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.