas, who get a whole haremful of mates if they win lots of fights and no mates if they win none, are twice as big as females. With humans, males are about 15% bigger--sufficient to suggest that male departures from monogamy, like female departures, are not just a recent cultural invention.
Anthropology offers further evidence. Nearly 1,000 of the 1,154 past or present human societies ever studied--and these include most of the world's "hunter-gatherer" societies--have permitted a man to have more than one wife. These are the closest things we have to living examples of the "ancestral environment"--the social context of human evolution, the setting for which the mind was designed. The presumption is that people reared in such societies--the !Kung San of southern Africa, the Ache of Paraguay, the 19th century Eskimo--behave fairly "naturally." More so, at least, than people reared amid influences that weren't part of the ancestral environment: TVs, cars, jail time for bigamy.
There are vanishingly few anthropological examples of systematic female polygamy, or polyandry--women monopolizing sexual access to more than one man at once. So, while both sexes are prone under the right circumstances to infidelity, men seem much more deeply inclined to actually acquire a second or third mate--to keep a harem.
They are also more inclined toward the casual fling. Men are less finicky about sex partners. Prostitution--sex with someone you don't know and don't care to know--is a service sought overwhelmingly by males the world round. And almost all pornography that relies sheerly on visual stimulation--images of anonymous people, spiritless flesh--is consumed by males.
Many studies confirm the more discriminating nature of women. One evolutionary psychologist surveyed men and women about the minimal level of intelligence they would accept in a person they were "dating." The average response for both male and female: average intelligence. And how smart would the potential date have to be before they would consent to sex? Said the women: Oh, in that case, markedly above average. Said the men: Oh, in that case, markedly below average.
There is no dispute among evolutionary psychologists over the basic source of this male open-mindedness. A woman, regardless of how many sex partners she has, can generally have only one offspring a year. For a man, each new mate offers a real chance for pumping genes into the future. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the most prolific human parent in world history was Moulay ("The Bloodthirsty") Ismail, the last Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, who died in 1727. He fathered more than 1,000 children.
This logic behind undiscerning male lust seems obvious now, but it wasn't always. Darwin had noted that in species after species the female is "less eager than the male," but he never figured out why. Only in the late 1960s and early 1970s did biologists George Williams and Robert Trivers attribute the raging libido of males to their nearly infinite potential rate of reproduction.
Why Do Women Cheat?
Even then the female capacity for promiscuity remained puzzling. For women, more sex doesn't mean more offspring. Shouldn't they focus on quality rather than quantity--look for a robust, clever mate whose genes may bode well for the offspring's robustness and cleverness? There's ample evidence that women are drawn to such traits, but in our species genes are not all a male has to offer. Unlike our nearest ape relatives, we are a species of "high male-parental investment." In every known hunter-gatherer culture, marriage is the norm--not necessarily monogamous marriage, and not always lasting marriage, but marriage of some sort; and via this institution, fathers help provide for their children.
In our species, then, a female's genetic legacy is best amplified by a mate with two things: good genes and much to invest. But what if she can't find one man who has both? One solution would be to trick a devoted, generous and perhaps wealthy but not especially brawny or brainy mate into raising the offspring of another male. The woman need not be aware of this strategy, but at some level, conscious or unconscious, deft timing is in order. One study found that women who cheat on mates tend to do so around ovulation, when they are most likely to get pregnant.
For that matter, cheating during the infertile part of the monthly cycle might have its own logic, as a way (unconsciously) to turn the paramour into a dupe; the woman extracts goods or services from him in exchange for his fruitless conquest. Of course the flowers he buys may not help her genes, but in the ancestral environment, less frivolous gifts--notably food--would have. Nisa, a woman in a !Kung San hunter-gatherer village, told an anthropologist that "when you have lovers, one brings you something and another brings you something else. One comes at night with meat, another with money, another with beads. Your husband also does things and gives them to you."
Multiple lovers have other uses too. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has theorized that women copulate with more than one man to leave several men under the impression that they might be the father of particular offspring. Then, presumably, they will treat the offspring kindly. Her theory was inspired by langur monkeys. Male langurs sometimes kill infants sired by others as a kind of sexual icebreaker, a prelude to pairing up with the (former) mother. What better way to return her to ovulation--by putting an emphatic end to her breast-feeding--and to focus her energies on the offspring to come?
Anyone tempted to launch into a sweeping indictment of langur morality should first note that infanticide on grounds of infidelity has been acceptable in a number of human societies. Among the Yanomamo of South America and the Tikopia of the Solomon Islands, men have been known to demand, upon marrying women with a past, that their babies be killed. And Ache men sometimes collectively decide to kill a newly fatherless child. For a woman in the ancestral environment, then, the benefits of multiple sex partners could have ranged from their sparing her child's life to their defending or otherwise investing in her youngster.
Again, this logic does not depend on a conscious understanding of it. Male langurs presumably do not grasp the concept of paternity. Still, genes that make males sensitive to cues that certain infants may or may not carry their genes have survived. A gene that says, "Be nice to children if you've had lots of sex with their mothers," will prosper over the long haul.
The Invention and Corruption of Love
Genes don't talk, of course. They affect behavior by creating feelings and thoughts--by building and maintaining the brain. Whenever evolutionary psychologists talk about some evolved behavioral tendency--a polygamous or monogamous bent, say, or male parental investment--they are also talking about an underlying mental infrastructure.
The advent of male parental investment, for example, required the invention of a compelling emotion: paternal love. At some point in our past, genes that inclined a man to love his offspring began to flourish at the expense of genes that promoted remoteness. The reason, presumably, is that changes in circumstance--an upsurge in predators, say--made it more likely that the offspring of undevoted, unprotective fathers would perish.
Crossing this threshold meant love not only for the child; the first step toward becoming devoted parents consists of the man and woman developing a mutual attraction. The genetic payoff of having two parents committed to a child's welfare seems to be the central reason men and women can fall into swoons over one another.
Until recently, this claim was heresy. "Romantic love" was thought to be the unnatural invention of Western culture. The Mangaians of Polynesia, for instance, were said to be "puzzled" by references to marital affection. But lately anthropologists have taken a second look at purportedly loveless cultures, including the Mangaians, and have discovered what nonanthropologists already knew: love between man and woman is a human universal.
In this sense the pair-bonding label is apt. Still, that term--and for that matter the term love--conveys a sense of permanence and symmetry that is wildly misleading. Evolution not only invented romantic love but from the beginning also corrupted it. The corruption lies in conflicts of interest inherent in male parental investment. It is the goal of maximizing male investment, remember, that sometimes leads a woman to infidelity. Yet it is the preciousness of this investment that makes her infidelity lethal to her mate's interests. Not long for this world are the genes of a man who showers time and energy on children who are not his.
Meanwhile, male parental investment also makes the man's naturally polygynous bent inimical to his wife's reproductive interests. His quest for a new wife could lead him to withdraw, or at least dilute, investment in his first wife's children. This reallocation of resources may on balance help his genes but certainly not hers.
The living legacy of these long-running genetic conflicts is human jealousy--or, rather, human jealousies. In theory, there should be two kinds of jealousy--one male and one female. A man's jealousy should focus on sexual infidelity, since cuckoldry is the greatest genetic threat he faces. A woman, though she'll hardly applaud a partner's strictly sexual infidelity (it does consume time and divert some resources), should be more concerned with emotional infidelity--the sort of magnetic commitment to another woman that could lead to a much larger shift in resources.
David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan, has confirmed this prediction vividly. He placed electrodes on men and women and had them envision their mates doing various disturbing things. When men imagined sexual infidelity, their heart rates took leaps of a magnitude typically induced by three cups of coffee. They sweated. Their brows wrinkled. When they imagined a budding emotional attachment, they calmed down, though not quite to their normal level. For women, things were reversed: envisioning emotional infidelity--redirected love, not supplementary sex--brought the deeper distress.
That jealousy is so finely tuned to these forms of treachery is yet more evidence that they have a long evolutionary history. Still, the modern environment has carried them to new heights, making marriage dicier than ever. Men and women have always, in a sense, been designed to make each other miserable, but these days they are especially good at it.
Modern Obstacles to Monogamy
To begin with, infidelity is easier in an anonymous city than in a small hunter-gatherer village. Whereas paternity studies show that 2% of the children in a !Kung San village result from cuckoldry, the rate runs higher than 20% in some modern neighborhoods.
Contraceptive technology may also complicate marriage. During human evolution, there were no condoms or birth-control pills. If an adult couple slept together for a year or two and produced no baby, the chances were good that one of them was not fertile. No way of telling which one, but from their genes' point of view, there was little to lose and much to gain by ending the partnership and finding a new mate. Perhaps, some have speculated, natural selection favored genes inclining men and women to sour on a mate after long periods of sex without issue. And it is true that barren marriages are especially likely to break up.
Another possible challenge to monogamy in the modern world lies in movies, billboards and magazines. There was no photography in the long-ago world that shaped the human male mind. So at some deep level, that mind may respond to glossy images of pinups and fashion models as if they were viable mates--alluring alternatives to dull, monogamous devotion. Evolutionary psychologist Douglas Kenrick has suggested as much. According to his research, men who are shown pictures of Playboy models later describe themselves as less in love with their wives than do men shown other images. (Women shown pictures from Playgirl felt no such attitude adjustment toward spouses.)
Perhaps the largest modern obstacle to lasting monogamy is economic inequality. To see why, it helps to grasp a subtle point made by Donald Symons, author of the 1979 classic The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Though men who leave their wives may be driven by "natural" impulses, that does not mean men have a natural impulse designed expressly to make them leave their wives. After all, in the ancestral environment, gaining a second wife didn't mean leaving the first. So why leave her? Why not stay near existing offspring and keep giving some support? Symons believes men are designed less for opportune desertion than for opportune polygyny. It's just that when polygyny is illegal, a polygynous impulse will find other outlets, such as divorce.
If Symons is right, the question of what makes a man feel the restlessness that leads to divorce can be rephrased: What circumstances, in the ancestral environment, would have permitted the acquisition of a second wife? Answer: possessing markedly more resources, power or social status than the average Joe.
Even in some "egalitarian" hunter-gatherer societies, men with slightly more status or power than average are slightly more likely to have multiple wives. In less egalitarian preindustrial societies, the anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown, the pattern is dramatic. In Incan society, the four political offices from petty chief to chief were allotted ceilings of seven, eight, 15 and 30 women. Polygyny reaches its zenith under the most despotic regimes. Among the Zulu, where coughing or sneezing at the king's dinner table was punishable by death, his highness might monopolize more than 100 women.
To an evolutionary psychologist, such numbers are just extreme examples of a simple fact: the ultimate purpose of the wealth and power that men seek so ardently is genetic proliferation. It is only natural that the exquisitely flexible human mind should be designed to capitalize on this power once it is obtained.
Thus it is natural that a rising corporate star, upon getting a big promotion, should feel a strong attraction to women other than his wife. Testosterone--which expands a male's sexual appetite--has been shown to rise in nonhuman primates following social triumphs, and there are hints that it does so in human males too. Certainly the world is full of triumphant men--Johnny Carson, Donald Trump--who trade in aging wives for younger, more fertile models. (The multi-wived J. Paul Getty said, "A lasting relationship with a woman is only possible if you are a business failure.")
A man's exalted social status can give his offspring a leg up in life, so it's natural that women should lust after the high-status men who lust after them. Among the Ache, the best hunters also have more extramarital affairs and more illegitimate children than lesser hunters. In modern societies, contraception keeps much of this sex appeal from translating into offspring. But last year a study by Canadian anthropologist Daniel Perusse found that single men of high socioeconomic status have sex with more partners than lower-status men.
One might think that the appeal of rich or powerful men is losing its strength. After all, as more women enter the work force, they can better afford to premise their marital decisions on something other than a man's income. But we're dealing here with deep romantic attractions, not just conscious calculation, and these feelings were forged in a different environment. Evolutionary psychologists have shown that the tendency of women to place greater emphasis than men on a mate's financial prospects remains strong regardless of the income or expected income of the women in question.
The upshot of all this is that economic inequality is monogamy's worst enemy. Affluent men are inclined to leave their aging wives, and young women--including some wives of less affluent men--are inclined to offer themselves as replacements.
Objections to this sort of analysis are predictable: "But people leave marriages for emotional reasons. They don't add up their offspring and pull out their calculators." True. But emotions are just evolution's executioners. Beneath the thoughts and feelings and temperamental differences marriage counselors spend their time sensitively assessing are the stratagems of the genes--cold, hard equations composed of simple variables: social status, age of spouse, number of children, their ages, outside romantic opportunities and so on. Is the wife really duller and more nagging than she was 20 years ago? Maybe, but maybe the husband's tolerance for nagging has dropped now that she is 45 and has no reproductive future. And the promotion he just got, which has already drawn some admiring glances from a young woman at work, has not helped.
Similarly, we might ask the young, childless wife who finds her husband intolerably insensitive why the insensitivity wasn't so oppressive a year ago, before he lost his job and she met the kindly, affluent bachelor who seems to be flirting with her. Of course, maybe her husband's abuses are quite real, in which case they signal his disaffection and perhaps his impending departure--and merit just the sort of pre-emptive strike the wife is now mustering.
The Fallout from Monogamy's Demise
Not only does male social inequality favor divorce. Divorce can also reinforce male social inequality; it is a tool of class exploitation. Consider Johnny Carson. Like many wealthy, high-status males, he spent his career dominating the reproductive years of a series of women. Somewhere out there is a man who wanted a family and a pretty wife and, if it hadn't been for Johnny Carson, would have married one of these women. And if this man has managed to find another woman, she was similarly snatched from the clutches of some other man. And so on--a domino effect: a scarcity of fertile females trickles down the social scale.
As theoretical as this sounds, it cannot help happening. There are only about 25 years of fertility per woman. When some men dominate more than 25 years' worth, some man somewhere must do with less. And when, in addition to all the serial husbands, you count the men who live with a woman for five years before deciding not to marry her, and then do it again (perhaps finally at 35 marrying a 28-year-old), the net effect is not trivial. As some Darwinians have put it, serial monogamy is tantamount to polygyny. Like polygyny, it lets powerful men grab extra sexual resources (a.k.a. women), leaving less fortunate men without mates--or at least without mates young enough to bear children. Thus rampant divorce not only ends the marriages of some men but also prevents the marriage of others. In 1960, when the divorce rate was around 25%, the portion of the never married population age 40 or older was about the same for men and women. By 1990, with the divorce rate running at 50%, the portion for men was larger by 20% than for women.
Viewing serial monogamy as polygyny by another name throws a kink into the family-values debate. So far, conservatives have got the most political mileage out of decrying divorce. Yet lifelong monogamy--one woman per man for rich and poor alike--would seem to be a natural rallying cry for liberals.
One other kind of fallout from serial monogamy comes plainly into focus through the lens of evolutionary psychology: the toll taken on children. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of McMaster University in Ontario, two of the field's seminal thinkers, have written that one of the "most obvious" Darwinian predictions is that stepparents will "tend to care less profoundly for children than natural parents." After all, parental investment is a precious resource. So natural selection should "favor those parental psyches that do not squander it on nonrelatives"--who after all do not carry the parent's genes.
Indeed, in combing through 1976 crime data, Daly and Wilson found that an American child living with one or more substitute parents was about 100 times as likely to be fatally abused as a child living with biological parents. In a Canadian city in the 1980s, a child age two or younger was 70 times as likely to be killed by a parent if living with a stepparent and a natural parent than if living with two natural parents.
Of course, murdered children are a tiny fraction of all children living with stepparents; divorce and remarriage hardly amount to a child's death warrant. But consider the more common problem of nonfatal abuse. Children under 10 were, depending on their age and the study in question, three to 40 times as likely to suffer parental abuse if living with a stepparent and a biological parent instead of two biological parents.
There are ways to fool Mother Nature, to induce parents to love children who are not theirs. (Hence cuckoldry.) After all, people cannot telepathically sense that a child is carrying their genes. Instead they rely on cues that in the ancestral environment would have signaled as much. If a woman feeds and cuddles an infant day after day, she may grow to love the child, and so may the woman's mate. This sort of bonding is what makes adopted children lovable (and is one reason relationships between stepparent and child are often harmonious). But the older a child is when first seen, the less profound the attachment will probably be. Most children who acquire stepfathers are past infancy.
Polygynous cultures, such as the 19th century Mormons, are routinely dismissed as cruelly sexist. But they do have at least one virtue: they do not submit children to the indifference or hostility of a surrogate father. What we have now--serial monogamy, quasi-polygyny--is in this sense worse than true polygyny. It massively wastes the most precious evolutionary resource: love.
Is There Hope?
Given the toll of divorce--on children, on low-income men, and for that matter on mothers and fathers--it would be nice to come up with a magic monogamy-restoration plan. Alas, the importance of this task seems rivaled only by its difficulty. Lifelong monogamous devotion just isn't natural, and the modern environment makes it harder than ever. What to do?
As Laura Betzig has noted, some income redistribution might help. One standard conservative argument against antipoverty policies is their cost: taxes burden the affluent and thus, by lowering work incentive, reduce economic output. But if one goal of the policy is to bolster monogamy, then making the affluent less so would help. Monogamy is threatened not just by poverty in an absolute sense but also by the relative wealth of the rich. This is what lures a young woman to a wealthy married or formerly married man. It is also what makes the man who attracts her feel too good for just one wife.
As for the economic consequences, the costs of soaking the rich might well be outweighed by the benefits, financial and otherwise, of more stable marriages, fewer divorces, fewer abused children and less loneliness and depression.
There are other levers for bolstering monogamy, such as divorce law. In the short run, divorce brings the average man a marked rise in standard of living, while his wife, along with her children, suffers the opposite. Maybe we should not lock people into unhappy marriages with financial disincentives to divorce, but surely we should not reward men for leaving their wives either.
A Moral Animal
The problem of divorce is by no means one of public policy alone. Progress will also depend on people using the explosive insight of evolutionary psychology in a morally responsible way. Ideally this insight would lead people to subject their own feelings to more acute scrutiny. Maybe for starters, men and women will realize that their constantly fluctuating perceptions of a mate are essentially illusions, created for the (rather absurd, really) purpose of genetic proliferation, and that these illusions can do harm. Thus men might beware the restlessness designed by natural selection to encourage polygyny. Now that it brings divorce, it can inflict great emotional and even physical damage on their children.
And men and women alike might bear in mind that impulses of wanderlust, or marital discontent, are not always a sign that you married the "wrong person." They may just signify that you are a member of our species who married another member of our species. Nor, as evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph L. Nesse has noted, should we believe such impulses are a sign of psychopathology. Rather, he writes, they are "expected impulses that must, for the most part, be inhibited for the sake of marriage."
The danger is that people will take the opposite tack: react to the new knowledge by surrendering to "natural" impulses, as if what's "in our genes" were beyond reach of self-control. They may even conveniently assume that what is "natural" is good.
This notion was common earlier in this century. Natural selection was thought of almost as a benign deity, constantly "improving" our species for the greater good. But evolutionary psychology rests on a quite different world view: recognition that natural selection does not work toward overall social welfare, that much of human nature boils down to ruthless genetic self-interest, that people are naturally oblivious to their ruthlessness.
George Williams, whose 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection helped dispel the once popular idea that evolution often works for "the good of the group," has even taken to calling natural selection "evil" and "the enemy." The moral life, in his view, consists largely of battling human nature.
Darwin himself believed the human species to be a moral one--in fact, the only moral animal species. "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them," he wrote.
In this sense, yes, we are moral. We have at least the technical capacity to lead an examined life: self-awareness, memory, foresight and judgment. Still, chronically subjecting ourselves to moral scrutiny and adjusting our behavior accordingly is hardly a reflex. We are potentially moral animals--which is more than any other animal can say--but we are not naturally moral animals. The first step to being moral is to realize how thoroughly we aren't.
LOVE AND MONEY
Power--whether measured in dollars or brawn--is an aphrodisiac in all societies. According to evolutionary psychologists, women seek the protection, resources and genes of successful men. And whatever their conscious motives, men seek success to draw women.
-- The cost of alimony was a running joke for Johnny Carson, 68, who has married four times. Each wife has been at least six years younger than her predecessor. He wed Alexis, 44, in 1987.
-- Texas oil baron J. Howard Marshall II, 89, has acquired new wives at 30-year intervals, marrying his first in 1931, his second in 1961 and ex-Guess jeans model Anna Nicole Smith, 26, last month.
-- Aristotle Onassis was 62 when he threw over longtime paramour Maria Callas, 44, and married his second wife, 39-year-old Jacqueline Kennedy, whose children were then ages 10 and 7.
-- Marla Maples, 30, was viewed as a gold digger when she displaced Ivana Trump as consort to real estate mogul Donald Trump, 48. They married last year, just after the birth of their child.
-- Billionaire J. Paul Getty was married and divorced five times. Said he (shown at 83 with a girlfriend): "A lasting relationship with a woman is only possible if you are a business failure."
Copyright (c) TIME Magazine, 1995 TIME Inc. Magazine Company; (c) 1995 Compact Publishing, Inc.
June 29th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Yeah Burke, I saw that piece, as I recall some womens reproductive organs didnt function unless their were at least two competing sperm, being from two different men of course.
I found it hard to wrap my head around this one but some women dont get pregnant unless they cheat.
That all being said, it is television and how much is accurate and how much is opinion, who can tell?
June 29th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
If a woman cheats there are not as many consequences. She will get the kids and the house and keep her lover. The man loses his house, he is relegated to visitor status in his children's lives, and on top of that he has to pay child support and possibly alimony.
Not only that but the woman can go into court, claim she was abused and have ignoramus judges believe her despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. She can very easily twist the matter around in one of these kangaroo courts and blame it all on the man and pursue some sort of antiquated precedent that claims she should be entitled to more than her fair share because he's the douchebag that drove her to cheat.
And we all know damned well that any man making the identical argument would be ignored if not told by the judge to go pound sand.
June 29th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I read most of the comments here and unless I missed something they are all from men. Not one woman known to visit this site has said anything, so I will. (FYI - Been busy, not in hiding.) I agree that just as many women cheat as men, this comes from my own observations. I am also of the opinion that if you are single but you know that the person you are seeing is spoken for, you are just as guilty. The only time the “other party” is guilt free is if they believe the person they are seeing is also single. Not separated, single.
I have a different theory on why women are forgiven their indiscretions more often and easier than men. For a man an affair is when you have sex with a person, no emotions are involved. For a woman an affair is an emotional event, with or without the sex. When I say without the sex I mean an emotional affair. They do happen and can be just as damaging (most of the time men don't even realize they are having an affair when this happens). Men also get over situations faster in general. Once something is talked out one time that should be the end of it, women take longer and more talking sessions before they can move on, if they ever do.
Therefore, when it’s the woman cheating, as long as the sex stops, the man is more willing to forgive and move on. When the man cheats it’s not so simple. Men are also more likely to keep his spouse’s affair quiet. Men tend to blame themselves and they don’t want others to know he isn’t keeping his woman happy. Women, on the other hand, are not willing to take responsibility for their part of their man stepping out on them and will cry to anyone who will listen. That’s not to say that women always play a part in their man’s cheating, but it does happen more often than most are willing to admit.
As for women being better at hiding it, I totally agree with that. Men are not as sneaky and conniving.
June 29th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
"I have a different theory on why women are forgiven their indiscretions more often and easier than men. For a man an affair is when you have sex with a person, no emotions are involved. For a woman an affair is an emotional event, with or without the sex. When I say without the sex I mean an emotional affair. They do happen and can be just as damaging (most of the time men don't even realize they are having an affair when this happens)."
Hmmm.
My impression is the opposite, based on Michelle Langley's book. Namely, that because female affairs are typically *not* just sexual supplementation as male affairs tend to be, female affairs are much more of a threat to the marital relationship, and are much more likely to wind up ending the marriage than male affairs are.
My marriage counselor told me that in all of the couples she had counseled and all of the infidelities she had become aware of in her career, generally speaking the couples with male adultery had a better chance of working things out than the couples with female adultery -- because, she told me, the women were often uninterested in reconciling with their husbands and had already moved on from their husbands as a result of the affair.
This parallels what Sandra Tsing Loh said in her recent article in The Atlantic: after her affair, she could no longer think of her husband in the place in her brain called "romantic love" -- that place was occupied by her lover and her memories of him. She admitted that she might have been able to do so if she worked on it, but she expressed no interest in doing that. In short, she had moved on.
This dovetails what Michelle Langley reports in countless cases in her book.
On balance, I think that it's female adultery that splits up marriages more than male adultery does.
June 29th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
novaseeker, I think you mis-understood what I said because you said the same thing I did, just in different words.
Re-read: Therefore, when it’s the woman cheating, as long as the sex stops, the man is more willing to forgive and move on. When the man cheats it’s not so simple.
June 29th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
One modern twist to all of this is that thank's to DNA testing, men no longer have to be so parinoid about their wifes getting pregnant from an affair. Deep down inside every man I am sure, lurks one of our greatest fears. No more. Sure, nobody wants the humiliation and pain not to mention various souvinears like AIDS or STDs that come with a spouse being unfaithful. Guarding the harem is easy now.
June 29th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
JeanB.: That is so true about woman being better at hiding it than men are. I do believe, from experience in counseling both men and women, that women who are not caught feel more guilt form cheating. Working with so many people who are torn from adultery and cheating, even if given an opportunity, that's something I would never do. I have also made it clear in past relationships that if I'm cheated on, I have to end the relationship. I'd do this, even if I still love them, because of the respect I have for myself.
June 29th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
"Re-read: Therefore, when it’s the woman cheating, as long as the sex stops, the man is more willing to forgive and move on. When the man cheats it’s not so simple."
Again, maybe I'm missing something, but I think I was saying the reverse -- that when women cheat it is much harder for the marriage to continue because the cheating is more total, and she's often done with her husband by the time she cheats -- as indicated in Langley's book and Loh's recent article.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
42
John Boy Says:
June 29th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
One modern twist to all of this is that thank's to DNA testing, men no longer have to be so parinoid about their wifes getting pregnant from an affair. Deep down inside every man I am sure, lurks one of our greatest fears. No more. Sure, nobody wants the humiliation and pain not to mention various souvinears like AIDS or STDs that come with a spouse being unfaithful. Guarding the harem is easy now
-------------------------------------
While you may not have to fear if the child is yours you do have to fear the courts.
Many men, after they have signed the birth certificate or assumed the role of father,later find out through DNA testing they are not the father.
However, our wonderful judicial system will routinely make these fathers pay for children, that per DNA are proven to not be theirs.
Who said fraud doesn't pay?
June 29th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
novaseeker: It varies why women cheat, but is generally done for emotional reasons. I've worked with many females who have cheated, some of which moved on from the marriage, and others who I assisted in repairing their marriage. Many of them want to remain married, and went outside their marriage seeking something they felt they need, but their marriage didn't have. Lack, of sex, intimacy, being held on the couch or at night which when missing leads to a feeling of inadequacy, not being desired or pursued by their partner. It's not whether or not their husband truly loves them, it's whether or not their wife feels as if they do (Actions speaking louder than words)
June 30th, 2009 at 3:54 am
"But suffice it to say that the paucity of female office holders getting caught with their pants down is more a function of the paucity of female office holders than it is of female virtue. "
Same as how 'most wars are started by men'...duh - most rulers or countries are men.
Feminists deliberately mislead using this method of obfuscation, quite frequently. It's like when they say, "only 13% of the medical studies were done on women's diseases"...
June 30th, 2009 at 3:56 am
should say, "most rulers OF countries are men."
June 30th, 2009 at 8:57 am
David M:
You are right about men still getting screwed. Where there is a will there is a way.
The impact of the discovery of DNA will have on humans is only beginning to be felt. It gives us knowledge and certainty where once there was none. Without a doubt, that will help men, unless of course, ignorance is bliss, which to me it isn't. I strongly believe that the laws will eventuallly catch up with the facts on the ground. It might take a generation or more even, but the clock it ticking down for paternity fraud and those who profit from it.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
This helps with some of my argument. From an AP interview with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford:
“He said that during the encounters with other women he "let his guard down" with some physical contact but "didn't cross the sex line." He wouldn't go into detail.”
This tells me that Gov. Sanford is of the mindset that as long as intercourse didn’t happen then it is all OK. Boy, is he ever about to find out how wrong he is.
Dr. Phil and I actually agree on this point: if your relationship with a person has to be kept a secret from your significant other, then it is wrong and you have no business being in it. Relationship not necessarily being an intimate one, could be a friend or co-worker. But if you feel the need to hide it then you are up to no good.
July 1st, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I'm not surprised that a higher percentage of young girls than young men cheat on their partners (if cheat is the correct word considering it is in their genes). Young women want boyfriends; but, as soon as they get one, they are seeking to trade up and the easiest and quickest way to trade up is the have sex with a potential new and more desirable boyfriend.
Also, 90 percent of young women but only 1 to 5 percent of young men can get sex just by snapping their fingers. The rest must invest a lot if time and recourses and even then they may fail.
Modern society is just a flash in the pan in evolutionary term and so it is our Stone Age brain that determines our behavior. During the Stone Age and even now the winning strategy is to produce the most descendents. For most females that is best obtained by mating with a dependable and good provider and then, when ovulating to seek the best genes by having sneaky sex with superior males; typically Alpha males. .
Women are compelled to have sex with Alpha males because their children will have greater size, strength, and fecundity. With so many women at their beck and call, Alpha males are driven to have sex with as many women as possible. That is their winning strategy to produce the most descendents. With so many women available, the Alpha male cannot afford to invest much time in any one woman. In fact studies show that Alpha males have the shortest courtships before having sexual intercourse with the women they date. They invest the least money and time in them. And they cheat on their mates more often than other guys. After having sex a few times, the woman may be pregnant and, with so many available women, the Alpha male cannot afford to waste his valuable sperm on a pregnant woman.
Most men don't cheat much because they are rejected by young fertile women. Therefore, there winning strategy it to invest a lot of time, money, and resources in a woman in order to be her mate.
Basically it is a matter of opportunity. Most young women cheat a little because willing partners are always available. A few men cheat a lot because most women are easy for them. Most men don't cheat because they lack the opportunity with desirable young fertile women.
July 2nd, 2009 at 4:42 am
Thought this was relevant as well (haven't read the book itself).
http://womensinfidelity.com/divorce.html
(I saw it on http://www.angryharry.com/ )
- Anon
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:50 pm
test