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July 9, 2019 - July 8, 2022
Untrue is a book with a point of view—namely that whatever else we may think of them, women who reject monogamy are brave, and their experiences and possible motivations are instructive. Not only because female infidelity is far from uncommon but also because the fact of it and our reactions to it are useful metrics of female autonomy, and of the price women continue to pay for seizing privileges that have historically belonged to men.
“I very rarely see that rules create security in these situations. How can we possibly anticipate all the possibilities? It’s an attempt to control, but it might make people feel more out of control,”
Although there is no hard data, polyamorists and the experts who work with and study them seem to agree that poly relationships are most often driven by women. 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.
In essence, while they are accepting of people who want to do things their own way, they want to blow up the heterosexual dyad and the dyad more generally, which even swingers and those in open relationships, not to mention everyone everywhere in the industrialized West, tend to prize, privilege, and believe in so fervently, albeit with local variation.
Plenty of poly people concede the couple works for others. But as a compulsory reality, they say, it is dated as well as the source of much pain and discontent, because it is predicated on and promulgates limited, limiting old think: that women are the property of men; that we “evolved” to be pair-bonded; that refusing sexual exclusivity is sinful or simply bad for society, a gateway drug that leads to other forms of corruption that compromise the very foundation of our culture.
monogamy-industrial complex,
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.
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).
What does it all mean? That women are, on some level, super freaks. Our libidos don’t give a hoot about the boxes we check. We are sexual anarchists, in the formulation of Daniel Bergner, the author of What Do Women Want?, who spent time observing Chivers at work, and whose assertions about women’s unexpected appetites basically suggest we might quite fairly be described as the “largest group of sexual deviants” in the world.
Meana has of late been homing in on “female erotic self-focus,”
“There’s this way in which seeing themselves desired is the ultimate turn-on for women,”
Women, not men, are the relationship radicals in this recent rearrangement of our intimacies.
Rather than throwing “female Viagra” at these women, what if we told them the truth? That it’s normal for women to get bored? That it’s normal to want to have sex in lots of different ways, with many partners? And that women too, and perhaps especially, have cheating minds and hearts and bodies?
Though we live in a state of ecological release, engineering a state of ideological release—freedom from censure, judgment, and self-judgment—is more complicated, particularly for women living in a culture brimming with double standards about female and male sexuality and misinformation about the hearts and libidos of women.
Au contraire, perhaps because they had exercised such agency and taken such risks, they considered their affairs the best, most exciting times of their lives.
The sexual, economic, and ecological circumstances of the lives of women could not be more closely linked or interdependent.
Simply put, a shift toward growing crops intensively for subsistence and later for profit changed everything between the sexes. Three linked beliefs—that a woman is a man’s property; that a woman’s place is in the home; and that women especially ought to be more “naturally” monogamous—are seeds that were planted in our early harvests. Stranger still, a woman’s most personal decisions were transformed into a matter of public concern and her sexual autonomy subjected to social control and legislation, owing to the ox and the horse.
Part of farming’s legacy is that, among other things, it “gendered” us in fundamental, comprehensive, and long-lasting ways. It sexed us as well; we are no longer Wyandot.
Yahweh is the jealous husband of a wife who is habitually untrue:
According to Aristotle, adulteresses in the Peloponnese were required to stand in a transparent tunic without a belt in the town’s center for eleven days. This was an explicit assertion that what these women had tried to claim as their own—their naked bodies and sexuality—literally belonged to all who looked.
What does any of this have to do with women today? Everything, it turns out. In a uniquely comprehensive analysis published in 2013, a group of Harvard and UCLA economists established that the plough has had as great an impact on our beliefs about men and women and about female self-determination as it did on the soil it tilled so efficiently. Where there is or has been plough agriculture, the effects are deep and wide-ranging: these societies have markedly lower levels of female participation in politics and the labor force, and they rank high on the embrace of markedly gender-biased
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As the authors of the Harvard-UCLA plough study put it succinctly, “Part of the importance of the plough arises through its impact on internal beliefs and values.” We live the plough’s unforgiving legacy every day, an inheritance that, for many of us, has come to feel logical or natural. It is not. Not only is the plough to thank or to blame for our monthly menstrual cycle; in our evolutionary prehistory, anthropologist Beverly Strassmann has found, our fat levels were lower from the constant effort of gathering, and so our cycle was more of a quarterly event. But our understanding that we
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In 2012, the World Health Organization reported that among the main risk factors for a woman experiencing sexual violence, either by an intimate partner or a stranger, were living in a culture with attitudes of gender inequality and sexual purity; having or being suspected of having multiple partners; and the prevalence of ideologies of male sexual entitlement—that is, beliefs that men are “naturally” and by right more sexual than women, that they have more of a right to be out and about, and that women should stay home. If not, they will by rights be brought back into line. Beliefs of the
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Our vaginas are not our own. And our very language speaks to our agrarian heritage and is inextricably entwined with our sexual selves, as if to suggest there is no escape. A woman who is having sex with a man is “getting ploughed” by him. And one who wants to be in charge of her own sexual destiny, who refuses to submit to the law of the plough—that she stay home, that she be monogamous, that she be dependent—is a ho (or is she a hoe?).
We are worn down by our culture’s tendency to universalize and naturalize the gender divisions of the plough, the assertion that men everywhere just logically want and have always wanted women, lots of them, who are servile and nubile and fertile and good hearth attendants. And that women everywhere logically want men who are powerful and have resources, and that more than anything we want one of them, an alpha male, of our very own.
All these practices give important clues about our evolutionary prehistory: dependence is new. It is human females of the Anthropocene—even and perhaps especially those living in the industrialized West post-plough—whose well-being and in some cases very lives are uniquely contingent on the support of males.
In many ways, Darwin’s view of sexual selection and Acton’s take on female sexuality culminated in Krafft-Ebing’s apocalyptic vision of what would happen if we undid such an order of things, which he offered up in 1886: “If a woman is normally developed mentally, and well-bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and family impossible.” Female passivity and sexlessness is the homeostasis that keeps the world in balance.
Is monogamy a privilege or a prison for women? Is it a choice, or does it subvert choice? Is it a luxury or a deprivation?
What if women are in fact “wired” at some level to be sexually dominant and promiscuous, and to use sex for pleasure and building social bonds with other women—and it is primarily environment that has resulted in our behaving otherwise?
“I think one thing that has really become clear to me is that social change and social justice are not just about large-scale politics. It’s about how we respond to and police one another.”
‘Okay, female sexuality is “insatiable” in ways male sexuality is not. So let’s ride this engine together.’ They get vicarious fulfillment, these men, from revving the engine of female sexuality.”
In the absence of intensive kin support, money can act as a buffer against restrictive ideology and the threat of consequences for female sexual autonomy, including male reprisals like withdrawal of support and even violence.
But certain rules and formulas adhere, and the lesson from cultures across the world and the women you know is clear: there can be no autonomy without the autonomy to choose, without coercion or constraint, or in spite of it, who our lovers will be.
we still don’t know what kind of breeding systems and social-sexual practices women might choose if they are actually free to do so.
