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

Linda Wolfe discovered that roughly 75 percent of the two troops of female macaques she studied regularly mounted or were mounted by other females. Female langurs also have sexual encounters with other female langurs; in three thousand hours of observation of a troop in India, researchers found that there were no females who didn’t.

They are a male philopatric species. That is, males stay in their natal groups, within a network of kin, while females disperse at sexual maturity to ensure there is no inbreeding. While it’s good for the species and individuals alike to have unrelated breeding partners, this arrangement generally means a life of misery for females who are, after all, interlopers of sorts, arrivistes in their social settings relative to males. The implications are hard to ignore: among other non-human primates, female dispersal/male philopatry means that females are at the bottom of the totem pole relative to the males who’ve stayed in place and the females who’ve been there awhile. It also means males are in charge in obvious ways—they eat first, get groomed more often, and can commit infanticide and physical violence against females, not to mention coerce females sexually without consequence. After all, what recourse do unaffiliated females have?

What if all our presumptions of alpha males being dominant adventurers in sexual conquest, and women as passive recipients seeking a single dominant male’s attention, come from the long shadow cast by the plough, not from how we evolved? 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?

Even though women who identified as exclusively lesbian pretty much stayed that way, there was undeniable variation in whom they were involved with and whom they were attracted to. Very few were “gold star lesbians”—women who only sleep with other women. One woman who had in fact only been with women for the entire twenty-year period told Diamond during their most recent interview that she and her wife had broken up. This woman, newly single and devastated, had then become involved with a man. She told Diamond, “I think I’ll end up with a woman again, but maybe I just needed a change.”

Chillingly, one study found that white female college students felt less intent to intervene and less personal responsibility to intervene, and imputed greater victim pleasure, when the hypothetical victim of sexual assault was a black woman.

In fact, according to research in Monique W. Morris’s book Pushout, people of every race and gender see black girls as more “adultlike” than white girls their own age. And thus the grown-ups upon whom they depend—teachers, principals, administrators—don’t give these girls the attention and protection they need. “Left to navigate school by themselves because they are ‘grown,’ these girls are easily manipulated by men.”

At first the show might seem to be playing into a timeworn trope: Lawrence is down, unmotivated, and basically not being a great boyfriend. They’ve grown increasingly alienated from each other. But then she and Lawrence reconnect emotionally. He finds an interim job. They recommit to each other, feeling happy and connected. Lawrence and Issa seem to be back on track. But Issa goes to Daniel’s recording studio anyway, and has incredibly hot, fun sex with him. In her interview with Wilmore, Rae explained her choice to write it the way she did. In part, she felt it was authentic to show that women don’t just “fall into” infidelities and dalliances. Like Alicia Walker’s study subjects, they often seek them out, because they want them: “She had already opened this door at the first episode, and once the woman decides, like, ‘I’m opening this door,’ she’s gonna walk through it,” Rae mused to Wilmore. This decision wasn’t about being angry at Lawrence or being disconnected from him. In fact, in a fundamental sense it wasn’t about Lawrence at all. It was about Issa and what she wanted, and about Issa acting on what she wanted. It wasn’t about her lackluster boyfriend, who was trying to get his life together, Rae told Wilmore. “It was about her and fulfilling this fantasy and being this person that she had set out to be, this active person who made different decisions.” Rae is talking about agency, something Issa struggles with and sometimes fumbles. But Rae wants her to have it. L...

Like 50 percent of the women who admitted they were unfaithful in a comprehensive 2011 survey of more than 100,000 US adults, Issa stepped out because she wanted to, because sex with a new person was an exciting idea and then an exciting reality.

In this she echoes the thinking of Esther Perel, the therapist and author of Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs, who challenges us to move beyond our paradigm of personal betrayal in thinking about infidelity. Perel wants us to consider that the affair may not be an indictment of the person being cheated upon. Nor a sign that he or she—the person who has been “betrayed”—has failed. Or that the relationship necessarily has big problems. Maybe, but maybe not. Not infrequently, Perel has found, infidelity has nothing to do with him or her or the relationship at all. Hard as it is to imagine that something that causes so much pain, something a partner does that devastates us so thoroughly, might be somewhat unrelated to us, it is sometimes the case. This idea may feel terrifying, because it shows how little control we have over what a spouse or partner does. Even if we’re “perfect” they might step out. People have affairs or extra-pair involvements because they want to.

Wyatt and her colleagues concluded that “only 26 percent of the Kinsey women reported six or more sexual partners as compared to 60 percent of the new subjects.” And Wyatt uncovered interesting facts about black women and infidelity: “Among ever-married women, there was only a slight difference between samples on extramarital sexual activity. The proportion of women who had engaged in extramarital sex was 31 percent in the Kinsey sample as compared to 40 percent in ours.”

had deliberately chosen a nondescript restaurant, one nobody I knew ever went to, for my meet-up with a married man. He had texted, “Let’s go somewhere private.” I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring—I hadn’t since that day of the workshop on consensual non-monogamy. The man I was meeting was attractive—dark-haired and fit—and always attentive. He was smart and handsome and he made me laugh and sometimes I wondered what it would be like to be with someone like him.

Of her own life, she writes: On the mornings when I walk from my boyfriend’s apartment to the home I share with my husband, I sometimes find myself reflecting on the disconnects between my own experiences with romantic love and the way romantic love is normally understood in the time and place in which I live (Vancouver, Canada, in 2016). Sometimes this starts out in my mind as a replay of an awkward conversation, one of those where someone’s asked me a perfectly innocent question—“So how do you two know each other?”—and unwittingly forced me to choose between giving a deceptive answer and providing what I know will be too much information. If I tell the truth—“He’s my boyfriend”—to people who know me and my husband, it’s inevitably going to cause embarrassment—the kind of embarrassment that comes with suddenly being made to acknowledge the existence of something awkward, something abnormal, something that makes people feel icky. Deceptive answers—“Oh, he used to work in the office upstairs from mine”—are easy and comfortable.

Justin Lehmiller found in a survey of four thousand men that 58 percent of them had fantasies about sharing their partner with other men, or being “cucked.” Some men like to be present for the act, even participate in it, while others just like to help set it up and hear about it after.

But Ley also interviewed couples in which the man participated in his wife’s sexual experiences with other men, and he told me that “quite a few men into this lifestyle have bisexual leanings.” They wouldn’t feel comfortable going to a gay club, but they might give a man oral sex in the context of cucking, if their wives directed them to as part of their play, Ley explained. One man Ley interviewed—married for twenty-two years and deeply in love with his wife—identified as bisexual and said he enjoyed “silky seconds” with her after she had had sex with another man because “his presence lingers in her.”

Meanwhile, in a study of gay men into cuckolding that Ley undertook with Dan Savage and Justin Lehmiller, the researchers discovered that the lifestyle is also popular with gay men in the age of marriage equality. It may be that, once gay men can get married, they are increasingly interested in being cucks and hot husbands. “It seems that when your relationship is codified and legalized, it is more erotic to cuckold within it, because it becomes more taboo,” Ley explained.

Miller-Young and Livermon suggest that pornography in general and Mandingo cucking in particular “are among the few places where our most privately held societal views about race are most revealed.” In “eroticiz[ing] the sexual powerlessness” and humiliation of the (usually) white head of household and performing the threat that the black man, with his sexual prowess, will displace the white husband, this genre of cuckolding also allows for the possibility of white men being sexual with black men by proxy, reframing anxiety and threat as thrill. Meanwhile, the white wife’s body acts “as a conduit of white male desires for racial purity and also for the black man’s body.” In this sense, she is less a woman coloring outside the lines and more an actress in her husband’s complex, racialized, and heteronormativity-bending passion play.

“What I saw was a number of women who, as they start initially to engage in this to fulfill their husband’s fantasies and needs, gradually they themselves begin to develop more sexual autonomy and independence. These women will say, ‘I’m interested in doing this, in developing relationships’ or just in doing it their own way, without the men’s controls placed on it.” To paraphrase a saying among swingers, be careful what you wish for when you yourself are a guy who can have perhaps several orgasms per day but are married to a woman who can have many times that per hour. The fear and the fantasy is that one’s wife will be “set loose.” As Alexis McCall puts it, “Once your genie is out of the bottle, she’s not going back in.”

The cuck elects to join forces with his hotwife, knowing that her capacity for pleasure, unlike his, is nearly limitless. Standing apart from the tradition of men who have tried to contain or exterminate or diminish the female libido, or force it into the confines of fidelity, he knows better. He embraces it, because it can take him everywhere.

Tammy Nelson, author of The New Monogamy, who says that in her experience, “men and women basically want the same things when they’re having an affair. They want sex and connection. I wish I had known that earlier in my life and career—that when it comes to motivation, men and women are really very similar.”

Of the 2,000 surveyed female users of the Victoria Milan website for married people seeking affairs, most responded “to add excitement to my life” (35 percent) when asked why they cheated (and a whopping 22.5 percent, more than one in five, reported doing so because they were unsatisfied in their marital beds).

In her Good in Bed survey of 1,923 women and 1,418 men, sex researcher Kristen Mark discovered that men and women were equally likely to consider infidelity due to “boredom” in a relationship, and that in the first three years of a relationship, women were roughly twice as likely as men to become bored.

Tilda Swinton comes to mind. Rich, beautiful, and powerful, for a time she reportedly lived in a castle in Scotland with her life partner, with whom she had twins, and also with her nearly twenty-years-younger boyfriend (in an interview with Katie Couric, among others, Swinton denied being in a “dual relationship” with the men, though did not deny having an arrangement that might appear unusual to some).

In neighborhoods where there are high rates of incarceration, for example, women and children may benefit from serial relationships and depending on extended family and other kin support to raise their children. Contrary to what social conservatives assert, this has less to do with morality and more to do with material circumstances and the kind of maternal strategizing and trade-offs in a sometimes hostile environment—in this instance, one ravaged by institutionalized racism—that helped Homo sapiens thrive.

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...

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.