Andrea sends me a link to this Jay Michaelson piece that ran last Wednesday at the Huffington Post: It’s Not Just Tiger: Monogamous Marriage Is An Anomaly. The title is, one admits, historically accurate; marriage, as Stephanie Coontz has shown so ably, is a dynamic rather than static institution, and it has meant different things in different cultures. Certainly monogamy (at least for men) hasn’t always been expected, and in making this rather familiar and unoriginal observation, Michaelson is on solid ground. But once we get past the title, we’re off to a bad start:
It was understood - in the Bible, in the Talmud, in Protestant Europe, in colonial America - that married men would visit prostitutes. And while this may have been a sin, it was everyone’s sin - and not a particularly serious one.
That’s simply bizarre. I assume Michaelson has read Midrashic commentaries on Judah and Tamar, for example, or Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America. Godbeer, an old friend of mine, ably demonstrates that the Puritans actually believed that men had more (rather than less) self-control than women, whom they regarded as disordered by the unfortunate condition of hysteria. The notion that in deeply religious Western cultures men were always seen as entitled to sexual release outside of marriage is absurd. Certainly, men were generally (though not always) punished less severely for sexual transgressions than were women, and prostitutes treated more harshly than their patrons — but to say that the record of Western civilization is one that reveals that men’s use of prostitutes was largely accepted is to grossly misrepresent the evidence.
But that’s not the real objection to Michaelson’s piece, which is written, more or less, in defense of philandering. (As a post, it stands as a terrific illustration of how to “praise with faint damns”.) It turns out, according to Michaelson, that feminists — who else — spoiled the fun men had been having for centuries by insisting on companionate, monogamous, egalitarian marriages:
What changed all this was, ironically, feminism. The first feminists weren’t bra-burning radicals: they were pious scolds, who in late 19th century America mobilized for purifying American manhood. They cleaned out the brothels and closed the pubs - feminists were the first prohibitionists. What had for hundreds of years been the common practice of men of all social classes became a great vice to be eradicated.
Twentieth century feminism added another layer of condemnation: after all, why should men be allowed to philander while women were expected to remain faithful and stand by their (abusive, cheating) men no matter what? Why are promiscuous men heroes, and promiscuous women sluts? Women aren’t slaves, feminism taught us, and men need to respect them as equal partners in marriage. Infidelity had been a religious sin - now it was a secular one as well.
Nineteenth-century feminists, as Michaelson doesn’t know, were far more concerned with fighting prostitution because of what it did to the lives of women and girls; purifying American manhood was about saving their wives and sisters and daughters and mothers from exploitation and misery. Of course, Michaelson is, like a great many men, attached to the idea that any woman who demands responsibility from a man is a hen-pecking killjoy who fails to understand men’s earthy, rambunctious, eternally puerile nature. And Michaelson ignores the countless male advocates for sexual restraint and fidelity, like Sylvester Graham, John Kellogg, and Anthony Comstock, whose influence was (probably unfortunately) far more significant on Victorian American culture than that of Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Michaelson is on firmer ground when he suggests that the women’s liberation movement did lead wives to demand more from their husbands. But his implication that this demand for lifelong fidelity exceeds the average male capacity for self-restraint is based more on an enduring myth about male weakness than on evidence. More offensively, he implies that monogamy is something that most men would rather not pledge — and that only because they know that they “have to” in order to keep their wives do most husbands at least attempt to remain faithful. This grossly misrepresents not just men’s abilities, but men’s desires. For that matter, by ignoring the fairly obvious reality that in a more egalitarian age, “women cheat too”, Michaelson reinforces the notion that the sin of infidelity is a one-way street.
Michaelson concludes with a short plea for tolerance:
It’s not that we should stop preaching monogamy: the value is still an important ideal. It’s that we shouldn’t be so surprised when people fall short of it. The people for whom this should matter are the cheater’s wife and family. As for the rest of us: we are human, after all. We overeat, we pollute, we cheat on tests and taxes and all kinds of legal regulations. We even drive above the speed limit. None of these things is good, none is praiseworthy. But to err is human, and our marriage rhetoric isn’t.
Jeepers, if that isn’t the banality of the obvious, I don’t know what is. I don’t disagree that we’re human, we’re flawed, and that we fall short of the ideal. But I reject the notion that cheating is an entirely private matter, or should be. Unlike the other sins he lists, cheating is the betrayal of a specific promise that was stated in public, a promise in which another human being (and, if children appear, a series of new human beings) have placed their trust. I promised my wife my faithfulness before God, our friends, our family. I did not make a similar profession about my commitment to not overeat, or not speed on the freeway. And while gluttony and recklessness are indeed misdemeanors against the collective good, betraying a promise to be faithful to one’s spouse inflicts a far deeper wound. That wound is not just to the spouse, but to the web of relationships that connect to the married couple. Few of us haven’t had our own friendships or families damaged by someone’s infidelity, even if we weren’t in the adulterous marriage ourselves. That it is a common failing doesn’t make it any less damaging, far more damaging than the other sins to which Michaelson compares it.
Marriage isn’t for everyone, which isn’t at all the same thing as saying it shouldn’t be available to everyone. It can be, at its best, a particularly effective vehicle for personal growth, and can be an excellent environment in which to raise children. Many marriages fail, and others reach the end of their usefulness. Many people cheat. We know all this, but none of this dampens the reality that enduring monogamous commitment is an ideal to which a great many people aspire for a host of complex (and often excellent) reasons. Companionate marriage — the idea that a spouse should be a friend and an equal — is not an unreasonable nor impossible idea.
And while we should indeed be willing to forgive those who break the promises they made, we shouldn’t allow the frequency with which those pledges are broken to lead us to dismiss the damage infidelity does, nor to be overly cynical about our very real capacity to be enduringly faithful.
Actually, you did make a public pledge to obey the speed limit (and all other traffic laws), when you applied for a driver’s license, and agreed to submit to punishment if you violated that pledge.
That’s why there is such a thing as a driver’s license, which can be revoked if you fail to live up to its obligations.
Yes and no — I made a pledge to the public in one sense (the state), but that pledge wasn’t made publicly in the presence of family and friends.
The thing about celebrities is that all sorts of normally private things that they do “matter” to the public (in the sense that they get reported on, talked about, etc.). Normally it wouldn’t matter to society if a person gets a haircut, or what they wear to a particular event, or what organizations they make charitable or political donations to. But all of those things are publicly reported and commented on in the case of celebrities.
I think the more interesting issue with marriage is what would happen if a celebrity were to say that his/her marriage is consensually, honestly, nonmonogamous. Because it’s reasonable to expect people to live up to the committments they make, and to not make committments they are unwilling to live up to. But having an enduring primary relationship with one person over a lifetime does not HAVE to include sexual monogamy. There is a default expectation that marriage means sexual monogamy. And so far it seems either that famous cheaters have been just that - cheaters and not honest non-monogamous people - or that they have been unwilling to say in public that monogamy was not one of the committments they made at the time of their particular individual marriage.
I think that it’s fair to criticize people for breaking their committments. But I think there should be more room and respect for people working out their own boundaries, obligations, and expectations when entering into a marriage.
The problem I have with this analysis is the whole concept of no-fault divorce. You suggest that infidelity is bad because it is a breach of a specific public promise. Why should that matter, as no-fault divorce institutionalizes divorce FOR NO REASON; at least, under at-fault divorce, infidelity was a ground for breaking the marriage. now that the marriage contract can be broken for no reason at all, those specific, public vows seem much less impressive than they might have been in those times when the law (and the public) took them more seriously.
-Jut
JG, my problem with infidelity is as great in a committed monogamous relationship where a couple isn’t married as when it is; a couple that is publicly together isn’t necessarily legally together. There may not be a legal marriage, but there may well be a sense that a couple is, in the eyes of their peers and community, wed — and cheating hurts just as much in those instances.
I’m not in favor of “at-fault divorce”; anything that traps people in irreparably damaged marriages is a very bad idea.
“(and, if children appear, a series of new human beings)”
I’m very tickled by my mental image here of a clown car of babies driving up and unloading an endless stream of youngins.
I’m sorry, that’s a way off-topic comment on a great post, but I just can’t get the picture out of my head.
Along those lines, I remember when my wife was first pregnant and we were interviewing midwives, one of them remarked — out of the blue — that if our baby-to-be was a little girl (we didn’t know the sex until the birth), she already had all of her ova inside of her — your “unconceived descendants” was the phrase the midwife used. Hell, I’ve taught sex ed for years, and never had thought of things that way. I had a clown car image too.
Yes, this is definitely off-base laying so much at the feet of feminism while ignoring the broader picture of the Victorian era and its moral prerogatives.
At the same time, getting away from the history and looking to the present, I do happen to agree with the broader premise that the default norm of lifelong monogamous marriage is definitely due for a comprehensive review, but one that addresses current realities, rather than referencing a shallow (and, as you point out, largely incomplete and erroneous) pop-history of the sort expressed here. We don’t go forward by hearkening back to some supposedly simpler past (that really never was).
I’m of the view, that while people certainly ought to be held to their public commitments, including marriage, that we put too many expectations on marriage as a culture and too much pressure on people to marry too young. Both men and women are susceptible to a fantasy that the marriages they contemplate are likely to work out or that they will gain some of the stability and responsibility of adulthood by marrying. These expectations are too often brutally belied by the emergent realities that are reflected most directly and simply in the 50% or higher divorce rate, and in the trauma that attends marital failure and divorce. We can add to the half of marriages that fail whatever the percentage is of marriages that have to be out there that are unsatisfying or unfulfilling, and that people are stuck in because of their desire to stick with their public commitments regardless, or because of children, or desire to avoid the pain of a divorce. We should expect of ourselves and others, in my view, that we probably aren’t going to find that person to whom we should be married or otherwise committed to in an exclusive and monogamous relationship at least until we’ve gotten some life experience and learned more about ourselves, about the options we can choose for ourselves, and about the other person we might want to be with.
I had two thoughts while reading the post and comments. The first is that one of the good things about the increased awareness of polyamory and other nonmonogamy approaches to relationships is that it makes people think about what they want/need/expect from a relationship. Most will still choose to promise monogamy, but knowing that it is a choice and not just the default or even the only way of structuring a relationship, will mean that people will think about what *they* want instead of simply what is expected.
The other thing follows from the first. Infidelity may well be a great reason for divorce. It may be something that so shatters the trust within the relationship that any other or subsequent promise is called into question. But it doesn’t *have* to be the death sentence to the relationship that it once ways. There are other ways of structuring relationships than the current most common serial monogamy and, if the relationship is worth having, then that discussion can be had.
There is a certain extent that I am more than willing to “blame” feminists for such a turn of events (although I would state it as “thank”). Women no longer being in such a subservient position that they have to stay in a relationship no matter what, is a good thing. No fault divorce is a good thing. Being fully counted as human, with human desires, needs, and expectations is a good thing. Being strong enough as individuals and supported as individuals and human by the state is a good thing. If that’s blame, then I’ll take my share of it.
While I’m not a huge fan of evolutionary psychology, one of their arguements is that monogamy actually benefits men in societies where women do not have power. Think about it:
Guys who can pay for multiple wives are taking sexual partners away from guys who can only pay for one.
So the idea that monogamy ruins all the fun really only applies to men who have money and power to burn.