Should Men Be Applauded For Faithfulness?

Our editor, back from her lost weekend cruising the loucher bars of festival Edinburgh, recently brought an article to my attention.  It took the rather unusual stance (at least for a feminist author) that men, finding themselves, as they generally do, in severely straitened sexual circumstances following marriage, are to be admired on a daily basis for any amount of fidelity that they exhibit to their generally disobliging wives.  Any lapses in this remarkable train of faithfulness were to be viewed as mere drops in the contextual ocean of the weeks, months and years of constancy, and men were generally to be cut a bit of slack over any porn use, street-leering or mental undressing of women they may or may not be caught indulging in.

I’m paraphrasing quite a bit, of course, but these were broadly the points the article was making.  And, equally of course, the author was obviously trying to encourage debate by taking a fairly contentious position.

But what surprised me most was not the rather extreme characterization of marriage as some sort of Dickensian workhouse where sex is like some sort of gruel doled out grudgingly and in pitifully insufficient quantities, and where men, like permanently starving orphaned inmates, dream feverishly of pies, puddings and roasts (I’m not sure if each of these has a direct equivalent in this simile, and I’m not going to get into sauces or chocolate).  What surprised me the most was the shadeless unambiguity of the characterization of the sexes.

According to this author, men are all helplessly priapic, hump-a-chairleg martyrs to their libidos, valiantly holding down their compulsions, like alcoholics walking the temptation alley of the supermarket’s vodka aisle, and women are all pursed-lipped, padlocked fridges, shutting up shop and turning off the taps with a prim satisfaction, having snared their men into matrimony with a few months of grimly endured humping as bait.

Not even touching on the silliness and unsustainability of such a situation, I’ve only really one point to make about this, and it is that there is in reality so much variation amongst people of the same sex, never mind between the sexes, that this categorization is completely meaningless.

There is absolutely no “broad sense” of any sort in which this portrayal of men or women can be said to have any truth.

Some men – even many men – like sex.  Some don’t.  Some think about it.  Some don’t.  Some use porn and others don’t.  And some women are uninterested in all of this, and of course some aren’t.

The point is that there are people of both sexes at either end and all across the middle of all the ranges of possibilities in these areas, and attempting to increase our understanding of how the sexes interact using a characterization based on complete extremes is pointless.  You might as well say that all men love eating out and women uniformly prefer eating at home, and that men occasionally stopping for a hamburger on the way home and not eating their dinner as a result is perfectly understandable.

It does nobody any good to try to explain the complexity of interaction between the sexes using one-dimensional clichés.  People enter into relationships and marriages successfully, unsuccessfully, once, often, repeatedly and even never, for all sorts of reasons and with all sorts of results.  Pigeonholing them as sex pests and ice queens and then commenting that the former actually do really well to stay with the latter is about as meaningful as a night with Charlie Sheen.

Contact the author here: thewhy@morningquickie.com