Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free

by Wednesday Martin

Monogamy is our society’s emotional, cultural, and sexual baseline, the place that comforts us. Sexual exclusivity is the turf, we tell ourselves, of the well-adjusted, healthy, and mature.

“I don’t think you really even want to talk to me, because I’m really—unusual…” most of the women I’ve spoken with begin by saying when we meet to talk. Why’s that? I wonder. “Because I have a really strong libido. And—I don’t think I’m cut out for monogamy,” they tell me, haltingly, one after another. We chat over coffee, in person, or on the phone. They fear they are going to “throw the data” with their freakish singularity. They think they are outliers. They are foreign to the tribe of women, they suggest and believe.

As the sociologist Alicia Walker has suggested, in being untrue, women violate not just a social script but a cherished gender script as well.

I thought I would grow up and grow out of my “crazy” libido, that non-monogamy was perhaps a developmental stage for the twentysomething, and that once I was in my thirties, things would change. I would calm down and figure it all out, and life would get easier. It didn’t.

For better or for worse, women who cheat often do so because they feel a sense of bold entitlement—for connection, understanding, and, make no mistake about it, sex.

Maybe I was overthinking things as I stood in front of my cramped closet, considering my options. But this keenly felt need not only to find something appropriate to wear but to be appropriate, and at the same time a little rebellious, reminded me of all the bargaining we do with ourselves about monogamy. I stared at blouses and trousers and dresses and thought of the big concessions we make and the little ones, and of the greatest trade-off of all, in which we surrender complete, dizzying sexual autonomy and self-determination for the security of the dyad.

For social conservatives, female infidelity—seizing what is generally believed to be a male privilege, doing what you want sexually speaking—is symptomatic of larger corruptions and compromises of the social fabric.

When I spoke about my work with female friends and acquaintances, I often floated the notions that compulsory monogamy was a feminist issue, and that where there is no female sexual autonomy, there can be no true female autonomy. This was met with everything from enthusiastic agreement to complete confusion—what did monogamy and infidelity have to do with feminism?—to denunciations of women who stepped out as “damaged,” “selfish,” “whorish,” and, my favorite, “bad mothers.” By self-described feminists.

“It’s pretty incredible that people commit for life, that they get married, without even discussing the issue of sexual exclusivity,”

This roster of shows dramatizes a contradiction: our country’s enduring emphasis on policing and enforcing “fidelity” precisely as it comes up against an impetus to redefine it.

Scheinkman suggests that rather than presume we are failing at marriage when we can’t make this “being all things” business work, we might consider the “segmented model” of marriage that exists in Europe and Latin America, where it’s understood that marriage will fulfill some needs but not others. Affairs and marriage are separate domains in some of these contexts, and affairs are more likely to be presumed “private” than “pathological.” Scheinkman critiques what she calls the “dogmatic no secrets policy” that tends to prevail in our fifty states of affairs and in the therapy sessions where we try to work things out with partners.

He pointed out that people for whom non-monogamy does work are probably not the ones coming to therapists for help. He said he believed therapists should get out into their communities in general, and into non-monogamous communities in particular, to educate themselves and expand their points of view. Too often they were seeing non-monogamous patients only when the patients were in crisis, which skewed their view of the issue, making them unnecessarily negative.

This might also be called “limerence,” which sounded delightfully like “limerick” to me but refers to wanting, sometimes almost desperately, to be in the presence of the new person and to have your feelings reciprocated. Then

“My job is to help people who have decided not to be monogamous keep turning back to each other if they feel insecure or flooded with fear. That way a negative becomes a positive. What might weaken or sink a relationship strengthens it.”

And poly peeps, as I came to think of them, are likely to emphasize that their relationships aren’t “just” sexual, that the emotional component is as, if not more, important than the physical one. (How disappointing, I thought, that in this sense even the poly movement recapitulates our culture’s insistence that women—who are at its forefront—are less sexual.)

(“The best thing for gender equality and relationships will be for all the old people to die,” one young woman joked at a panel on sexuality I later attended. She was only kind of kidding.)

I wonder what she thinks now, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his experience, Kaupp told us, what we have to give ebbs and flows with our attachment security. The less attachment security we have to begin with, the less connected we feel to our love object, and the more threatened and threatening others seem. The more attachment security we have, the more we have to give not just to one but to potentially myriad others. And the more we can tolerate our loved ones doing the same. In this rather startling reframing of non-monogamy, limiting ourselves to dyadic sexuality and romance is restrictive, stemming more from anxiety than from a moral or even pragmatic stance.

“People have a hard time keeping it in their pants. Why don’t we give them a way to live without sneaking around and being hypocritical and feeling like failures?”

Polyamory, consensual non-monogamy, and open relationships might be nice for idealists with flexible schedules and time on their hands, I found myself thinking. But for the rest of us, it hardly seemed realistic.

To state the obvious, non-monogamy is exercising a pull on us because monogamy isn’t working for everyone.

Accurate stats are tricky to come by not only because we don’t like to disclose stigmatized behaviors but also because our definitions of infidelity and cheating have shifted over the decades.

Experts like Marianne Brandon tell us that while our cultural norm is monogamy, we have high rates of undisclosed non-monogamy. However we define infidelity, what is clear is that it happens, and not infrequently.

If monogamy is so hard and we’re so bad at it, why do we keep doing it? Not a few anthropologists, taking the long and unsentimental view of these things, tell us monogamy and monogamous marriage are neither in our blood nor in our DNA.

Some data suggest that long-term, committed relationships are good for us physically and emotionally. But there is also research indicating that marriage brings health benefits for men, not for women. And one sixteen-year longitudinal study of a representative sample of more than eleven thousand adults showed not only that marriage has little impact on health or happiness but that any positive effects of marriage are likely attributable to a more positive evaluation of one’s life rather than improvement on concrete measures. While there may be some psychological benefit to being exclusively coupled in a culture that pathologizes singleness, that hardly seems cause for dancing in the streets or buying a ring.

today we are less tolerant of infidelity than we were in 1971, when only half of those polled in the GSS said infidelity was “always wrong”—81 percent of respondents agreed with that statement in 2008.

while polls show we are more forbearing than ever of divorce, premarital sex, homosexuality, and gay marriage, infidelity remains, in a sense, “our last sexual taboo.”

Meanwhile, a 2017 study shows that among women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, group sex and threesome experience equaled that of men the same age, and women were nearly twice as likely to have gone to a dungeon, BDSM, swingers’, or sex party, challenging the easy assumption that men are the naturally more sexually adventurous sex.

I began to suspect that being open, curious, and matter-of-fact about sex—a subject many of us consider shameful and private and, like those newly discovered creatures who inhabit the deepest parts of the ocean, perfectly suited and inherently appropriate to its indigenous darkness—correlates with a sunny disposition and bright interpersonal style.

Chivers spoke quickly about topics familiar to most of her listeners, including Rosemary Basson’s concept of “responsive desire.” This “desire style” is more common among women than men, according to numerous sex researchers and therapists, and describes a tendency to feel sexually excited after erotic stimulation, versus in anticipation of it (that’s called “spontaneous desire,” based on an experience that sexual desire is an appetite like hunger that just comes upon us).

Joana's style?

Chivers spoke quickly about topics familiar to most of her listeners, including Rosemary Basson’s concept of “responsive desire.” This “desire style” is more common among women than men, according to numerous sex researchers and therapists, and describes a tendency to feel sexually excited after erotic stimulation, versus in anticipation of it (that’s called “spontaneous desire,” based on an experience that sexual desire is an appetite like hunger that just comes upon us).

Gladys' style?

Chivers shows the study participants explicit photos or movies—of women and men having sex, of women and women having sex, of men having sex with men. That’s when things get interesting. The women who describe themselves as heterosexual have physical responses to just about everything they see—a man having sex with another man, a woman going down on a woman, a man and a woman doing it. They are adventurous, at least in their minds, un-finicky and indiscriminate omnivores. They take it in with category-blurring gusto, liking what they see regardless of who they presumably are.

“It’s frustrating to hear it repeated over and over that men have stronger [libidos] than women do, as if that’s a simple fact. Let’s consider that maybe we’ve been measuring desire incorrectly.” She pointed out that there were a few other papers with preliminary findings like her own and told me she expected there might be more if researchers measured triggered or responsive desire rather than spontaneous desire.

Women don’t necessarily want what they fantasize about, or want to do what turns them on, of course, and Chivers is careful to emphasize this. But if her work destigmatizes the range and variation of female sexual fantasy, and the sheer force and strength of some women’s desires, she’s delighted.

“The very idea that people could form long-term pair bonds and be equally sexually exciting to each other from day one to day seven thousand makes no sense. It doesn’t fit any psychological model we have of how people habituate over time,”

She has found that the institutionalization of roles and the familiarity of a spouse or long-term partner—the fact of being in a relationship, basically—is especially challenging for women.

“We have plenty of data telling us that long-term relationships are tough on desire, and particularly on female desire,”

She asked me to think about how, when we get dressed for an evening out, women often discount the opinion of our long-term male partners. And not just because our partners are afraid to tell us that the dress does, in fact, make us look fat. “He just doesn’t have a lot of credibility. You’re all he’s got. He doesn’t see you the way you want to be seen! But admiration from someone you know less well, or from a stranger—that has an impact!”

Being desired by someone whose desire for us is a given doesn’t confer the same thrill we feel when we get that lustful glance from a stranger on the street.

In a talk she gave, Meana had also mentioned that “crude initiations” (a husband or partner who doesn’t bother trying to be seductive) and being exhausted from mothering and “wife-ing”—being in charge of the domesticated this and that of coupled life—also tended to push female desire underground.

“There’s this way in which seeing themselves desired is the ultimate turn-on for women,” Meana told me, “which suggests that female sexuality has a kind of wonderful autonomy that people miss all the time.” She said she had titled the paper she and her graduate student wrote on the topic “It’s Not You, It’s Me,” and we laughed at the play on a familiar apology reframed as an unapologetic declaration about what women want and need during sex: to see themselves as sexy and desired.

Meana likes to refer to pop culture to bring her points home, and now she mentioned song lyrics like “You make me feel like a natural woman,” and Shania Twain pronouncing, “Man! I feel like a woman!” and Katy Perry singing, “Put your hands on me in my skintight jeans.” “What’s going on with these lyrics? You’re a woman so of course you feel like a woman, right?” Meana noted gamely. “But what it’s telling us is that the singers are a lot more focused in these songs on themselves. See?”

“Ideology and sex make terrible bedfellows!” she exclaims, really warming to her topic now. To her, there is something much more profound going on than false consciousness, and if it is false consciousness, or narcissism, well then, so what? “I don’t really care what we call it. But the minute you try to put ideology on sex—whether it’s progressive ideology or conservative ideology—sex rebels! Sex is by its very nature transgressive.”

Meana doesn’t want women to be judged or pressured from either direction. What matters to her is the finding: that to a certain extent heterosexual women are their own erotic targets, and that their arousal emanates to some significant degree from their erotic relationship with themselves.

Walker explodes several of our most dearly held notions about female infidelity: that women cheat only when they are unhappy in their marriages; that unlike men, they seek emotional connection, not sexual gratification, from affairs;

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one she lives: “My goal is to contribute to preventing people from being able to utter all kinds of nonsense about the social world.”

the majority of women in Walker’s sample reported that they were otherwise happily partnered or married, and that these affairs were a way for them to remain in their primary relationships. They were not looking for an exit strategy or a new husband. They did not seek emotional connection or companionship. They wanted a solution to a dilemma: they felt unable or were unwilling to end their sexless or sexually unsatisfying partnerships or marriages, but they also wanted great sex.

And on the site itself, they were often subjected to male rage and retaliation for ending a liaison, or even for not messaging back after an invitation to do so. “You’re a fat cow no one would fu*k anyway” one man wrote to a woman (who had not posted a photo) when she didn’t respond to his online overture. Men sometimes also left information on the “feedback” section of the women’s profiles, falsely suggesting they had slept with them and rating the experience unfavorably, as “payback” for the women not responding to them. Slut-shaming apparently exists even where men and women come together to cheat.

But the participants in her study wanted sex badly enough that they willingly took these chances. They had run the calculus and considered the options: cheat for sexual satisfaction and accept the risk it entailed; don’t cheat and continue to live without satisfying sex, or any sex at all; be openly non-monogamous and risk almost certain stigma in their communities and blowback from their husbands, including, possibly, divorce; initiate divorce, thus, in the words of one woman, “dismantling my life and breaking my husband’s heart as well as my own.” Divorce could mean custody issues, financial hardship, and the loss of social and family support. In Walker’s formulation, “These women were unwilling to toss the dice a second time on marriage and risk ending up with a lesser hand than the one they currently held.” They efficiently pursued what they wanted and confounded our received script that women don’t care about or need sex the way men do, and that women who have affairs fall in love and inevitably “destroy their marriages” because “women who have affairs want emotional connection, not sex.”

Sarah was far from the only woman I spoke to over the course of researching this book who pondered this apparently inescapable, fundamental contradiction: while doing what was supposed to be natural for a woman—refuse sex outside monogamy or marriage—she was profoundly remorseful and resentful about the enormous sacrifice she felt she had made.

Nearly half a century ago, the pill was legalized for unmarried women, decoupling sex and reproduction as well as sex and marriage;