What Do Men Want?

As if I would know, but it was maddening trying to follow it in last week's New York magazine piece, "The Secret Lives of Married Men." Building on the dinner-party chestnut that men have a deep sexual need (a biological imperative!) to spread their seed and so shouldn't be expected to remain faithful within a marriage, the author wonders why the European husband-cheating model isn't as welcome in our society as, say, gay people are.

He compares two women in a committed relationship and their two children with a man in a heterosexual marriage who's been caught cheating and is in the dog house. Why is the man in the dog house and these women aren't, he asks? Society should welcome them equally as the evolutionary by-products of progressive thinking and living.

The author's homophobic aside is an offensive distraction from his larger argument: men just can't help themselves because of their hardwiring, which you could buy but you'd need to figure out first how so many men have affairs with so few women having affairs. You could reason that that's where prostitutes come in, but I doubt in enough quantity to satisfy all that restless wiring passed down from Early Man. And are the women just being talked into it based on a male need?

I used to think that there were simply a few women having an astonishing number of liaisons to hold up the female end of the affairs until I realized that in my own experience it's usually the women who cheat; turns out they have a need too. I had this conversation with my brother a few years ago -- which women were sleeping with all the men, if the men all had so many partners and the women so few? "Well," my brother started slowly, "take your friends in college as an example..." Dear reader, he slept with two of them. Two! I was torn in my shock between feeling betrayed by my friends -- how could they never have told me? -- and the fact that this older brother had been a chick magnet without my knowing it, but that's family business. The point is, I didn't hear from my friends about it, and neither of them was even cheating on anyone -- they just kept it to themselves, quietly filling a need. I'd hazard that it's women who are sleeping with all the men who are sleeping with women who aren't their wives, and plenty of those women likely have husbands too. (The rest are younger unmarrieds, no? With sexual and other needs to meet.)

And if you've ever seen the L Word, which is lesbian Hollywood at its finest, you'd know that the old stereotype of the devoted, monogamous female partner seems as outmoded in the gay community as the Pendleton shirt. Not that, as in heterosexual marriages, the model and aim shouldn't be to commit in a trusting relationship to one partner (and in fact most couples do - 80%, to use New York's statistics, splitting the difference between the 15% of married women it claims who cheat and 25% of married men) but just that we are equally human and flawed, we men and women, and make mistakes, and sometimes face difficult choices. And sometimes we act on our inappropriate-for-society needs but more often we make the decision, maybe with complication and sacrifice but also with reassurance and joy, to be with this one other person we found, if we were lucky enough to find a person who makes us feel that way most days; and we act carefully, to not let her go.

Comments

[onceler]

hm, funny, I read that article, and while I remember the author asking the question as to why the European model of (not just men, where do you get that?) cheating casually hasn't been accepted in the hetero community the same way as it is in the gay community. not, as you state, why cheating men aren't as acceptable as gays, that is a complete misreading on your part. which makes a lot of the rest of the post somewhat nonsensical.

[oldpotsmuggler]

Go back a few hundred, or even a few thousand years, and then let's look at reality. Men faced heavy death tolls due to wars, and other "masculine" pursuits, and women had the whole pregnancy/child birth thing hanging over their heads. At best, we evolved as a creature practicing serial monogamy. And the odds of us being able to avoid our evolution in such a short period are zero.

Maybe it's okay to let behavior be a guide in studying biology. However, trying to figure out who we are, looking only at what we do now, and ignoring where we've come from, has no chance of resulting in anything other than confusion.

The evidence says that cheating was a defect in the old days. If the message has conveniently changed since then, I can't find the evidence for that.

[bgregs]

Actually, go back a little farther and you find that there are basically two types of society in human history. Male based and Female based. The primary difference lies in whether men attach or not. In a Female based society (think Rome, ancient Greece, ancient Israel, etc...) no matter the form, there is some sort of marriage, where at least one man matches himself up with at least one woman, and is relatively faithful. In a Male based society (think of the barbarians who brought Rome down) there is no marriage. At best there is simply a clan where you either have all the men there for all the women, or the chief there for all the women.

Christianity screwed up the system by creating a Male based society with a Female based marriage, and there's been problems ever since!

[whitey7]

You make a good point concerning Patriarchy vs Matriarchy,but your history is a little off. The Matriarchy disappeared well before the emergence of the Classic civilizati­ons.Christ­ianity doesn't appear until much later in the Patriarchy which we still live under today.

[nypoet22]

the author is skipping a major possible hole in his argument; the statistics on cheating are based on self-report data. even if it's anonymous, it may be measuring less the number who actually cheat than the number who will ADMIT to cheating.

[onceler]

the statistics relied on in the article almost certainly underestimate the number of women cheating, and probably men to a lesser degree. there was some serious screwy stuff in the stats they were using...