The XX Factor: What women really think.

Tim Noah Dares Us

A guest post (or rather a challenge) from Slate's Tim Noah:

May I put in a good word for Philip Weiss?

Before proceeding, let me stipulate that I know Phil and have edited him in the past. It would be a stretch to call him a friend (we've exchanged perhaps five sentences over the past 20 years), but we hung out a bit during the 1980s and I remain fond of him.

One thing I've always admired about Phil is his personal courage as a writer of nonfiction, even at the risk of appearing foolish. Certainly he displays courage in his New York magazine piece, "What Makes Married Men Want To Have Affairs?" The article is an attempt to take something we already know—duh, males crave sexual variety—and explore what can be done about it without adopting the familiar posture of the locker-room raconteur, on the one hand, or the prim scold, on the other. To achieve this, it is necessary to engage men and women in a conversation with one another. Phil hints strongly that he himself has strayed, or (less likely, I think) that he has come so close to straying that it "jolted my marriage." Phil has discussed this "over the years with about six or seven people, and when you leave out my wife and therapist, they're all men." Which obviously didn't get him very far. Here, he's proposing something new. A topic seldom discussed in mixed company—indeed, the very topic that probably occasioned the invention of that idiotic phrase "mixed company" in the first place—is to be discussed with both men and women present.

The trouble with Phil's piece, as various XXers have pointed out, is that the female libido is scarcely heard from. Phil portrays women mostly as enforcers of monogamy and domesticity, and men as caged libertines who daydream about boffing the nearest Hooters' waitress and on occasion actually do. Phil acknowledges that married women have affairs, too—15 percent to men's 25 percent. But while the promiscuous men Phil writes about come off as mainstream humanists—regular guys—the promiscuous women Phil writes about are all exotic creatures—sex researchers, sex counselors, free-love bohemians, and prostitutes. The only "normal" woman willing to consider promiscuity, even for a moment, is his wife. She shuts down Phil's campaign to establish whoopee utopia by pointing out that if he wanted to be unfaithful, he'd have to accomodate her infidelity, too. Of course he backs down immediately—and realizes life and love are more complicated than his desire is willing to acknowledge.

The default female response to Phil's piece is to clobber him for being such a, you know, guy. Instead, I'd like to see a woman take up Phil's invitation to converse about the uneasy truce between monogamy and sexual desire. What makes married women want to have affairs?

I'll readily grant that taking up this topic requires considerably more daring from a woman than it took from Phil, because our society is a lot less tolerant of female infidelity, or even female daydreams about infidelity. In that stupid Stanley Kubrick movie, Eyes Wide Shut, hubby Tom Cruise plunges into a rococo sexual odyssey because wifey Nicole Kidman says merely that she experienced unrequited lust for another man. In older movies, whenever a woman sins, or contemplates sin, blam!—she's immediately run over by a truck. The political world is even more retrograde. There's a reason why you'll never hear presidential candidate Hillary Clinton say, as Jimmy Carter said in 1976, that she's experienced lust in her heart. If she ever let us find out she'd acted on it, as Bill did, her political career would never survive, as Bill's did. So, yes: This is hard stuff for a woman to talk about it. But talking about it seems more constructive, not to mention more interesting, than finger-wagging.

So how about it, XXers? You probably didn't need Phil Weiss to tell you why men have affairs, or at least fantasize about having affairs: They crave sexual variety, they long to recapture lost youth, blah blah blah. Like everything else about male sexuality, the male desire to lie with another woman is boringly uncomplicated. But why do women have affairs? The judgment of literature (Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary) is that they feel trapped and oppressed, or, less sympathetically, that they're easily gulled by preying males one or two notches up the social ladder. Two centuries later, I would imagine that life is a bit different. The answer we heard from writers like Erica Jong and Gael Greene back in the swingin' Plato's Retreat 1970s was that women crave sexual variety in precisely the same way men do. Three decades later, though, feminism no longer insists that women's desires and inclinations be identical to those of men. It may even be permitted to recognize that, at least superficially, the female sex drive seems, in the aggregate, less pronounced (or at least less conspicuous) than the male sex drive. You don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. You do hear stories about women telling their husbands they no longer want to have sex.

So, what's it all about?

Please don't refer me to The Erotic Silence of the American Wife and the groaning bookshelf of similar titles out there. My bad, I haven't read them. But let's face it: Those books were written for and by women, not for men and women. They're the equivalent of a ladies' lunch. Let's have a mixer instead. Why do women want to cheat?

Two ground rules:

1.) No diversions into what's cultural and what's "hard-wired" about women's sexuality. Once you fall down that rabbit hole, there's no coming back. Just talk about what is, and skip the warring evolutionary and behaviorist theories as to why this should be so.

2.) No bad-mouthing your husbands, or the male sex in general. Phil managed to write without bad-mouthing his wife, or women in general (except perhaps by implication). Even if men really are unregenerate shitheads, dwelling on this will just turn this back into a discussion about men.

Anyone game?