It was the tip of the nose that did it, and not just for me. The wife of Democratic New York Governor Eliot Spitzer stood by his side on 12 March 2008, as he attempted to salvage his reputation by resigning from office. Looking rent to the core of her frail and neatly suited being, she stood quietly as her sexual allure was effectively trashed by her own husband before millions of viewers. Pale but keeping it together with what must have taken an iron will, it was just the tip of her nose that give away how utterly humiliated, dejected and betrayed she felt.
So poignant was the picture, it inspired the television law drama series The Good Wife (2009) which replayed that interview with a cathartic reprise. She smacks him one out of sight of the cameras and didn't it feel good. Men like Spitzer make us collectively angry. He not only abused public funds - some $80,000 - to pay exhorbitant escort fees, he caused distress to the very people he is charged with protecting from the slings and arrows of life, etc.?
Yet the Spitzer story was somehow different to the Clintons and a blur of public figures whose unfaithful marriages have undergone the same?flayed-alive,?overexposure. Sometimes it takes a critical mass to disperse the fog of unquestioning. I saw the carcass of the Spitzer marriage being flung atop a mass of corpses too high to see over. I needed to step back to get perspective, and once I did I saw a heap that, like most heaps, looked like a monumental waste.
It's no surprise Sptizer?s call-girl has done very nicely for herself, with a Playboy shoot, a single release and a sex-advice column in the New York Post. Spitzer's wife, Silda Wall, has also capitalized on the media attention, releasing a book,??Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer?. She has said, 'The wife is supposed to take care of the sex. This is?my?failing; I wasn't adequate.'
Bettina Arndt would agree. It is men who suffer a 'sex-starved' subsistence in heterosexual monogamous marriage. Women deprive men, women dismiss men, women shame men about their natural urges. Women are, all over again, Female Eunuchs and God's Police.?Whatever sexuality we managed to reclaim during the sexual revolution, we are now content to consign to history and worse, impose our desultory, lack-lustre, bed-death on the men we love.?
Eric Anderson also discerns a gender abyss between men and women's sexual needs in his recently released book,??The Monogamy Gap: Men, Love, and the Reality of Cheating?. This study of 120 partnered undergraduate men found that 78% cheated, and unlike Arndt who attributes men's infidelity to sexual neglect, Anderson blithely puts it down to men wanting to have sex with other women. He and Ardnt advocate rethinking monogamy, and I agree.?
It may just be the surveillance and exposure of our once private lives that has brought us to this point of realisation, but monogamy clearly isn't working and in the end it's kids who are getting most hurt by the trashing of perfectly functional relationships all because we have lazily failed to pay attention to the self-evident ? sexual exclusivity is a cruel and repressive ideal few attain. Long term monogamous sexual relationships at some point lose ignition. Most soldier on without it, but a critical mass can't live without it. Rather than hurt the partners they love, and destabilise their kids, they lie.
Increasingly the absurdity of the institution, its inherent sexual repressiveness, is being questioned. What concerns me is this nasty turn toward correlating monogamy with women's sexuality, as though it suits us because we have lesser, read?deficient, read inferior needs.
By all means let's rethink monogamy, but why that entails blaming women for the failings of an institution that arguably hasn't left us overly sated and all-over-rosy either, isn't clear. Aside from entrenched, habitual misogyny, it is hard to explain why the voices of women are either missing or stereotyped in the debate to date.
Arndt has so alienated women over decades of overexposure in male-appointed editorial column space I'm astonished any have contributed to her 'research'. I for one refuse to have another Saturday morning trampled by her myopic ravings and haven't read a word she's written in over ten years, anymore than I would listen to Alan Jones, or watch Andrew Bolt.?Certain men, who may not have taken ?Gender, Sexuality and Feminism? in their undergraduate years at a guess, will flock to her website seeking solace, making her sample self-selected. I wonder if any have ever asked themselves what they might do better to make their wives want them again ? Cut their nails? Brush their teeth? Read the kids a story? Make eye contact? Instead it is all about women?s lack of testosterone.
It's easy to blame, and harder to think with rigour on a question that does indeed cause untold numbers of men AND WOMEN real distress, either because a central part of their well-being is daily undermined by living unsated, or because their entire lives, their emotional and financial security, things they have worked most of their adult lives to build, and that of their children, has been thrown asunder on the tissue-thin premise of sexual possession and its betrayal.
The keystone of the institution of monogamy is sexual possession. Its origins lie in the securing of agnatic bloodlines for property inheritance. Over centuries it has cast a long shadow disproportionately over women's lives because we are the only ones in the reproductive dyad who can prove with certainty our children?s parentage. The Father could be anyone, and nothing cuts deeper for men, as it would for women. It has made them a little insecure about women?s sexuality and that?s putting it mildly. It is thus women who have endured real suffering Bettina, such as violence, incarceration, lobotomies, impoverishment and social stigma.?Indeed the body count for adulterous women over the centuries and the horrific state of many of their corpses is testament enough to the gender asymmetry in heterosexual monogamous marriage.
Sexual possession has no place in modern relationships or familial configurations. It is like religion. For some, for a time, it provides an ideal to live up to that gives structure and purpose. To have mutual satisfaction over a lifetime with the person you love is not just ecstatic, it is a triumph given all the impediments to good sex a couple can face. But for monogamist fundamentalists, sexual possession provides the rationale for violence against women and children. The children of monogamist fundamentalists face a clear and present danger when their mothers repartner; in two recent cases, of being left to drown at the bottom of a dam, or of catapulting to their death off the Westgate Bridge.
There is much at stake here, and we have reached a critical moment in this nascent debate. Let's not squander the opportunity to create better relationships, and perhaps defuse one highly volatile fuse for violence against women and children, by letting gender bias and misogyny creep into the discussion.
This article appeared in The Hoopla, 9 January 2012, http://thehoopla.com.au/monogamy-its-over-lets-talk-it
Source: http://lizconorcomment.blogspot.com/2012/07/monogamy.html
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