Infidelity & Other Valentine Thoughts, Part I

(with apologies to Joan Armatrading)
If Jesus were to return to earth as the Messiah of sexual liberation, John H. Richardson might want to put in for the post of his new John the Baptist. Richardson was recently spotted wandering around the wilderness of Esquire magazine draped in goatskin and exhorting the adulterers, philanderers, and horn dogs of this Gomorrah of ours to"Repent NOT!"
In an essay that provoked quite a bit of Internet fury and caused a Salome or two at Andrew Sullivan's Dish to call for his head, Richardson wrote, under the title of The Martyrs of Sex, a defense of marital infidelity that included the following passage:

I want to suggest that sex, be it adulterous or premarital or deviant or polyamorous, is a good thing, not a bad thing, and that sex itself is the moment of grace. And that our sterile idea of perfection is the actual sin. To start with the subject on the table, adultery is a brave rebellion against the invisible prison we build for ourselves. When the sad little man Larry Craig widened his stance in that airport bathroom, it was probably the most honest and courageous act of his life. When Clinton got that blowjob in the White House, he wasn't indulging a weakness (and an eager intern) but enacting the hero's journey of reconciling inner and outer, risking all to break through the wall of hypocritical purity he had spent years building and projecting to the world in the effort to get elected. By risking martyrdom, in fact, he lifted himself up into an exaltation we still refuse to understand. He was the Martyred Jesus of Oral Sex with Interns and all we see is a mean little sin, as all the sexual deviates pretending to be puritans gathered around in an orgy of denunciation and scandal. In our condemnation, we focus on the supposedly broken vows and the supposed pain of his wife when in fact we know nothing of his wife's true feelings or her knowledge and tolerance of his "frisky" side (frisky being one of the endless array of demeaning expressions we use as invisible prison bars, along with dog and pig and you only want one thing). We never consider that our reaction is the punishment and the meanness is all in our eyes. Every single time we play out this ritual, we replay the Old Testament rite in which the pious transferred their sins to goats, which were then driven into the wilderness, just as we drive David Petraeus and a parade of other scapegoats out the gates of our smug little village of lies in the hope that we can put the "sin" outside the gate — when it is, of course, always inside. That's what happens when you put up gates.

Rationalizing adultery is not what makes Richardson's essay so radical. Every other month or so some woman's magazine or Huffington Post offers up an article on how an affair can actually be good for recharging the dead battery of a long too-idle marriage. Richardson heads into wild man territory on the subject when he calls an act generally characterized as "cheating" as rather heroic. It takes one's breath away--and maybe one's sense of logic and proportion as well. To consider a 62-year old Senator trying to solicit illicit sex in an airport men's room or a 50-year old president engaging in oral sex with a 24-year old intern as heroic seems to stretch the very concept of heroism to the breaking point. Perhaps a ringing public declaration, “I did have sex with that woman!” Now that’s something a lot more folks could swallow as heroic. Even David Petraeus’s quick and quiet resignation comes much closer to our notion of heroism than does the infidelity that forced his resignation in the first place. 

Yet, we at the Nobby works are no strangers to the suggestion that infidelity—even as it often involves the betrayal of sacred vows—has something of the heroic about it. In Love's Body and much of his other writings, Norman O. Brown often frames the sexual act--both in and out of marriage--in heroic terms. “The soul is the penis," he writes at one point.  "The wandering heroes are phallic heroes," he writes at another.
Of course, in these wanderings one must always be on the lookout for the ever-dangerous Slippery Slope…more fearsome for those of us who inhabit real earth than anything Tolkien imagined for Middle-Earth. After all, if wandering heroes are phallic heroes, could not Jerry Sandusky and a parade of pedophile priests count themselves among that number? Richardson certainly doesn’t shy away from that possibility when he includes deviants among those noble few struggling against the chains of convention and repression. This is where the phrase “consenting adults” becomes the most essential in any discussion of sexual freedom. The conversation starts to get irrational around the edges when one man’s sexual liberation is fixated on another man’s 10-year old child. (Though the guys at NAMBLA do their best to keep the conversation rational with constant references to Ancient Greece and Rome. Operative word there, fellas, is Ancient .)  
But deviancy must be part of the discussion because it is such a subjective term. In most people’s minds deviancy is anything they wouldn’t do…or think of doing. That is why, since Kinsey in 1948, people are repeatedly shocked by the revelations in sex studies. And the shock is not just for those with a narrow view of sexual activity, but for those with a broader view who can’t believe there are more people like them than they ever dared think.
However over-the-top he may be in making his case, Richardson does not overstate the daring element required in sexual adventurism. As loathsome, silly, or pathetic we may choose to view Senator Craig’s attempt to play footsie with an undercover cop in a men’s room stall, we must admit it takes a bit of derring-do—even if it is driven by desperation. (And let’s not overlook the role of cultural bias in our degree of tolerance for these behaviors. Larry Craig’s situation was almost identical to the pickle rock star George Michael made for himself in 1998, and he didn’t experience half the backlash.) 
Anyway, as coincidence would have it, a day after reading Richardson’s Esquire piece I happened upon a little Israeli film aptly titled Footnote. It’s about a pair of Talmudic scholars—a father (Eliezer) and son (Uriel), who have a very strained relationship due to the son’s career eclipsing the dad’s. As a consequence, the father has sunk into bitterness and near-permanent gloom. The son is shocked one day to see that gloom lifted when he comes upon his father relaxed and smiling in the semi-secluded company of another woman. He comes home at night and tells his wife, Dikla, about it. Here’s their dialog:
Dikla: Do you really think there's a woman?Uriel: I don't know. Anything’s possible. If he does, it's hilarious, no? Where does he get the courage?Dikla: What's courage got to do with it?Uriel: It takes a lot of courage to risk everything for a momentary passion.Dikla: Maybe it's not momentary.Uriel: Still, he has a lot to lose.Dikla: So that's why you don't cheat on me. Too much to lose?Uriel: Who said I don't?Dikla: You don't.Uriel: How can you be so sure?Dikla: You're a coward.Uriel: So my father is brave and I'm a coward?Dikla: Your father is true to himself and willing to pay the price. You're a nice guy who's afraid of confrontation. Even with me.Uriel: What are you saying? I don't understand. You want me to confront you? I can do that.Dikla: No. I'm glad you don't want to break up our family. It's not out of fidelity, but out of fear.Uriel: I love you. I really doDikla: I know.
These words flat on the page can’t possibly convey the exquisite nuance and subtext of this exchange. Dikla is basically echoing much of John H. Richardson’s argument, but rather than coming from a man in a men’s magazine, it’s coming from a woman lying in bed with the one person most vulnerable to this particular viewpoint (albeit, a woman whose scripted words and actions have been written and directed by a male).
Dikla really does appreciate the civilized man lying next to her who has made their life together safe and comfortable. But with her sigh and last look in that scene, she clearly conveys that she also longs for whatever daring qualities Uriel possessed that attracted her to him in the first place. In Dikla’s sigh, Footnote brilliantly captures the paradox Freud discovered a century ago: to build families and thus our civilization, we must repress our individualistic basic instincts. But that repression eventually becomes the greatest threat to both civilization and family because those instincts cannot be forever repressed and will assert themselves eventually--to paraphrase the marriage vow: for better or worse. The challenge for us is to make the outcome of that more good than bad.
To Be Continued…