So we know something about who the women who have affairs are. They’re you and me. They’re bored in their marriages, or sexless and orgasmless in their marriages, or happy in their marriages but eager for sex with someone other than their spouses, or they have money and power so they can do what they want, or they live in a culture that dictates that monogamy is stingy, or where monogamy isn’t an option. Or they have a particular sexual “personality.” Not unlike men, they often do it simply because they feel like it. For fun or for payback or because they are out of town or they had one drink
So we know something about who the women who have affairs are. They’re you and me. They’re bored in their marriages, or sexless and orgasmless in their marriages, or happy in their marriages but eager for sex with someone other than their spouses, or they have money and power so they can do what they want, or they live in a culture that dictates that monogamy is stingy, or where monogamy isn’t an option. Or they have a particular sexual “personality.” Not unlike men, they often do it simply because they feel like it. For fun or for payback or because they are out of town or they had one drink too many and succumbed to their feelings for that woman at work. Whatever the reason, for that window in time, whether the encounter is under an hour or an affair that extends for years, when they are doing it they are not mothers or wives or employees. They are not honest and they are not self-sacrificing. They are not good; they are not admirable. But make no mistake, they are being themselves. Part of female sexuality, part of its legacy and its present and its future is that it is assertive, pleasure centered, and selfish. No amount of pathologizing can change the deep lessons we glean from the Wyandot and the Himba, from Amy Parish’s bonobos and Sarah Hrdy’s langurs, from the laboratories of Meredith Chivers and Marta Meana and Lisa Diamond’s twenty years of interviews: that when ecological circumstances are right, women are just as likely to step out as men are. Our dearest held...
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
binary cannot hold. The world is being rewritten. 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.
