The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Gettin' Some Strange

That's funny, Meghan—when you just posted asking if any of us had seen Philip Weiss' cover piece for this week's New York, I was debating whether it was worth gathering my own thoughts about it. Poor Weiss is already being eaten alive, entertainingly, in the comments section, and really, his piece is such a feverish blend of anecdotal evidence, confessional sexual fantasy, and ev-psych chestnuts (there are enough "hard-wiring" arguments in there to power a mainframe) that it kind of critiques itself. But if nothing else, you have to marvel at the guy's self-immolating candor, his willingness to expose his fantasy life to public scrutiny in his quest for what the old Kris Kristofferson song called "some strange." I'm all for dismantling our culture's understanding of marriage as a state-sanctioned commitment to lifetime heterosexual monogamy. But what about prioritizing the "heterosexual" part—and granting all Americans the civil rights that come with marriage—before we start rejiggering the "monogamy" part so straight guys can collect all the women they want?

As you point out, what Weiss tries to frame as a radical rethinking of marriage amounts to a code of conduct so familiar as to be reactionary. Hey, what if we lived in a world where, because of their struggles with monogamy, men were subject to a less restrictive set of sexual expectations than women? And what if, instead of working as, say, waitresses, young women could fashion alternate careers for themselves as professional "mistresses"? What if sloppy think-piece writers could conflate the practices of "empowered" courtesan-bloggers like Debauchette or the polyamorous authors of The Ethical Slut with the sequestration and abuse of 14-year-old girls by the FLDS cult? Oh, wait, we're living in that world already.