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Monday, July 19, 2004

A shot to cure infidelity?

This article in the New York Times Magazine has an amusing premise and some interesting information in it.  Apparently, some scientists were able to manipulate some promiscious male rodents into being monogamous through medical means.  The author takes off from there and wonders what would happen if you could medically manipulate men into faithfulness.  He suggests that women would be able to talk men into getting an injection that rid them of a straying eye by making it a precondition to sex.  Of course, that's nonsense, because in order for that to work all women everywhere would have to make it a precondition or else men who don't want the shot will gravitate towards women who don't demand it.
But his entire article is silly, because in order for his ideas to work, we have to accept that infidelity is a male problem and women are just victims.  And therefore the tension is not between men and women who extract monogamy from each other, but between men who want to be naughty and women who keep them in line.
But, women cheat nearly as much as men.  And men feel just as much anxiety about their mate's fidelity as women do.  They may feel even more anxiety--it's telling to me that there's a word for a man who's been cheated on (cuckold), but not a word for a woman with a straying husband.  On top of that, the sex that's notorious for using control to extract fidelity is not women, but men.  If there was a shot that made both sexes faithful, my guess is that the vast majority of people demanding it would be those men that stalk, beat, abuse, and otherwise already control their wives. 
That's probably why this writer decided to focus on controlling male infidelity instead of controlling female infidelity.  When women try to exert control over men, they stereotypically do so by using manipulation, specifically sexual manipulation, which he suggests would be the case here.  A woman using sexual manipulation is regarded with humor, regret, resignation, or annoyance, but it's usually not with horror.  It's just not that threatening.  But contemplating male control is to open yourself up to contemplating scarier things--violence or the threat of it.  What some men would do to get their wives to take a fidelity shot is no light-hearted manner in the spirit of this article. 

11 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So what you're saying is, there's a bit of Lysistrata-fication going on here...

7/20/2004

 
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Anonymous Anonymous said...

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11/11/2005

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, I’m out searching & surfing for the latest information on infidelity and found your blog. Although this isn't exactly what I am looking for, it caught my attention and I just read this post. I see now why Google pointed me here while I was searching for infidelity related stuff. I'm glad I stopped long enough to read your posts -- thanks.

11/14/2005

 
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