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. Continue reading →