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Somebody please stop me, but I'm afraid I have more to say on the subject that Tim Noah challenged us to: "What makes married women want to have affairs?"
I ran into Meghan in the ladies' room, and we both scoffed at the notion that "You don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex."
I will agree with you on one point. Yeah, you don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. (In the same way they don't call and don't tell you they want to break up—they just disappear—or so the stereotype goes.) You do, or at least I do, hear stories from women about how their husbands have stopped having sex with them. For years.
Here's just one example that I found quickly. OK, the guy is depressed; maybe he is atypical. But, as a woman with female friends and relatives, I hear many stories like this.
I don't think the apt question is why do women want to cheat? I think the question is, why don't women cheat more?
And at the risk of embarrassing myself yet again, I will venture an answer with no research to back it up whatsoever except for my own little opinions and anecdotes.
First, a caveat. I sort of hate to talk about this stuff in this way. I hate to get into the gross generalizations of "all men always do this" and "all women always do that." So could we just stipulate that when I say "men" I mean "some men, sometimes" and ditto for "women"?
A male acquaintance once said to me, "I want to have sex with every woman I see." This sentence troubled me for a long time. Did he really want to have sex with every woman he saw?
I decided that the problematic word wasn't every. It was see. I assumed he simply didn't see women he didn't find attractive. That was upsetting in its own way, but at least that meant he didn't want to have sex with every woman in his purview.
I told him I'd heard that men think about sex something like 10 times a day. He told me that figure was way too low. It was more like 50 or 100 times a day ("or 1,000 or 1,000,000," other men chimed in—if this is true, how do men get anything done?). We hear statistics like that a lot; turns out they are all bunk. Nonetheless, it got me wondering: How many times a day did I think about sex? How many men did I see that I wanted to have sex with?
I decided to do some observation and experimentation. Turns out the amount of time I think about sex is quite variable. Sometimes it can be a lot in one day. Sometimes it can be not for days or even weeks.
As for the experiment, I played a little game with myself: I decided that when I was on the subway I would ask myself, "If I had to have sex with someone in this car, who would it be?"
Granted, I don't often ride the subway at the height of rush hour when there are a lot more people to choose from, and that fluorescent lighting is pretty harsh, but I have to tell you, some days it was pretty hard to find anyone at all (of course choosing someone solely based on appearance is not the only way to become interested in someone). The conclusion: It's pretty rare that I see a man I want to have sex with. (In real life, anyway, on movie and television screens is a different story.) So rare, in fact, that when I do find myself attracted to someone it is a very powerful feeling.
Now, I am happily married, so perhaps that partially explains this rarity. (Though when I think back to before I was married, I think I was always a one-crush-at-a-time kind of girl. Or, wait, maybe two. Or three. Or four. Well, maybe five at the most. But there was always a reason, albeit shallow, that I liked someone—I thought he was cute or I liked his voice or something he had said or his personality, or the way he played guitar turned me on. It wasn't solely because he had the right equipment between his legs.)
Perhaps women are just more picky. While men are looking for quantity, maybe women are looking for quality.
On the other hand, guys, maybe you need to do something about the way you look. Clooney it up a little bit, for god's sake. Do some push-ups every day at the very least.
(True, I am no Angelina Jolie, but I am not actually on the prowl, either.)
And, now, an even touchier subject. Why do some women stop having sex with their husbands?
This may sting a little. I have no delicate way to put it. Once again, it's a question of quality.
Bad sex. Obviously, sexless marriage is a deeper issue that involves more relationship conflicts than just the physical. But, speaking as a woman, all I can tell you is that if she knew she was going to have a good time, she would want to do it. Often.
As for men, I think it was Jerry Seinfeld who said, "Sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's pretty good."
Not so for women.
Best-case scenario, bad sex is like being stuck in a traffic jam when you have a million other things you'd rather be doing, places you'd rather be.
Worst-case scenario, well, ask the Austrian woman whose father locked her in a basement for 24 years, raping and impregnating her repeatedly.
Now, it's not all you. It takes two to tango, and both parties need to "bring it" (or, in the case of the incestuous Austrian rapist, "leave it"), but all I can say is, guys, it wouldn't hurt for you to work on your skills.
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Tim: Last week you challenged us to reveal the reasons women cheat (or want to) in response to our posts about this Philip Weiss article. I'm late to the party. But first I wanted to second Ellen's no-nonsense answer: For the same reasons men do. Desire, selfishness, the thrill of novelty, love, boredom, a boost to the ego—the list goes on.
Second, though: You second Weiss in suggesting that the female sex drive is, in the aggregate, less "pronounced," as you put it. And you write that you hear stories about women who don't want to have sex with their partners, but "[y]ou don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex." But in fact, you do-at least, you do if you're a woman. I've heard this very complaint from female friends whose husbands/partners are too busy or stressed or distracted for sex. And according to some reports, like this one in Psychology Today, low male libido is reportedly on the rise, affecting some 20 percent to 25 percent of men. Meanwhile, several couples therapists—most notably Michele Weiner-Davis, author of The Sex-Starved Marriage—have suggested that male sexual apathy can powerfully affect marriages and long-term relationships. On a Yahoo Answers thread about low male libido, you'll see a post from a woman bemoaning that her male partner would rather "snuggle" and "bond" than have sex.
Now, low male libido probably has cultural and environmental causes. (Anti-depressants, estrogens, etc.) And so yeah, there may be real underlying differences in male and female sex drives in the aggregate, as you argue. But I think most women who've spent much time talking openly to other women would say that the desire for sexual novelty within a long-term relationship hardly seems to be the exclusive province of the Y chromosome. On second thought, though, maybe it's better for everyone if men still think it is.
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Tim and Ellen, the few married women I know who've come right out and said they were having affairs all wound up divorcing the hubby and marrying the "other man.'' Only, those are just the ones who talked about it. One of my most gorgeous married friends once complained she wouldn't even know how to get something new started, so that one in three still seems high to me. But then, I am someone who missed her own fling: One night maybe 10 years ago, I get home from work and my husband says nonchalantly, oh, nearly forgot, there's a message for you I saved. (Which should have been a red flag right there, because how many times in our marriage has he said that?) OK, who was it? Dunno, cough, cough, didn't listen. Turns out, the message is from some guy I never heard of saying hey Melinda, LOVED our super-great time together in Chicago and just found out I'm going to be in D.C. on such-and-such a date and sure would like to see you again, pant, pant; call me! So not only did somebody pretending to be me have a big old night out—but she was enough of a woman with a plan to use my name from the get-go, and hand out my unlisted home number, too. I half suspected a certain bony, bitter (see, it is never a nice word) officemate—who I'd bet my life believes Hillary wuz robbed. But I still don't know how (whether?) this love story began or ended—or maybe it's still going on.
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All right, Tim Noah, I will bite.
"What makes married women want to have affairs?" you ask?
The same things that make married men want to have affairs (excepting, of course, the desire to "spread seed").
Monogamy is hard. For all of us. It's unrealistic for people who live as long as humans do today. We, too, crave variety. We, too, have fantasies. We, too, are busy, overworked, have too many responsibilities, and want to blow off some steam. Some of us are neglected, abused, oppressed, unloved, ignored, deprived of affection, unhappy, unfulfilled. Some of us are just bored. Some of us are just horny. Some of us are getting old and we want to feel young and sexy again.
Some of us have been brainwashed by the Jane Austen fantasy, and we are still looking for Mr. Darcy.
Some of us love our husbands, but, well, we are married, not dead. There are a lot of hot, tempting women in the world, but there are a lot of hot, tempting men, as well, and we are exposed to their hot, tempting images everywhere, every day, all the time. (Note to Jonathan Rhys Meyers: Call me!)
I suspect there are as many reasons women want to have affairs as there are women having affairs.
I find it curious that so many people still buy into the myth that pairing off and staying together forever is the only model of a successful relationship. It's hard not to acquiesce to this religion-enforced, society-sanctioned, government-rewarded "lifestyle."
But as our rates of infidelity and divorce suggest, it's not realistic. This is not to say that we should live in a sexual free-for-all. There are great rewards that come with being in an emotionally, as well as sexually, intimate relationship. We do seem to naturally pair off, for a while, and have relationships this way—but serially. I think serial monogamy is perhaps more realistic, though it is also more complicated.
The problem is, how long is "for a while"? How long should it be? Seven minutes or 70 years?
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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?
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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.
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Has anyone sat down yet with New York's cover story, a long essay entitled "The Affairs of Men: The Trouble with Sex and Marriage," pegged to the Eliot Spitzer scandal? Inside, however, is not an outré confession but a fiftysomething baby boomer's long-winded attempt to rationalize his desire to screw a variety of women despite being married. Though it presents itself as provocative and edgy, the piece is inflected with the naïve, wishful rhetoric of 1970s thinking about sex.
Philip Weiss, the author, explains that men "hunger for sexual variety" and determines that this hunger is "a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse." He comments on Ashley Dupre's "luscious body." He reports that men are using more porn than ever and quotes Mark Penn wondering what will happen when women "realize it." He notes that sexless marriages among power couples are endemic. He harps on his own desire for "some strange." Yet when his exasperated wife proposes an open marriage in response to all his bellyaching, he flinches at the thought that she might avail herself of the new rules, too: "No thanks." Throughout, he presents a view of men as virile, prowling predators and of women as gentle, jealous keepers of social calendars who simply don't feel monogamy to be as much of a challenge as men do. (His wife tells him that the women she knows aren't that interested in sex.) And thus he frets over a "never-ending battle of the sexes," which might be boiled down to: "Men Like To Spread Seed, Women Get Jealous." My god, the man has put his finger on it! And only how many decades after Charles Darwin did it better?
The piece has myriad problems. But the main problem is that it offers nothing new. Weiss is deeply enamored of what he takes to be his own willingness to challenge cultural mores about sex, yet the piece could have as easily been written in 1978 as today. Weiss' cultural references are antiquated—Yoko and John, Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife—and so are his attitudes. (Prime example: He fantasizes about persuading waitresses in New York that it would be "cool" to have an affair.) There's certainly plenty still to be said about the complexities of monogamy in married life, but at this point the starting point for the conversation should be a lot more advanced than Weiss'. It certainly would have to include the fact that women may well find monogamy to be almost as difficult as men do. One 2007 study found that among married couples with children, some 37 percent of women and 40 percent of men cheated. That's not a huge discrepancy. I pressed to the end hoping for some, any, fresh insight (For example: Has feminism changed women's relationship to sex and marriage? Do couples raised in the post-feminist age deal with their sexual appetites with more clarity than boomer couples do?)—but I kept finding only the same "truth" you find in Philip Roth novels of late: a rather fuzzy picture of the darkness of sexual desire.
To put it plainly, it's tiresome to read men dilate at length on their own hemmed-in libidos while refusing to seriously examine three things: 1) the possibility that unfettered sexual freedom might not actually solve all their emotional problems or satisfy their fantasies, 2) the possibility that their wives might feel the same complicated desire for sexual novelty, and 3) that one consequence of sexual freedom is jealousy. Weiss coyly refers to his desire to have a threesome with a blogger named Debauchette and waxes enthusiastic about breaking down sexual taboos and setting up free-loving polyamorous compounds. (Been there, done that, circa 1971, no?) He goes on and on about sexual variety but doesn't characterize just what it is about variety that's appealing to him and his anonymous peers: the possibility of a brutal, depersonalized sexual encounter? The sheer bounty of potential partners? Novelty itself? All of the above? I'd love to read some, well, probing writing about this.
Basically, the piece lost me as soon as it became clear that Weiss wanted to have zipless fucks while his wife was home planning his social calendar. (Talk about presenting yourself in an anti-erotic light.) It lost me again when I reached the end and found that he never paused to complicate his assumption that having sex with more women would make him happier—and be as mysterious and thrilling as his fantasies. Sex is rarely frictionless. Let's assume that—and then ask what it might be like to be more honest about it.
Read more XX Factor reaction to Philip Weiss' New York magazine article.