Why women judge "sluts" negatively

There are lots of studies out there on the number of sex partners people have in a lifetime. If you look at the serious ones only (and you have to be careful because there are a lot of studies that are obviously completely bogus) you will find that median of what women typically report is four sex partners in a lifetime and of what men typically report is seven.

So where are men finding the three extra partners that women don't report? Now, it is possible that those numbers are honest even though they don't line up but it is highly unlikely. Other studies have been done in which men and women are asked a series of questions, including one about number of sex partners twice, the difference being that they are told they are hooked up to a lie detector for the second round. These studies have found that everyone lies but women lie by a greater margin than men. A pretty reliable guess is that most people have between five to seven partners in a lifetime.

Which brings me to my main point: even though we had a heavily advertised sexual revolution roughly forty years ago, things just haven't changed that much. Your mom and dad and your grandmother and grandfather probably had sex before marriage and they probably had more than one partner in their lifetime. Yes, they probably had fewer partners than is common now but that is most likely a function of the fact that people used to marry a lot earlier than they do now.

Things haven't changed that much! Go write that 100 times on the blackboard Bart Simpson.

Which brings me to this telling quote from Amanda Hess.

And as UCLA sociologist Jessica Carbino recently told Ann Friedman at The Cut, “men and women both agree that men should actively pursue female partners and that women should be passive recipients to their advances,” and that “when women do not adhere to these scripts they are viewed negatively.”  

The key phrase here is "men and women both agree". Both Hess and the woman she is quoting, Ann Friedman, clearly think that men and women should not agree to this. And it's important to keep that in mind as we move on to this next line from Ann Friedman:

We all get that the rules of traditional courtship — in which men make every single advance and women demur or acquiesce — are dead, but we haven’t replaced them with a new standard operating procedure.  

Because that is a lie. The problem is that all attempts to replace the rules of traditional courtship have failed and Friedman's own piece makes this point. The title to her magazine piece is "When Women Pursue Sex, Even Men Don't Get It."

There is an odd double argument here that is typical of progressives: on the one hand, they claim that world has changed and that the old ways are no longer valid while, on the other hand, the bemoan the fact that the world has not changed. The problem is human nature. It doesn't change so the old ways remain valid. Perhaps they can be improved, but they can't be replaced. Progressives try to ignore human nature, or pretend that it is infinitely malleable, thus they end up at this impasse over and over again.

What does it have to do with "slut-shaming"? Well, let's go back to that teaser quote I gave you yesterday:

 The study found that women—even women who were more promiscuous themselves—rated the Joan with 20 partners as less competent, emotionally stable, warm, and dominant than the Joan who’d only boasted two.

Courtship is all about getting to sex under conditions that you want and when we study that the issue is competence. It's a skill. If you are man, you have to engage a woman and develop a relationship without making your pursuit of sex so blunt that it turns her off. But you have to be careful not to overdo it for if you are too indirect she'll file you under "just friends" and you don't want that. A woman, likewise, has serious challenges. She uses sex to entice men (look at how women dress before you even think about challenging this)  but she wants to play her cards, especially the one that treats sex as an actual possibility, close to her chest. If she is direct about her desire for sex, then she will be filed under "just for sex" and she doesn't want that. That's what human nature looks like.

Now go back to the assessment of Joan above and you can see that the real reason women don't rate her highly is perceived lack of competence. All the things listed are valuable personal relationship skills (competent, emotionally stable, warm, and dominant). Women don't want to be close to sluts not because they judge them as tainted but because they think they are losers and we all prefer to associate with winners so that we can learn to be like them. Thus even women who are promiscuous themselves would prefer to associate with non-promiscuous Joan.

And men, as boringly conventional as this may seem, admire men who seem to be successful at talking women into bed because that is a competence they want for themselves. And they want it even if they don't want to have a lot of sex partners themselves, which is the case for most men. (Hooper in Brideshead Revisited wants to see action in battle but not a lot, "only enough to say I've been in it" One hell of a lot of men feel that way about seducing women; the desire to feel competent, of knowing that you can do it, is more important than having a whole lot of partners.)

But that leaves a key question unanswered: Are women right to think more promiscuous women are less competent at work, life and love? My experience is that, yes, they are right. I can't prove that although I suspect that if researchers looked for such evidence in an open-minded way, they would find lots of it. (My experience has also been that amount of sex experience has nothing at all to do with how good a woman is at it. Any virgin could figure out in the first few months of her first sexual experience anything and everything that the woman with twenty partners knows. And the odds are that "Joan" probably isn't very good at connecting with another human being, the principal evidence for this being that she has gone through twenty different partners without settling down into a meaningful, loving relationship by her early twenties.)

For now I'll just note that there are one hell of a lot of articles out there by women who went to New York or some other big city looking to live the Sex-and-the-City lifestyle and then get married who are finding themselves single and wondering why.

The rest of this series:
Wednesday: The truth about slut-shaming
Thursday: Why women sit around talking about the real or alleged promiscuity of other women

Caveats and other bullets:

•  The numbers four and seven will seem low to you if you read a lot of breathless pieces about our hook-up culture. That's the impact of media who have to have something sensationalist to report and, therefore, create the impression that everyone is doing it.
• As I hinted in an earlier post, choosing the number twenty for promiscuous Joan strikes me as a bit much. With statistics suggesting that most women report just four sexual partners over an entire lifetime, Joan having twenty by her early twenties is way off the scale. As is the case with most things, there are degrees of sluttiness. (and this remains true even if most women are lying about having had only four.)
• If the previous bullet hurts your feelings, I don't care. Go find someone else to complain to.
• Related to the above point, notice the interesting verbal fudging in this report on the study from Science Omega: "Even when the female participants themselves reported a high number of sexual partners or liberal views on casual sex, the preference they expressed for less permissive friends was constant." It's one thing to say you have "liberal views" on casual sex and another to see a woman who has been logging as many partners per year as most women claim in an entire lifetime.
• I think that there is a period in many women's lives when they will befriend a slut. You might call it the Samantha Jones phenomenon. When you're in an experimental phase, it's helpful to have a buddy who goes just a little too far to contrast with your own behaviour. (By the way, if you're a guy and your girlfriend or wife suddenly befriends a slut, look out, she's about to start cheating on you.)

Women sit around and discuss the sluttiness of other women

They do! Everybody knows this but it doesn't fit the feminist narrative in any way shape or form. Why not? Because any feminist narrative at all has to be based on an assumption of solidarity among women or, at least, the possibility of solidarity among women. That cannot be the case if women have a propensity to undermine other women for not living up to complicated social norms regarding sexual behaviour and sexual presentation.

And that is why the study I discussed yesterday is so dangerous to the feminist cause; for it shows us a deep-seated psychological tendency in women. Thus the rather desperate tu quoque response from Amanda Hess in Slate's XX blog.

Slutty Joan is just another statistic tossed onto the mounting pile of evidence of girl on girl crime, in which sexism is inflicted on women by other women. But lately, the public fascination with female infighting has threatened to let men—and really, the society we all live in—off the hook for hating on ladies who get around.

Only if we keep the focus on men as the source of the problem can there be feminist solidarity and, thus, any evidence that women do this as much or, in this case, more than men do will cause panic.

"Joan", by the way, was the name assigned to the woman whom women participating in the study were asked to evaluate. They were given near identical profiles of "Joan", the significant difference is that in one profile she'd had more than twenty sex partners while she'd had only two in the other. The details of the different responses are interesting but I am saving that for a little later. The key thing to note here is how determined Amanda Hess is to keep the blame on men and not women.

The American Association of University Women is equally determined:

But lost in the overwhelming amount of discussion surrounding these incidents is the fact that this is not a women-hating-on-women problem; the problem is that our entire culture hates on women. It is not that women are catty and men are not. It’s that culture teaches us women should be a certain way, and any woman who dares fall outside those guidelines is fair game. 

The problem here, as I suggest at the very top is  that everyone knows that these issues play out differently among men and women. Don't believe me that everyone already knows this? Well, take a close look at how Amanda Hess parses the issue:

That finding could be interpreted as evidence that men engage in social policing of sexual behavior less than women do. But it’s really just that they’re saving their judgment for women like Joan instead of for each other.

Hess grasps the problem fully and gives it a name: social policing. Then she tries to diffuse it with a tu quoque about men. The problem is that she is describing two different behaviours. For "social policing" means collectively judging people and that is not the same as individually judging "Joan"; sitting around talking about people, which is what women tend to do, and individually judging them, which is what Hess describes men as doing, are very different activities. I'm not saying that one is better than the other but there is no denying that social policing will have broader social implications, that being the whole point of social policing in the first place.

Men are, of course, aware, often painfully so, of the fact that others judge them and of how they judge the women they are with. I knew a guy back in university who could never introduce the women he had relationships with to his friends because of the way he imagined they might judge her This, not incidentally, gave all the rest of us a powerful hint about how he judged our girlfriends but, and this is the important thing, it was a hint because we didn't sit around discussing these things. The importance difference is that men don't spend nearly as much time sitting around evaluating men or women as women do. Look up a typical male site on celebrity women and you will find something like Esquire's Women We Love, a site that singles out exceptionally attractive women. Do the same with women's sites and you will land on something like Go Fug Yourself, a site that spends most of its time mocking women for making bad clothing choices.

Of course, as I have been claiming all along, this is no surprise to anyone.  This is what women do, which is not to say that all women do it or that no men do but that this is a much more common trait amongst women than amongst men. Because it is.

Why? Any answer is going to be circular. The simple answer is that women and girls sit around socially establishing norms of behaviour because they have a deep need to know what the social norms of behaviour are. That's circular because it is the discussions that create the social norms in the first place.

You can see this most obviously with clothing. Right now we are just reaching what I suspect is the end of the fashion for skin-tight leggings. A woman can wear these right now and receive no criticism for doing so. If, however, a woman had appeared wearing such leggings in 2004, she would have been dismissed as a total exhibitionist slut for doing so. On the other hand, having your thong show above the waist of your low-waited pants was perfectly acceptable in 2004 and would be regarded as cheap and slutty now.

And you can see the next stage coming in that the most fashionable women are leaving leggings behind and moving to a softer, more-romantic look. The woman who still wears leggings a couple of years from now will be seen as desperate for attention. That is how "social policing" works. It requires a constantly shifting set of criteria because the social clique needs this to maintain its power. If, as the case with men, styles of fashion remained roughly the same year after year (despite a lot of effort on the part of the fashion industry to change this), then the cliques of women who do the social policing would lose all power.

It's interesting in this regard that the people doing the study chose to give promiscuous "Joan" twenty notches on her bedpost. To me, that suggests that standards of promiscuity have changed over the years because the researchers obviously felt they needed to go quite high*.

I'll end with a teaser for tomorrow. You might think that the problem with promiscuous "Joan" in the eyes of other women was that she was cheap or easy. You'd be wrong. Women saw her as lacking in "virtue" in the Aristotelian sense,

The study found that women—even women who were more promiscuous themselves—rated the Joan with 20 partners as less competent, emotionally stable, warm, and dominant than the Joan who’d only boasted two.

Those are competencies of various sorts rather that what you might guess the case against "sluttiness", however defined, might be. And that is interesting because it might just line up with mens' attitudes. For men don't hate sluts, however much Amanda Hess wants to insist they do. They just don't want to be ion love with one.

The Cornell study itself didn’t rate male attitudes about promiscuous women (or vice versa), but as lead author Zhana Vrangalova told Science, that’s partly because “study after study has found that sexually permissive women are discriminated against by potential romantic partners.”

I started off talking about different standards of rationality and how behaviours that can seem irrational can, if we do a little detective work, turn out to be supremely rational. That is what I am going to suggest is the case with women's harsh assessment of promiscuous Joan in tomorrow's post.

The rest of this series:
Wednesday: The truth about slut-shaming.
Friday: Why women judge "sluts" negatively.



* To a point that is getting a little ridiculous.  If someone becomes sexually active between the ages of 16 and 20, to get to more than twenty partners by your early twenties is quite a pace. Most reliable statistics indicate that the vast majority of people will have fewer than ten sex partners in their entire lifetimes.

The truth about slut shaming

One of the worst things you can do in the modern world is to come up with a study that runs against the narrative. For example, hundreds of thousands of women took to the street in "slutwalks" a few years ago now so that must be because "slut-shaming" is something men do to oppress women. Right?

Well, no, of course not and anyone who has gone to high school should know that slut-shaming is primarily something women do to other women. But women can't be the problem. Men have to be the problem. (You will, of course, meet men who will condemn this or that woman for being "a slut" but it's almost always because they have some personal grievance, however fantastic, against her. It's primarily women who will sit around in a group talking about "what a slut Shelley is," even though they have no other reason to dislike her.)

Anyway, the study established that women don't want to be friends with promiscuous women. (Promiscuous defined here as having had twenty or more partners by your early twenties, which strikes me as a pretty good definition, although I would have said ten myself.) I don't think anyone who isn't completely absorbed in the feminist narrative will be surprised at that.

What might strike a few people as counter-intuitive is this:

Head researcher Zhana Vrangalova says: "What surprised us in this study is how unaccepting promiscuous women were of other promiscuous women when it came to friendships – these are the very people one would think they could turn to for support."

The theory the researchers came up with was that women worried the social stigma of the promiscuity woman would rub off on them if they befriended her. That's probably not completely crazy but I suspect it misses something more profound.

Before we get to that, however, let's turn to men and see how they respond to promiscuous men.

Men's views, on the other hand, are less uniform – favoring the sexually permissive potential friend, the non-permissive one or showing no preference for either when asked to rate them on 10 different friendship attributes.

This is one of the reasons that men tend to think of themselves and other men as "rational", we tend to pride ourselves on judging each case based on the particular facts we think apply in that case.  In fact, you could just as easily argue that have a general policy towards everyone else, as women tend to do with regards to promiscuity, is equally rational. Either way what makes a behaviour rational is that it is consistent and can be explained in terms of some reason or reasons. Although the person doesn't have to have that reason in mind when they make the decision to be rational. The rationality behind actions (even our own actions) is often something we have to dig out.

What I find most significant, and no one else seems to have noticed this. is that promiscuous men respond to other promiscuous men in a similar way to that which promiscuous women respond to other promiscuous women. Which is to say, they didn't want to be friends with them. Unlike the case for promiscuous women, however, the researchers provided a reason why the men might feel that way,

Promiscuous men favored less sexually experienced men, however, if they viewed other promiscuous men as potentially interested in stealing their girlfriends.

Why wouldn't women act this way for the same reason? What are we to make of that? Is it crazy to think that women, especially promiscuous women, might worry about competition from other women? No, I don't think that's the whole explanation but I suspect it's part of it. I do know this: any time you meet a woman who is sometimes intensely jealous of other women, you can be relatively sure that she has "stolen" at least one man from another woman.

But why do I bring this up at all, you ask, if I don't think it's the explanation? I mention it because I think it points at the real reason; it points at the thing that doesn't fit the feminist narrative and that is that most people want a particular kind of relationship. They want:

1. A relationship based on trust and commitment and that implies monogamy.
2. And they want a relationship in which the man takes the lead sexually.

I know, I know, according to the feminist narrative they aren't supposed to want these things. But they do!

No, I can't explain it, at least not completely but I think there is lots of evidence that it is that way and I will discuss that the next two days.

The rest of this series:
Tomorrow: Why women sit around talking about the real or alleged promiscuity of other women.
Friday: Why women judge "sluts" negatively

Who is better at separating sex and emotion?

I take it no one is going to accuse me of being sexist for suggesting that women lie about sex. Why am I so confident? Because I remember that all the good, politically correct people insisted that everyone lies about sex during the Lewinsky scandal and the class that is "everyone" necessarily includes women.

In any case, men and women sometimes lie about sex. Perhaps they do it for the same reasons and perhaps they do it for different reasons. Here is one explanation that suggests that they do it for different reasons. Don't read it to agree or disagree but rather to understand the logic. Get inside it. Think the way someone like Dr. Frank Pittman thinks

While there is a common assumption that men and women fall in love at different rates, or that men cheat primarily for sex while women are more likely to be looking for an emotional connection, this may not always be the case. Dr. Frank Pittman suggests that men are typically more honest about the sex than women, perhaps because men are better able to separate the issue of sex from that of emotional attachment. He believes that this is due in large part to the fact that men have their genitals on the outside rather than inside and so men seem to separate sexual response from a lasting and committed relationship more easily than do women.

The line that should jump out at you, because it is so unusual to see men praised for anything these days is, "men are typically more honest about sex than women." That is in direct violation of the Althouse rule that says that it is politically correct to talk about differences between men and women only so long as you do so in a way that is flattering to women.

There is a reason why Dr. Pittman is being critical of women here. It's because he more or less has to be because of the next step in the argument. Admitting that men might be more honest about sex than women allows him to dodge another, even more troubling admission.

In his practice, he says that he has seen many cases where men admit to the sex and deny any emotional connection to the affair partner, while women tend to talk of strong emotions and feelings of love while denying that sex took place. He believes that if a man denies the sexual context of the affair and dwells on the emotional connection above all else, he is probably lying. He finds that women, on the other hand, more easily talk of an emotional connection and the feelings induced by an affair while denying any sexual context to the entire episode.

I've added the emphasis on the words "lying" and "denying" to highlight the dilemma poor Dr. Pittman finds himself on the horns of. Notice that when a man "denies" he is "lying". A woman, on the other hand, is only "denying". So the Althouse rule is allowed to slip in a minor way in the first paragraph I cite in order to save it in the second. Or, to put it another way, Dr. Pittman allows that men are typically more honest about sex than women in order to avoid its obvious corollary, which is that women typically lie about sex.

Before getting to that, let's talk about men. Why would a man be forthright about the emotional connection while lying about the sex? This is not a trick question: he lies about the emotions because he wants to reduce the harm the affair might do to his marriage. In a sense this is crazy because if anything is going to threaten your relationship or marriage it is your wife finding out that you are having sex with another woman. And while that is true, having an affair that involves both sex and an emotional connection is a much more serious risk; it is, in fact, almost certainly fatal to your marriage. Restricting the affair to just sex is safer; you can have a meaningless affair without any risk to your marriage. No, your wife isn't going to see it that way but she doesn't have to find out does she? No, I'm not advocating that. The point is that that is the way the guy thinks and he isn't crazy to do so. An affair that was purely about sex would be the easiest to maintain and the easiest to break off. He avoids building an emotional connect or, if he can't do that, lies to himself about the emotional connection he is building with his lover in order to pretend that this can all be easy.

Remember Sheila, whom we were discussing just the other day? Her affair is like that:

'I love Peter dearly,' Sheila says. 'He's a good husband, and father. I like cooking with him and gossiping about the neighbours. He's my pal and I'd never want to lose that. Sex with Michael is a purely separate thing; it's about erotic abandonment, being seen as just a woman rather than as Peter's wife, or "the doctor" or a mum. Any working mother will know what I mean. Every woman needs something that is hers alone. Some of my friends ride, some sing in choirs, I have Michael.'

And it's important to recognize the deep truth here, as hard as you may find it to associate truth with something a cheating spouse said. For the blunt reality is that if Sheila allowed herself to fall in love with Michael she'd put her marriage at immediate risk whereas an affair that is "just about sex" is only threat if she gets caught.

But that is supposed to be the way that only men think, which is what the good Dr. Pittman meant when he said men are typically more honest about sex. But, you know, I don't entirely believe that. Yes, there are some men who are very good at separating sex and emotion. Notoriously so. But most men aren't like that. Most men tend to fall in love with the women who have sex with them. I know I do. In fact, I have tended to be deeply in love with women long before any sex happened.

And the man who can separate sex and emotion could also be described as the man who is unable to connect the two. In fact, he usually is loudly denigrated for this. The only time men are praised for being able to separate sex and emotion and, therefore, to be more honest about sex is when it is necessary to provide cover for women.

Now there are good evolutionary reasons that I won't go into in any depth here why women, all the talk to the contrary, might actually be very good at separating sex and emotion. To give just one example: women typically live longer than men. Being s strong widow who can care for and raise children without a man is a good trait to have in evolutionary terms. Not all women will have this trait but most certainly will.

Men, on the other hand, have considerable reason to bond emotionally with women they have sex with. Your children will have a much better chance of surviving and passing on your genes if you stay with her and help her raise the children. That's one approach. The alternative is the shotgun approach where a man tries to impregnate as many women as possible thereby increasing the chance that some will survive to pass on his genes. And, yes, there is a small subset of men who become notoriously good at having lots of partners while avoiding emotional ties with any or most of them. Less often discussed, there are women who are good at tying one man down emotionally while having lots of affairs. But most men and women will bond with the partner they have sex with and will see continued good sex as part of that love.

There is, however, no reason at all to believe that women are less likely to be good at separating sex and emotion. Again, don't take my word for it: who is it that typically insists that love in a relationship doesn't have to be connected to sex? It isn't usually the man.

There will be more ...

Nothing is ever women's fault, a continuing series

In the book, Bergner ... lays out a diverse body of research that threatens to disrupt all the modern stereotypes of female sexuality: That women are not visual creatures; that their sex drive is lower than men’s; that they’re aroused by love, not sex; and that they’re naturally fitted to be sexual objects, not agents.

And who is to blame for this? If you guessed men, go to the head of the class.

If society didn’t realize all of that before, Bergner writes, it’s because the men who run it didn’t want to. “Women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force,” he concludes. In the Middle Ages, it was constrained by the idea that “lust-drunk witches … left men ‘smooth,’ devoid of their genitals.” In the last century, it was constrained by Freud’s theory that women have “a weaker sexual instinct” than men. Now, it’s constrained by modern evolutionary psychology that says that “women are rigged by their genes to seek the comfort of relationships.” Across culture, Bergner writes, “with scientific or God-given confidence, girls and women are told how they should feel.” Mostly, they should feel comfortable sexualizing themselves, but not men.

That doesn't pass the smell test.  Men don't want women to recognize their own sexual desire? Does that sound even remotely credible?

Consider, for example, the Facebook app called "Bang With Friends". Created by men, the app allows users to anonymously pick people from their friends list whom they'd like to have sex with. If two people both pick one another, the app lets them both know and they can have sex. Notice the strategy: straight to sex with no complicated social ritual to go through first.

That's not the way all men think all the time but it is the way a lot of men think a lot of the time. Women occasionally feel like that too but only a disgusting pig of a man would go so far as to make a computer app to make it actually possible. To turn around and claim that it is men are telling women that they should not feel these things is bullshit.

And who is it that always insists they want love and not sex?  Or, the dread of it, who insists that they don't want "just sex"? Those are things women say and yet we are supposed to believe that this happens because men are scared of women's  "desire—its inherent range and innate power". That is bullshit on stilts.

No, I don't know why women keep saying they want things they don't actually desire. I don't understand why women fall in love with men they desire and then allow the way they think of him to change so that they no longer desire him. Perhaps they can't help it.

Whatever the reason, Its! Not! Men's! Fault!

The problem needs more careful analysis than what the author of the piece I cite above, Amanda Hess, has given it. For starters, look at stereotype #1 from the list above.  Who is it that tells us that women aren't turned on by visual things? It's women. That tells us that women have, at the very least, internalized the notion that they are not visual creatures when it comes to sex. Or, to put it more baldly, women really believe it when they say they are not turned on by erotic images. But they are aroused by them.

This has been proved by repeated studies in which women were monitored by devices that measure their sexual response while being shown images. And women are not exactly subtle about what they do respond to:

The only strong preference Chivers found among her female subjects? When she presented straight women with photographs of human genitals, their blood “rushed much, much more when an erection occupied the screen” than when a flaccid penis or a female “crotch shot” appeared.

Well, I'm not surprised by that. Any man who has had a reasonable life has had the wonderful pleasure of watching an aroused woman go gaga over his erect penis and marveled at how very, very different that is from the public image she presents. But ask any woman you know if she'd be interested in looking at porn featuring men with erections and the odds are that she'll say "no". She'll deny that such a thing could possibly do anything for her.

(If you conducted a study where women kept under secret surveillance while left alone with porn, I'm certain that the vast majority would spend some quality time with the porn. And then they'd turn around and lie about it. If forced to admit the truth, a good number would then insist that their reaction that day was unusual and not a reflection of what they are really like.)

Part of the problem is that people, such as the author of the piece I cite here, confuse desire and want. There are lots of things that I desire that I do not want. I might desire to have sex with Hillary but I'm married and so is she and I want my marriage and respect hers whereas I merely desire her body. I don't even know that she'd be interested. Likewise, I may sometimes have a desire to tell my friends certain blunt truths about them but I want their friendship more than I desire to blurt out whatever it is that is bugging me so I don't.

The real problem women have, and it's something right in Bergner's book (although he apparently can't grasp the importance of it), is that women don't understand their own desires. In his book he discusses a study where men and women were show potentially erotic images and their arousal was measured objectively by measuring blood flow to their genitals. At the same time, the test subjects were given a keyboard to record their subjective sense of their arousal. The men's subjective responses were 100 percent in accord with what the objective measurements indicated. Here is what happened with the women:

... with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord.

Notice the phrase "especially the straight women". For everyone knows what the cause of the problem is. Women tend not to understand their own desires because they don't want to understand them. More to come in tomorrow's post.

Who is supposed to fix this problem? Part 2

More from that New York Times article that inspired yesterday's post.

Dietrich Klusmann, a psychologist at the University of Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, has provided a glimpse into the bedrooms of longtime couples. His surveys, involving a total of almost 2,500 subjects, comprise one of the few systematic comparisons of female and male desire at progressive stages of committed relationships. He shows women and men in new relationships reporting, on average, more or less equal lust for each other. But for women who’ve been with their partners between one and four years, a dive begins — and continues, leaving male desire far higher. (Within this plunge, there is a notable pattern: over time, women who don’t live with their partners retain their desire much more than women who do.) 

It's that last paragraph parenthesis that jumps out at me. Similarly, some couples also report that changing to separate bedrooms improves the wife's sex drive.

No, I'm not suggesting that you move out of the house to save your marriage but notice how the moral psychology works. If you normally sleep in different places, it takes a commitment for one of you to walk to the other one's place. Or it takes an effort to entice the other to come to your place.

Let's go back to Linneah and her avoidance tactics from yesterday's post again. She'd go to bed early, concentrate on a book and then not respond to her husband's overtures until he gave up. One reason she can do that is because they are living together and sleeping in the same bed. If, OTOH, they are not always in the same bed together, she has to earn his attention. If she wants to be together with him then she has to show commitment and interest every single time, even if that only amounts to actually getting up and going to his place or inviting him to hers.

Let's look at Sheila from the first of this series again. Here is what she values about her marriage:

He's a good husband, and father. I like cooking with him and gossiping about the neighbours. He's my pal and I'd never want to lose that.

Well, how did poor Peter get to be that way?  He got to be that way by giving Sheila the things she said she wanted. She wanted him to be the father of her children and to be her pal so he became that. And she paid him back by losing interest in him sexually. And she did this years before she started having sex with another man. the actual affair, when it came, was merely the consummation of a betrayal that had actually taken place years before.

There is also evidence, by the way, that suggests that men who do a lot of the housework get less sex than men who don't. I hope you are beginning to see the pattern.If not, here is some more.

One theory holds that it’s a challenge for both sexes to maintain passion over the long-term because it’s threatening to desire the same person from whom we seek security and true understanding. It leaves us feeling too vulnerable. As Stephen A. Mitchell, one of the leaders of relational psychoanalysis, described it: “Sustaining desire for something important from someone important is the central danger of emotional life. What is so dangerous about desiring someone you have is that you can lose him or her.”

Remember all those feminist rants about men being afraid of commitment? What distinguishes those men is that they understand women better than women understand themselves.

Esther Perel, a couples therapist and author of “Mating in Captivity,” emphasizes a separateness at the heart of longstanding passion. “Many couples confuse love with merging,” she writes. “This mix-up is a bad omen for sex. To sustain élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross. Eroticism requires distance.” 

Exactly. And which partner to marriage—the man or thge woman—do you think is most likely to make the mistake of confusing love with merging? More to come tomorrow ...

Who is supposed to fix this problem?

[F]or many women, the cause of their sexual malaise appears to be monogamy itself. It is women much more than men who have H.S.D.D., who don’t feel heat for their steady partners. Evolutionary psychologists argue that this comes down to innate biology, that men are just made with stronger sex drives — so men will settle for the woman who’s always near. But the evidence for an inborn disparity in sexual motivation is debatable. A meta-analysis done by the psychologists Janet Hyde and Jennifer L. Petersen at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, incorporates more than 800 studies conducted between 1993 and 2007. It suggests that the very statistics evolutionary psychologists use to prove innate difference — like number of sexual partners or rates of masturbation — are heavily influenced by culture. All scientists really know is that the disparity in desire exists, at least after a relationship has lasted a while. 

The standard cultural explanation for marital infidelity for centuries now has been that men won't control themselves. As I've discussed many times before here, there isn't actually much evidence for that and serious study of female sexual response is, as the quote from the New York Times above indicates, is demolishing that.

HSDD means "hypoactive sexual-desire disorder" by the way, "hypoactive" meaning the opposite of "hyperactive". It's odd to call it a disorder as it is quite normal. In any case, it's a classic female pattern behaviour, not a male one. And it becomes pretty obvious, once you acknowledge this, that men don't cheat for the reasons a show like Mad Men would have us believe. That is to say, men don't cheat because they have some deep "inward" flaw that causes them to seek more and more sexual partners or because they are less mature emotionally or less giving than women. Rather, they cheat because women get bored of them as partners in a steady relationship and men, after trying hard to "rekindle romance" finally give up in despair and seek love elsewhere.

The above is all from a New York Times article by the way. The article is about how drug companies are trying to produce a pill that will increase women's desire and thereby solve the problem. That's one way to solve the problem I suppose.

But read the sample interview of one test subject from the study and you'll begin to suspect that her sex drive might not be the real problem:

“When your partner initiated sexual activity over the past eight weeks, did you show avoidance behavior?” 

“Yes.” 

“Like earlier to bed?” 

“Yes.” Linneah’s voice lurched louder; she laughed; it was a relief to talk bluntly. 

“Do you have pleasant feelings when you’re touched?” 

“Yes.” 

Later, after her appointment, she told me that in fact she has orgasms pretty much every time she and her husband have sex — that wasn’t the problem. “There’s something that’s stopping me from wanting it,” she said. “I don’t know what it is. I can’t tell you what it is.” 

And any man who has been in a prolonged relationship with a woman will be familiar with this scenario:

Around once a week, her husband tried to reach through the invisible barriers she built — the going up to bed early, the intense concentration on a book, the hoping he was too tired to want anything but sleep. “He’ll move closer to me in bed, or put his arm around me, or rub my back.” She willed herself not to refuse him. And mostly, she didn’t. Usually they had sex about four times each month. But it upset her that she had to force herself and that she put up those barriers to deter him from reaching more often.

Notice how she doesn't have any problems enjoying sex. It's the fact that she has to force herself to start with this particular man that bothers her. She doesn't want to work at sex, not even marital sex; she just wants it to just happen magically. If  Linneah were to cheat on her husband with another man, all those problems would disappear. Then it would be magic again. For a while anyway.

A lot of people have been saying, aha, see monogamy doesn't work for women and that is why we need open marriages. But, before you go that route, notice how ordinary her problem is. It's the sort of problem that just about everybody has about something. I don't know about you but I have  hard time getting into the shower some days. I much prefer being clean to being dirty and yet there is always a moment of hesitation. Once I do it, I feel better for it. The same thing happens with exercise. I feel much better as soon as I'm going but the duty of it drags me down. But if I put some imaginative effort into making it work for me, I can do those things. Linneah could do that with sex.

The point being that any other era of history would have described Linneah's problem using words like "selfish" and "lazy". All she has to do is make the effort and she'll he happier, her husband will be happier and, I suspect, everyone who has to deal with her will be happier because women who have regular orgasms are much better people than women who don't. But she won't do that.

Cheating woman post of the day

I'm doing a lot of reading about women who cheat and the reasons they do it in order to create a sort of virtual affair in my imagination that I will use for some fiction I am creating so there will be a a lot of posts on the subject here.

I found this quote interesting:

'I love Peter dearly,' Sheila says. 'He's a good husband, and father. I like cooking with him and gossiping about the neighbours. He's my pal and I'd never want to lose that. Sex with Michael is a purely separate thing; it's about erotic abandonment, being seen as just a woman rather than as Peter's wife, or "the doctor" or a mum. Any working mother will know what I mean. Every woman needs something that is hers alone. Some of my friends ride, some sing in choirs, I have Michael.' 

Why is that interesting? It's the larger context that makes it interesting. All by itself it's just one of millions of examples of the sort of banal lies women and men tell themselves and others to excuse their desire for illicit sex. But now read the quote that opens the piece and think about it again.

One of the challenges Sheila hadn't expected was where to hide her sexy lingerie. 'I went out and spent a fortune at Myla on gorgeous transparent bras and G-strings – things I'd stopped wearing for my husband, Peter, even before we were married. 

'The problem was where to keep them and how to wash them? I could have worn them every day but after 13 years of greying M&S pants and flesh-coloured bras Peter would have been rightly suspicious. I ended up stuffing all my new buys inside the legs of a manky old tracksuit. I washed them by hand, locked in the bathroom, and dried them with a hairdryer as I didn't dare hang them up.'

The line that jumps right out at me is: "things I'd stopped wearing for my husband, Peter, even before we were married." Imagine Sheila and Peter very much in love with one another in the days before their marriage. She has sexy lingerie but has stopped wearing it for him. He asks why. She says she doesn't feel comfortable wearing it anymore (we know she said that that because that is what women always say when they don't want to wear lingerie for a man). Now flash forward and there she is standing in the lingerie store buying a sheer bra with matching G-string for her lover Micheal. Does anyone imagine that she looked at the G-string and thought, "That looks comfortable."

(I also love the line about how her husband Peter would have gotten suspicious if she'd worn her lingerie more regularly. The real problem, of course, is that he would have wanted to have sex when he saw her in lingerie and he would have wanted the kind of wild erotic abandonment that such lingerie suggests and she doesn't want to give that to him anymore, in fact she stopped wanting to give him that even before they got married. "Any working mother will know what I mean. Every woman needs something that is hers alone." The real crime is the thing she thinks of as something that "just happened by itself", that she stopped loving and started denying her husband; it's just collateral damage that another man ends up enjoying the thing she denies the man who should be getting her love.)

And do note her age! Sheila is in her mid forties at the time of the affair. Age is often given as a reason not to dress erotically anymore. A woman will say she could wear clothing when she was in her twenties  but now she feels ridiculous in it and she'll keep saying that right up to the day in her mid forties when she suddenly wants to feel sexy for her new lover and then it's bring on the G-string.

Myla only sells one G-string (famous because it was once featured on Sex and the City), by the way, so you can see for yourself what she bought and wore for her lover Michael. That's a key element in any affair. The sex has to feel really illicit and daring and what better way than to buy yourself something like that. It's a positive joy for Sheila to do this thing for herself, and Michael of course. It's understandable. Sin and betrayal is always understandable because we all sin and betray. One of the reasons to have an affair is to step out a bit and do things you wouldn't normally do. So you buy the sexy lingerie or get a lot more meticulous about your grooming, or wear nicer clothes, start reading poetry, follow more sophisticated culture like opera, ballet or poetry, or follow much less sophisticated culture like going to the track or the fights. All in all, you create a more interesting version of yourself. And you create this new you for yourself!

Think about Sheila washing her underwear by hand and drying it with the hair dryer and finally hiding it in an old track suit. That's an adventure! It's like being a spy. It's fun.The effort involved only increases the fun because she likes getting into it.

Yes, it was important for lover Michael to be thrilled when he saw her in the G-string but that is still a selfish desire because Sheila did it to support her secret vision of herself as a great and exotic lover. Most women are fantastic lovers when they put the effort into it, by the way. That's the easy part. The thing that needs explaining is why they think it's fair to stop doing so after the man has committed his life to them and sometimes then turn around and start doing for some other guy. And the answer is that the whole thing was purely selfish from the get-go. Sheila sought attachment and love when it suited her, and all of society sanctioned this desire of hers, but now that she no longer craves that she is having an affair.

But suppose she had not had the affair but everything else remained the same. That too would have been a betrayal. And if Peter were to complain about this, he would have been told to man up and deal with the fact that women change as they get older. But the only thing that has really changed is her feeling for him.

Which is why comfort isn't really the issue. If comfort really mattered to women, they would all wear their manky old track suits every day instead of hiding their lingerie in them. Note above that Sheila now favours her husband with Marks and Sparks utility knickers that she wears so long they are greying! Does anyone think that she does that for comfort? The real issue is effort. Women (and men) either do or do not make an effort to be attractive for others. That effort is the real problem and not discomfort.

The affair really gets unfair if we consider poor Peter who stopped getting the special treatment even before they got married! But she says she loves him:

'He's a good husband, and father. I like cooking with him and gossiping about the neighbours. He's my pal and I'd never want to lose that.'

Well, it's much easier to say things like that than face up to the fact that you're a selfish jerk.

On the other hand, why did she get away with it? I don't mean the affair that her husband, presumably, doesn't know about. No, the problem is that she started cheating him years before when she stopped making the effort she was willing to make early in their relationship. It was all bait and switch. She wore sexy lingerie when she was alone and wanted to attract a man. Once she had one, she said she didn't feel comfortable and confident in sexy clothes anymore so she stopped wearing them. But the point is that she let herself stop feeling comfortable and confident. Anyone want to bet that she didn't start exercising and being a bit more meticulous about her intimate grooming when she bought that G-string? Why is it okay for a woman to give a man that sort of extra effort when she is interested in having her self esteem propped up but deny it to him after she has vowed to love all the days of her life? For it's that kind of betrayal, which receives the full sanction of our culture, that makes the other kind possible.

I can easily imagine (because I've heard many women argue this) that it is unfair to expect a woman to feel the same spark that motivated her to make such efforts in the early days of a relationship later in marriage. I'm not sure why it's unfair. Is it because it would require effort and dedication?

 I stopped fancying Peter years ago. The girls were small and sex with him had long been just another chore, like loading the dishwasher. 

Think of how different that statement would be treated coming from a man talking about his wife. Do you think he'd get a sympathetic write up in the paper?

Final thought: the article suggests another motive for why more women are cheating on their husbands.

Thousands of women like Sheila are enjoying what they believe to be no-strings flings. Having witnessed the devastation divorce wreaked on their parents' generation, they have no desire to end their marriages. Instead they are searching for variety in an otherwise humdrum routine.

 How lovely, she's cheating in order to save her marriage.

Adrian Lyne's date rape movie (plus some more ranting on female infidelity)

I watched Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful last week and two things struck me about it. The first was that the first thirty-five  minutes features the most convincing portrayal of date rape I've ever seen on film. Of course, he didn't intend for it to be that. Lyne meant to paint a highly erotic portrait of a woman succumbing to an affair. (BTW: I say "succumbing" rather than initiating intentionally here. That's the mythology we all desperately want to believe about women.)

First of all, why is it date rape? Our heroine, Connie Summer, goes to the city during a windstorm and is quite literally blown into Paul Martel. He takes care of her (establishing a Daddy and little girl relationship between them) and, in the course of this, there is an unmistakeable erotic charge between them. She insists she has to leave and does. She goes back. Again the erotic charge is intense and again, she insists that she has to leave and does. Then she goes back again. This time she tries to leave but he grabs her. he takes her to bed where she is so upset by the experience that her whole body is shaking and she keeps pushing his hands away.

And then he keeps pushing until she gives in.

That's about as clear-cut an example of date rape as you will ever see. Which brings me to the second thing that really struck me about the movie: I can't find a single review in which this problem is noted. Not one. Harmless Christmas songs get the third degree but this very ugly movie scene gets let off free.)

Date rape is real. Yes, the notion has been oversold by some feminists but it is a real and horrifying thing that thousands of women go through every year. So why was it that a film which played up this sort of rape as if it were a great erotic thrill to watch got off without anyone calling Adrian Lyne on this?

Part of the answer is that it is erotically thrilling to watch. Yeah, I know, that's difficult but it's inescapable. Ninety percent of women eroticize their fears and the other ten percent lie about it. But there is more to it than that: our culture just can't face female infidelity. We supposedly live in an era with few taboos but this taboo is very much with us. The big reason there are so few successful neo noir films with female leads is because we just cannot accept a woman who cheats as a sympathetic character. A female Don Draper would get more hate male than any other character in TV history.

It's not that women don't cheat on their husbands. They do it with shocking regularity and the statistical gap between husbands who cheat and wives who cheat has all but vanished in recent years. (And, given that it is such a big taboo, you have to wonder how honest women are about this when responding to pollsters.)

But experts say that a large majority of the time, motivations differ by gender, with men searching for more sex or attention and women looking to fill an emotional void.

"Women tell me, 'I was lonely, not connected, I didn't feel close to my partner, and I was taken for granted,'" marriage and family therapist Winifred Reilly says. "They say they wanted to have someone who would look into their eyes and make them feel sexy again."

As the Lemon Girl would say in response to some woman's claim that she just wanted her "emotional void" filled, "Is that what that thing is called?".  These supposedly different-from-men reasons women have affairs are just lies women tell themselves and others in order to get laid. It's not unique to women; the classic male line is, "My wife doesn't understand me," as an excuse for an affair. It's not the quality of the tripe coming out of the mouths of women and men that is different but the extraordinary lengths people will go to not call women on stuff that they'd laugh at men for peddling.

And thus this  bizarre movie scene  in which the woman cheating is anything but willful about it. This is not the way people actually have affairs. They tend to do that with people they meet and get to know a bit first and not in feverish encounters with relative strangers with the sex following very quickly on the first meeting.

The movie does a good job of showing the sort of moral arguments that surround affairs. There is scene in which the heroine is out with two other women at a restaurant and they spot Paul Martel. Both these other women are unaware of the affair. One of them notes how handsome Martel is and suggests that she would cheerfully have sex with him. The other, an older woman, talks in foreboding terms about the damage infidelity does.

The problem is that all this discussion comes after the affair has already started in. In real life, a woman (or man) would feel a growing erotic charge to their friendship and be considering just these moral issues before initiating the affair. And it would be a very different movie if this discussion had been shown to take place before Connie initiated the affair. Then we'd see what she does in a very different light.

To have told the story that way would require us all to take the woman seriously as a moral adult. And we'd judge her far more harshly if we did that. When we see her swept up by passion and barely in control of herself it may feel edgy but movies like Unfaithful are just protecting our illusions about women.

The advice they give

Update: the comments below feature some harsh language that I regret. I regret it mostly because I detracted from my own point that we go to great lengths to avoid holding women morally accountable for affairs by using it (an argument that is mostly strengthened by the other comments). However, I did say it and then it was later commented upon so it would deeply dishonest to remove it now.

Here's the question:

A few months ago, my husband uncovered an affair I was having with an old flame. He moved out and initiated divorce proceedings, but in the time since, I was able to convince him that I am truly repentant and to give our marriage another chance for the sake of our children. The problem I have now is that he says that if we are to stay married, he wants it to be an open marriage. I've tried to tell him that I've gotten that out of my system and I don't want to be with anybody other than him, but he says there just isn't any way he can ever trust me again, he doesn't feel an obligation to be faithful to me anymore, and at least this way we're being honest about it. Prudie, it makes me ill to think about him being with another woman. I just want things to go back to how they used to be. How can I convince him that we need to be completely committed to each other in order for this to work?

Prudence, whose advice column it is, is rather hard on this woman and good for her. The level of selfishness displayed here is mind-boggling. That said, it's pretty typical for modern liberalism. This should remind you of the Clinton years: "Okay, I did it, now can we just move on!" Emily Yoffe (AKA "Prudence") quite rightfully castigates this woman for just wanting "things to go back to normal" but that's all Prudie herself has to offer. She is full of self righteousness but that is all you'll get from her.

What do I mean? Well, look at Prudie's advice. She gives some way at the bottom of the column when she finally finishes heaping moral abuse on the woman who wrote the question I cite above. If we isolate that advice, we can see how utterly useless it is:

It could be that you and your husband should simply be separated for a while—without the threat of divorce hanging over your heads—to see how each of you feel about this new status. While you do that, I will naturally recommend couples counseling. It sounds as if you both need a third party to help you communicate and to hold a mirror up to the consequences of each of your actions.

Tell me, how is there separating a little while "without the threat of divorce hanging over your heads" different from open marriage? "Just go away for a while and then come and start fresh," is all Yoffe has to recommend. And if that doesn't work, you can try a marriage counselor.

The thing that is missing from all this is actual stuff that the wife might do. And that is what is needed. The first point here is that she screwed up and it is up to her to beg forgiveness. He has no obligations towards her at all. He certainly isn't obliged to actually forgive. Forgiveness that isn't freely given is no forgiveness at all so he has to be perfectly free to dump her or else the whole exercise is pointless.

And if you notice one thing about this question and the advice given by Yoffe in response it is that neither woman is willing to give this man the dignity of granting him the moral freedom to forgive or not forgive. From the very start this woman acts as if he is under some sort of obligation to her, to their marriage and to their children. She is the one who betrayed his trust and destroyed everything their marriage was supposed to be and yet she hammers over and over again on his responsibilities.

Just read the narrative carefully and you can see this. Let's pull out all the "I" statements:

1. I was having [an affair] with an old flame. 
2. I was able to convince him that I am truly repentant and to give our marriage another chance for the sake of our children. 
3. I've tried to tell him that I've gotten that out of my system.
4. I don't want to be with anybody other than him ... it makes me ill to think about him being with another woman
5. I just want things to go back to how they used to be. 
6. I [want to] convince him that we need to be completely committed to each other.

That's the real story. It's the story of what she did, what she wants and the real reasons she wants these things. Everything she says about him is some responsibility she wants him to accept. Everything she says about herself is something that she wants or once wanted.

Look at #2 for example: he is under a moral obligation to work at the marriage for the sake of the children.

Look at #3: It was something she had to get out of her system! In #2 he was under a moral obligation to forgive her but she doesn't see her affair as a massive betrayal of trust but as something she had to "get out of my system".

#4 It makes her ill to think of him with another woman? Then why the hell isn't she groveling in front of him? She should be begging and pleading for a chance to win him back; begging not to get him back but just to be given the chance to try and win him back.

What should she do? Here's the alternative narrative she should be living.

1. She should tell him that she doesn't want an open marriage but she understands perfectly that he is going to need some time and space if he is going to get over this. It's only been a few months since this affair! 
2. She needs to make it clear to him that she understands that even if he leaves her she still owes him a long and grovelling apology because she betrayed him
3. She should tell him that she will be perfectly faithful to him and she should make it clear that she will make her life perfectly transparent to him so that he will be able to rest easy knowing that he will never have any reason whatsoever to even so much as suspect that she is seeing anyone else.
4. She should make it clear that she is going to cut this old flame completely out of her life and that she won't even acknowledge this other man's existence if their paths cross.
5. She should say that while it would torture her to think of her husband with another woman, she understands that she has destroyed the trust between them and that she realizes she has no right to expect fidelity from him now.
6. She should promise that she will begin, as of right this moment, proving that she loves him by giving him the best sex he could imagine without any expectations of a commitment from him.
7. And she should say that she while she is pleading for forgiveness and will continue to do so so long as he doesn't completely shut the door that she understands that it is entirely up to him to forgive or not to forgive.

If he forgives, they can return to the sort of mutual obligations, especially sexual fidelity, appropriate to marriage but for now all the responsibility is in her court.

Female infidelity as Hollywood sees it

One of the many things I am grateful for is that my occasional commenter Gaius put me onto The Last Psychiatrist. Like me, TLP is inconsistent: sometimes you moan, sometimes he hits something really good. Unlike me, sometimes he has insights that really shake us out. Case in point, his polemic against The Descendants.

I'm not knocking these movies for existing or for casting these hairless nymphomaniacs, I'm simply posing the general question: since the audience has learned nothing from their own parents, and they don't read 19th century Russian literature, what is their model for love in the 2nd decade of marriage?  They don't have one.  Which is why when this demo finds themselves in the 2nd decade of marriage they feel unfulfilled, anxious, depressed, is this all there is? They have nothing to guide them except The Discovery Channel and mommy blogs, and they lack the courage to analyze their ennui, so these movies serve the important function of pretending that it's normal.  "Oh, yeah, that's exactly what I'm feeling."  Fine, but don't you also want to know why you feel that way?

And, of the two, the mommy blogs are the bigger problem. Read the whole thing, it's well worth your time. That said, there is a weakness here that you need to grasp to really get it. TLP handles men and women unevenly and that is a flaw he shares with the movie he is discussing.

The set up paragraph from TLP  is below. I'm going to chop it into two. Here is part one:

Here's a bit of human nature for you and you are most certainly not going to like it.  Fat George Clooney discovers his wife has been cheating on him-- and he never suspected.  That's a profound insult, a narcissistic injury, and no, people who complain I talk about it too much but haven't actually learned the lessons, you don't have to be a narcissist to experience a narcissistic injury, it's built into the way we relate to other people.  It's jealousy AND an existential beat down: look at the limits of your power, look at the limits of your reach, she is able to have a whole other existence that had so little to do with you you didn't even notice, nor did she feel any need to tell you.  

Clooney's character discovers all this, by the way, while his wife is dying and in a coma. That's important because it completely closes any possible response from her and, therefore, any moral assessment we might make of her. So how is a guy to respond?

Before we get to that, let me emphasize the formula here: jealousy + an existential beat down = narcissistic injury. Jealousy by itself is a perfectly natural and, more importantly, an absolutely unavoidable emotion. No love is ever so secure that you won't feel twinges of jealousy sometimes. Jealousy can tear your love down or it can build it up depending on how you respond. But there is one sort of situation where you always lose and that is when jealousy is combined with a threat to your sense of who you are. Finding out you have been cheated on will almost always be an existential beat down.

Okay, now for part two:

At least if she had done it to hurt you you'd still suffer the jealousy but your place as main character in your own movie would be secure.  Maybe you're only supporting cast in hers?   "Screw that. I'm changing the script."

This is one of my own favourite points: she didn't cheat to hurt you because she planned to get away with it. Her guilt here is analogous to the person who decides to drive themselves home anyway after a  few drinks. She never thought about the pain she might cause by running you down because she focused on getting away with it. You weren't even on the radar screen when she did this. That hurts much more than even than the thought that another guy got to ... .

So what do you do? Well, assuming you don't go on a destructive rampage or kill yourself, the irresistible temptation is to make it about yourself.

Increase your pain to save your ego.  That's the path the movie chooses: she cheated not because she fell in love, or lust, but because he neglected her, he was a bad husband, he didn't take her on shopping sprees.    "As long as you don't ask me to change, I'm accepting some blame for her cheating on me."  You'll feel right as rain. 

But here TLP, in my opinion, goes astray because he isn't willing to confront the crucial question directly enough. Notice how he seems to contradict himself in the very next paragraph for he immediately turns around and tells us that the audience don't understand Clooney's character's motives:

They are (thanks, VO)  starting from a false premise: that he actually really loved his wife in the first place.  He didn't.  That's why she was cheating.

Uhhhh whattt??? But isn't that the narcissistic defense mechanism? You know, making it about myself by saying that she cheated because I didn't love her well enough? Well, it actually all makes a sort of sense because the movie itself embraces the narcissistic impulse along with its lead character and that is what TLP wants to highlight: if this movie really speaks to you, then there is something wrong with you. But even if we allow that, I think TLP is missing a key detail here.

To understand what is really wrong here you have to turn this scenario around and imagine it the other way. Imagine the husband is in the bed in a coma about to die and the wife dutifully sitting at the bedside holding his hand discovers that he has been having an affair and had planned to divorce her before he got sick. Okay, got that picture? Okay, it's easy to picture part of this playing out the same. You can imagine the wife suffering the narcissistic injury and coping by blaming herself for being a poor wife, boring lover, letting herself go or whatever but any Hollywood movie would ultimately assure us that she was mistakenly blaming herself. It wouldn't be her fault.

When a man is the cheater, our culture blames him.

It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to show us that the husband was, in fact, a selfish jerk in such a movie. That is the real hollow moral core in our culture: it is unwilling to acknowledge that women are just as capable of being selfish jerks as men are. That is the missing step that George Clooney's character needs to make here. He needs to see that his wife behaved like a selfish jerk and now that evil will outlive her.

And that is what women need to see if they are going to be really liberated. Moral freedom comes from confronting the truth that you yourself are a sinner. And that will never happen so long as our culture keeps honouring movies like this. For in this movie, as TLP nicely draws out, the narcissistic response is made to look like moral maturity and love. What he misses is that the reason it does this is because it cannot bring itself to treat women as moral adults.

Note: I used to write about women and womanly virtues on Friday but I'm moving that to Wednesday with this post.

Final thoughts on infidelity

Womanly virtues Friday
Final for now.

Before starting, I have written almost exclusively about sexual infidelity by women. That is not because I don't think men's infidelity issues aren't interesting. But far more has been written about men than women already.

A few years ago I used to go to a grocery store that was located next to what was at the time the only liquor store in Ottawa that opened before noon on Sunday. Walking across that parking lot at ten minutes to opening time on Sunday morning was tragicomic. And one of the things that really jumped out at you was that alcoholism is an equal opportunity affliction; you'd see the street person with his stolen shopping cart parked right next to the society woman in her Mercedes and they'd both be staring straight ahead with the same nervous expression on their faces.

Infidelity is also an equal-opportunity affliction. And not just on the receiving end. People of all types cheat on their partners. Even women who find cheating repugnant and who speak scathingly of others who have done this will surprise us and themselves by having affairs.

So it seems to me that the first thing anyone, woman or man, would want to do when thinking about love and commitment is to acknowledge that they are capable of cheating. Actually, that doesn't go nearly far enough. What you need to do is admit that if it ever felt easy and safe enough to get away with, you probably would. I say this because I've lived long enough that I've seen women—quite a few women—seriously mess up because they didn't worry enough about the possibility that they would cheat. They worried plenty about their partner cheating on them but it never occurred them that they could ever do such a thing themselves until they did.

And when they did really bad things happened. A serial adulterer already knows she is capable of such a thing. She may enter her most recent relationship fully intending to be faithful but she has cheated before and that means she has some established behaviours to fall back on if she falls off the wagon again. The woman who has never cheated and is firmly convinced that she never could cheat has no idea how to behave. I've seen women who were emotional and moral landmarks for all their friends go right of control.

From what I've seen, here are some hints about what not to to do:

• Don't run to your partner or husband and confess everything. Fixing things between you is more important than confessing. He's better off not knowing.
• Don't run to your best friend and tell her about it. You may feel you feel a need to talk to someone about it but she is the very worst choice. She'll give you bad advice because she is too much on your side. And then she'll tell someone else. And they'll tell someone .... Eventually, the man in your life will be the only one in the whole world who doesn't know he has been cheated on and he'll be a subject for gossip among all your friends. And one day he will find out and there will be nothing you or anyone else can do that will ever be able to fix the pain you have caused him.
• If, on the other hand, you get caught, don't lie. Confess and grovel. If you don't want him to leave you, tell him so but accept that he might.
• Don't continue any sort of friendship or ever see the guy the cheating happened with again. Any sort of insider relationship between the two of you is an insult and injury to the person you are in a loving relationship with. The only solution is to stop the affair and cut your lover out of your life absolutely in the most brutal fashion you can.

The other thing about women's infidelity is the other corner of the triangle. Men do indeed cheat on their partners more often than women do, although women are no slouches at it, but those men have to cheat with someone and there always seems to be no shortage of single women willing to have sexual affairs with men who are in a serious relationship with another woman.

Or just out of one. If you ever find yourself with a group of women chatting comfortably after  their second glass of wine, raise the issue of women who betray their best girlfriends by bedding their exes after a break up. Then sit down and make yourself comfortable because the stories will go on all night.

Forgiving infidelity

Manly Thor's Day Special
Perhaps it has always been the case or perhaps it is especially true of our post-feminist era but one of the things a man has to be ready for is discovering he has been cheated on. It's not a certainty but it happens enough that the odds of it happening to you are considerable. (Yes, it did happen to me in a previous relationship.)

In theory the solution seems straightforward: you'll dump her. Very few men do in practice. Not immediately anyway.  The first reaction is always to try and reach some sort of reconciliation. If you can dump her immediately, the truth is that you were looking for an excuse to get rid of her anyway.

It is only if efforts at reconciliation fail that you will dump her or let her go (these are not the same thing).

The really unfair thing is that you have responsibilities at all in this. She is the one who screwed things up and it only feels natural and right that it should be entirely up to her to make them right again. But what is making them right again? Worse, you will have certain entirely natural and justifiable reactions that you will have to control in order to make it work.

How women lie about sex
As Proust said, women lie in order to avoid lying when it comes to sex. If the woman in your life cheats on you, she will build a wall of lies around the incident. Every one of these lies is a roadblock intended to stop conversation from steering into the place the lie she doesn't want to have to tell is located.

Suppose you mention that a house belonging to the parents of a friend of hers is for sale and ask her what it's like and she says, "I don't know, I was never there." That's a nice, low tension lie. It can be delivered easily. Better, if you later find out it isn't true it can be easily deflected.

Now suppose a week later you meet the friend and ask about the house and she says, "Why didn't your girlfriend tell you, she stayed over back when we were single." So you approach your girlfriend and she says, "Oh that's right, I guess I forgot." She's doing all this so she can avoid talking about something else. Perhaps her friend's brother, perhaps her friend's brother's friend. Perhaps something that happened with her girlfriend while she was staying.

And all that effort is being made to hide a secret that dates from before she met you. It all goes triple if she cheats on you during your relationship.

The odd consequence of this is that you'll peel layers off the lie before you get to it. And that will make you into a bit of an obsessive before you even know whether you should be hurt or not.

And when you do find the lie, it might be harmless. It might be that the thing she has been protecting is the memory of a boyfriend who was gone years before you arrived on the scene. It may be that she is protecting the memory of the guy who hit on her and she turned down but she feels rather good about the fact that he tried. Or it may be an affair.

So the first question you have to ask yourself is whether you even want to find out. You may not.

Why you think she lied
From the outside, as you slowly turn into some clever Sherlock slowly unmasking her, it feels like she is lying for one and only one reason: to hurt you. That's extremely unlikely. So, right off the bat, we need to get our own nightmares off the table as they blind us to what is really going on. There are two nightmares here. One is common to men and women and the other is peculiarly male.

The common one was a favourite of my mother's. She'd say, "Do you lie just to torture me? You know how this hurts me." And I'd stay silent because the truth was that it was precisely because I done something that I knew would really torture her that I lied to protect her.

The same dynamic is in place when a woman cheats on you. She didn't do it to hurt you because she planned to get away with it. No one, least of all you, was ever going to know.

The other, peculiarly male reason you think she lied is to hide what you are terrified to think may have been the best sex of her life. You think she went to another man to get something that she finds lacking in you. Again, this is exactly backwards. The problem is not what he did for her but that she did for him something she is only supposed to do for you.

An aside, when people start any new relationship, including an affair, one of their first thoughts is often how much easier things are than their last relationship. They think that they don't have to work at it. The truth is that things are going so well in the new relationship because they are working ten times as hard at this new relationship than they did the last one. That is what should bother you: that she worked so much harder at this affair than she did with you.

When she met this other guy, she was always on her best behaviour. She didn't dare put him through one of her moods because he could have left so much more easily than you would. She had to earn his attention and she did. She always dressed so as to feel confident and beautiful and she always arrived  ready to have a good time. She complains that you don't spend enough time on foreplay but every time she saw this guy she had already been priming herself for hours if not days before he even showed up.

Here's a basic truth about women's sexuality that she'll never admit to herself: sex can only be as good for her as she is willing to let it be. If the sex was good with another man it was mostly because she made it that way. And that's the real problem: she should have been doing all that for you. She robbed you.

Why she really lied
She lied to keep the secret. I know, that sounds tautological but the whole point of intimacy is to be intimate and intimate is secret.

And, crazy as this may seem, that's understandable. She probably hasn't done this sort of thing often. (If she has, what the hell are you doing with her?) From a male point of view, it seems like it's easy for women to get sex; it seems like all they have to do is say "yes" to some guy. But it doesn't feel that way to her. From her perspective the problem is, "How does she make this happen in a way that feels good for her?"

Again, you'll obsess about that "masterful lover" who made things happen for her. For her the real thrill is that she actually managed to make this other guy come after her. That's really quite the trick and she is proud of having done that. (By the way, she'll lie in exactly the same way if it was disaster because that will make it a matter of shame and anyone else knowing about her shame will only make it worse.)

It may well be that she has wondered all her life whether she could do such a thing. She has watched other women do it and publicly sneered at them for doing so but all the time she has privately worried that the real reason she never has never done this is because she can't.

Here's a dark secret, she will never hate the memory of this affair. She may hate herself for giving in to it. She may hate herself for hurting you. She will never hate the thing that happened. If it was good, she will privately treasure this for the rest of her life and, crazy as this will sound, you should let her get away with that. (One of the odd aspects of this is that one of the counter-intuitive results of a woman cheating on you is that in some cases your sex life with her suddenly gets better because she feels better about herself.)

You, of course, do hate it and you think you want her to hate it too. You think you want to destroy this intimate secret and make it awful in her memory. Or, to be more accurate, you tell yourself this is what you want. You don't because the only way you could achieve this is by degrading her.

What you should want
You should want absolute and unequivocal acknowledgement from her that she wronged you. No fudging allowed. No, "I was feeling insecure and needed reassurance." Sorry, Honey, everyone feels insecure and needs reassurance. And while it may be perfectly true that you have been difficult, none of that excuses her cheating. There are no excuses and no qualifications. This is her fault and she has to unreservedly acknowledge this and apologize for it.

And you want her to work hard to restore trust and love. There are two parts of this. First you forgive her and second you decide whether you can trust her enough to continue a relationship with her. The first does not imply the second and you should tell her this.

One thing you want to be on the watch for is the apologizing-to-Rachel-Lynde phenomenon. This is an apology that does no real work. One thing people, including women people, will do when they know they are in the wrong is to get so torn up about how awful they have been that you end up suffering twice as much. First you got cheated on and now you have to live with this sackcloth and ashes routine where she is impossible to live with because she feels so miserable and she can't do anything about it because she feels so lousy. You meanwhile are left alone and moping.

Odd as this may seem, you want her to cheerfully throw herself into making it better. She should react to your being willing to consider trusting her again the same way she would react to being told the test was negative and she doesn't have cancer after all. You shouldn't have to explain this to her. If she doesn't figure it out, dump her. Don't make it a  condition. Don't say unless you do this, I'm out of here. Just wait and see. If she fails, go. Don't explain, just leave.

Infidelity part one

I quoted this line from Iris Krasnow yesterday.

Save abuse or serial adultery, every marriage is salvageable with a big caveat that there’s “trust, respect and intimacy, both emotional and physical".

I think that is right. You might call it an update for our times of Matthew 19:9. And let's note in passing that while women are somewhat less likely to cheat and far less likely to be serial adulterers, there is credible evidence suggesting that women commit abuse at least as often as men do.

When we think about not serial adultery but single instances, the obvious question is, How do you restore trust, respect and intimacy in the face of infidelity? Well, I'll be writing about that over the next two days. Today I just want to note a crucially important fact.

When Krasnow says "salvageable" above she is really saying, whether she realizes it or not, is that pretty much anything that troubles a marriage save these two offenses is forgivable. "Forgivable" means nothing unless someone forgives.

A woman the Serpentine One and I heard talk about marriage a few years ago now told us about an interesting bit of research she did. She'd given questionnaires to a whole lot of young couple about to get married and asked them what they could imagine forgiving and not forgiving. They all agreed they could NEVER forgive infidelity. What's interesting about that is that in practice, couples actually have a fairly high success rate of dealing with infidelity.

No, I'm not saying go ahead and cheat. What I am saying is, go ahead and become the sort of person who would forgive their spouse for cheating. We never spend much time thinking about that do we? Most people wonder if they'd ever cheat and most people can imagine their self righteous anger at someone else cheating on them. But imagine* forgiving someone. What would that take?

More tomorrow and Friday.





* By the way, one really interesting aspect of the famous John Lennon tune is that he only imagines achieving peace by eliminating things be believed to cause strife between people. There isn't so much as a single hint in the song about forgiveness. That says an awful lot, and none of it good, about the people who believe that song says something profound and important.

Body Heat Part 3

The convention that wasn't used
Every neo noir film tends to use the conventions of classic noir: the fedora, venetian blinds, Gothic camera angles, the femme fatale and so forth. It's telling then when a movie skips over one of the obvious choices.

Body Heat does not feature a narrator. That is quite telling because Phillip-Marlowe-style narration is used by the vast majority of neo noir films. And it is used for a very simple reason, it's the first thing you hear and therefore plays an important first impression role. That voice instantly tells you "This is noir". And there lies the problem for if the movie has to tell you what it is then maybe it isn't really.

Instead of a narrator, Kasdan uses a realist convention some times called the flâneur. A flâneur is sort of loiterer. The story teller—in this case, the camera—seems to simply record what is in front of them as they float through life and we try and assemble some sort of narrative in our heads as we follow them. I say seems to float along because the details they and therefore we see are all carefully selected by the writer to create a sense of character, place and time. Kasdan is particularly interesting in that he uses this stylistic convention of realism to deceive rather than to be realistic.

The "time" in that trio is particularly interesting because the time he seeks to create is a nostalgic time. Thus the first things we hear Ned Racine say is this

It's the Seawater Inn. My family used to eat dinner there twenty-five years ago. Now somebody's torched it to clear the lot.

And there we are. And it helps that the scene is set in a room that gives us a very indistinct notion of time. (As I've said before, it's a brilliant touch that the sense of the nostalgia is not for the specific period of the classic noir but for a past for which there was still lots of evidence at the time the film is set in.)

A moment later, Ned ruefully adds that it was probably one of his clients who torched the Seawater Inn. Character, place and time in four sentences. And in four sentences that do nothing to call attention to themselves. That's writing.

But consider how much more authoritative this would have sounded if delivered by voice over narration. We'd still have time place and character but it would be a different character with more distance on the story and therefore more authority. Even when that narrator was later revealed to be Ned it would still be stuck in our heads as something that had been narrated.

By simply giving us Ned (and what a perfect name, it sounds like the name of a guy who always wanted to be Nancy Drew's boyfriend) and loitering along with him the camera forces us to either like the guy or stop watching. You have to want to be Ned for the movie to work and you do want to be him.

His "family" is also an interesting choice. Most heroes don't have families. They don't have fathers or mothers. This one mention changes everything about this guy. He isn't going to be Mike Hammer.

The camera flaneur goes on for a full eight minutes before we start to get anything like a story when he tries to pick up Matty Walker. Everything we have seen up until that moment is stuff that happens to Ned. This is the first thing he tries to do. We know he'll fail of course because of what we have already seen. What is different is that we have effortlessly slid into a story—a very deliberately constructed story—with no sense of having done so.

By the way, in a brilliant musical choice, the orchestra plays "That Old Feeling" as he first sees Matty. Nostalgia and the woman blend into one. And away we go for a wild ride.

I've written before of the unrealistic moment. The touch where the writer goes too far as if by accident and forces us to take their side. In this movie it is a scene in the Pinehaven Tavern when Ned and Matty shake hands and he comments that her hand is hot and she says her temperature runs a couple of degrees above normal. This too is a noir convention; think of Phillip Marlowe describing a woman as a blonde to make a Bishop put his foot through a stained glass window.

But, again, it isn't narrated but acted out and our reaction is to think, "O come on". It's just too too much. But, like Charlotte Haze getting run over, if we choose to accept it and go along we embroil ourselves just a little too far to back out of we decide to let it go. If we go beyond this point, we have to go all the way.

The first Body Heat post is here. This is the last as I will move on to another neo noir (I haven't decided which yet) next week.