Extramarital Acts are either the incarnation of evil or a dissolute “sex addict.”?

Vito Fosella. Republican
The new American prudery

U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., addresses a news conference in New York, Monday, June 6, 2011. After days of denials, a choked-up New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner confessed Monday that he tweeted a bulging-underpants photo of himself to a young woman and admitted to "inappropriate" exchanges with six women before and after getting married. (Richard Drew - AP)
The unrealistic American
 expectation that monogamy and marriage must inevitably go together like a horse and carriage seems to be back in fashion. This time, the moralizing is coming not primarily from leaders of the religious right (perhaps because many of them have violated that vow of all vows in spectacular fashion) but from disappointed children—especially women in their 30s and 40s—of fallen baby boomers. The members of Generation X won’t do to their children what dad and mom did to them by failing to forsake all others. They will remain forever best friends, forever passionately in love. And should either the passion or the friendship fade, they will be grownups and never abandon their own high standards of marital fidelity or disappoint their children. Oh, good luck with all that!
I first became aware of the chic new prudery when I came across an article in which 32-year-old Molly Jong-Fast, who has been married all of seven years, tells her mother, 69-year-old Erica Jong, how feckless and sex-obsessed mom has always been.. When Jong, who is the editor of a forthcoming anthology, Sugar in My Bowl, by women writers about sex, says that she married her first lover, Jong-Fast replies, “Ugghh. Lover? Lover is a disgusting word. It makes me want to throw up. It’s a Plato’s Retreatword. This idea of commitment, that was something I had to learn. It was not something my mother’s generation was aware of.”
Lover is a disgusting word? Tell it to William Shakespeare. I found myself hoping that Jong-Fast doesn’t really mean what she says and that she is just a canny writer on the make, trying to carve out a niche to distinguish herself from her famous mom, the author of the sexy 1973 feminist classic Fear of Flying, (a novel with views on sex that seem as outdated because of their idolatrous quality as Jong-Fast’s seem retrograde because of their staidness.) Among Jong-Fast’s other pearls of wisdom: “Your generation wants to write about having sex and not wearing bras; my generation wants to pick up their kids at school.”
Thus speaks a woman who is too young to know that she is too young to know much about the changing needs and desires of both women and men in a long-term relationship over decades, not years. I remember my mother-in-law, who had one of the best marriages I’ve ever observed, telling me when she was in her 70s, “What no one wants to admit is how much luck is involved in whether a marriage works or whether you turn into one of those petrified couples you see sitting at the next table in a restaurant and saying absolutely nothing to each other for the whole meal.”
Much of the current posturing about marital fidelity has been attributed to the horrendous divorces of baby boomer parents and the damaging impact on their children—Jong-Fast’s generation. Susan Gregory Thomas, another Gen-X mother, writes in her forthcoming memoir, In Spite of Everything, “For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: `When did your parents get divorced?’ Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.” In an advance excerpt published in The Wall Street Journal, Thomas adds, “I can’t help feeling that every divorce, in its way, is a re-enacment of `Medea,’: the wailing, murderously bereft mother; the cold father protecting his pristine, new family; the children: dead.”
I would never minimize the impact of divorce on children. Indeed, the fact that I never had children during a 13-year marriage that ended in 1982 was directly related to my pessimism about the prospects for the permanence of that marriage. But what anguished worst-case-scenario recollections—every divorce leaving Medea behind!—never take into account is what it might have been like for the children had their parents stayed together.
The American divorce rate climbed throughout the 1970s and peaked in 1981. Most of these divorces were initiated by baby boomers who grew up in the supposedly idyllic “Father Knows Best” homes of the 1950s. The question never asked or answered by women like Jong-Fast and Thomas (who is now divorced herself) is what impelled the children of outwardly stable, two-parent homes to seek divorce in unprecedented numbers. I don’t think it was just the “sexual revolution” or the fact that boomer women were entering the labor force and had a better chance of being able to support themselves.
There was something in many of the now-iconicized marriages of the “greatest generation” that made their offspring fearful of staying together “for the sake of the children.” It is easy to idealize the traditional nuclear family if you didn’t grow up in a supposedly “intact” two-parent home filled with rage.
At the moment, the divorce rate for college-educated, relatively affluent couples is at its lowest level in the last 30 years—but divorce remains just as common for those without a college degree. Call me a cynic, but I think that the economy is the main reason for the disparity in divorce rates between the affluent and the less affluent.
High-earning couples have the most to lose through divorce. If your house is underwater and you’re just managing to make the mortgage payments on two salaries, a divorce is likely to ruin you economically. And women still have more to lose financially than men. I suspect, if times get better, that the divorce courts will be busy with unhappy couples who stayed together to weather the financial crisis.
There is little evidence that the new prudery will do anything to deter divorce. In fact, the idea that marital infidelity must mean the end of a marriage seems to me one of the major causes of divorce. So too is the belief that it is natural for two people, over the course of a lifetime, to find all of their sexual, emotional and intellectual needs fulfilled by each other. For most of human history, the fifty-year marriage hardly existed—for the obvious reason that the average life expectancy in developed countries was around 40 at the turn of the 19th century.
The most common pattern was for women to die young, worn out by frequent childbearing, and for men to find a new mate to care for the children. Widows too tended to remarry, since they needed a man to provide for the children they already had.
Secularization has often been seen as a contributor to divorce—if only because secularists have more liberal sexual values (at least they say so) than the devoutly religious. And secularists regard marriage as a purely human institution, not a divine arrangement “instituted of God in the time of man’s innocence” (as the Book of Common Prayer puts it). But divorce rates do not bear out any connection between secularism and eagerness to end marriages. Divorce is much more common in the South, the heartland of right-wing evangelical Christianity, than in more secular New England. That disparity may have nothing to do with religion, however, since the Deep South is poorer than New England and the poor, since the mid-twentieth century, have always been more likely to divorce than the better off. Nevertheless, devout faith has proved no deterrent to these divorces.
The current self-righteous posturing about monogamous marriage as not only the ideal but the norm is now being heard from many precincts of the supposedly secular media. I am frankly befuddled by the wholesale condemnation surrounding former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s fall from grace—by the number of male commentators who have claimed that they cannot imagine why Weiner did what he did and by the number of people (most, though not all, women) who have said that they would never take a man back if they knew he had engaged in cybersex or viewed Inernet porn. If we are to conclude that every man who views porn must therefore not love his wife or his family, we can expect many more broken homes and weeping children throughout the land than there are today.
Those who now look up to Hillary Clinton as a role model seem to have forgotten that 15 years ago, a good many of them were saying that any self-respecting woman would have left her husband after the Monica Lewinsky scandal—just as they’re saying today that Weiner’s pregnant wife should leave him. In Clinton’s case, it was also said that if she stayed with her husband, it must only be for cynical political reasons. That Hillary Clinton might still have loved her husband—and he her—“in spite of everything” hardly figured in the speculation about their motives.
The new conventionality is now reaching out to gays, some of whom are being pressured to marry whether they want to or not. In New York state, some companies are already talking about abandoning health coverage for those who register as domestic partners and extending it only to the married—whether gay or straight. This threat is of course economically motivated—companies would love to pay out less money for health insurance—but it also speaks to a desire to conventionalize non-marital relationships that are working very well without benefit of clergy.
I do see marriage as a vital institution, especially for raising children. But it is not for everyone. I found the love of my life after the end of my marriage and we were together until his death, more united without being married than my husband and I had ever been. Some people thrive on seven-day-a-week domesticity, while others shrivel. Men and women should make every effort to figure out which type of person they are before they bring children into the world.
Everyone begins marriage with the highest hopes, the conviction of being “made for each other,” and the determination to stay together even as other marriages fall apart. But I am certain that many fewer marriages will flourish if any straying from the path of monogamy is seen as an inevitable precursor to THE END. I was never an advocate for what was called “open marriage” in the 1970s, because it was based on the biologically unreasonable and emotionally ridiculous premise that sexual jealousy can somehow be eliminated. But it is equally unreasonable to base the definition of a successful marriage on the insistence that everyone who acts on extramarital desires is either the incarnation of evil or a dissolute “sex addict.”
Lover is a beautiful word, because it implies nothing of compulsion. AsW.H. Auden wrote in his poem “In Sickness And In Health,”
That this round O of faithfulness we swear
May never wither to an empty nought
Nor petrify into a square…
And take our love for granted, Love, permit
Temptations always to endanger it…
That we, though lovers, may love soberly,
Fate, O Felix Osculum, to us
Remain nocturnal and mysterious:
Preserve us from presumption and delay;
O hold us to the voluntary way.

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