Women cheating?

Women and men cheat in roughly equal numbers, and by most standards, men cheat slightly more. However, this is only an emergency situation requiring drastic measures like abandoning career prospects and submitting to humiliating guilty-until-proven-innocent paternity testing when women do it, according to the "we only want men to be equal" crowd that's making a fuss at feministing and volsunga.

At feministing, the story is a new twist on an old line of bullshit--that men who want subordinate wives don't want that out of sexism. Oh no, they are hapless victims of their maleness. Of course, this argue relies on women's powerlessness, since in the past when a group has been marked as naturally defective they tend to be enslaved. But now you have the dominant group arguing that they need their dominance because they are naturally defective. It's headache-inducing.

The new twist on the "all in the genes, ladies" excuse is that men look for wives who don't excel at work because they are afraid that this means that women will cheat. Man, anything but admit that it might have something to do with a sexist culture, huh? You gotta admit, if you can get people to swallow it, it's a hell of an excuse--women with ambition are officially sluts now. It's genetic, ladies. Can't help it.

Of course, inequality between men and women really does cause palpable anxiety in women about male cheating, since dependent females don't have much recourse to divorce if their husbands cheat. I don't think anyone is suggesting that men stay at home dependent on their wives, in order to reduce that anxiety, though.

The most thigh-slappingly funny thing is this story that was posted at thisgirl's blog. It's a supposedly telling poll that's a variation on the ol' "When did you stop beating your wife?" question that has no good answers. (I cracked this joke over there, but it went over like a lead balloon, either because it's only an American joke or because it might be hitting a leetle too close to home for the trolls on the blog.)

The whole point of the article is to demonstrate that women are evil, lying Jezebels. Of course, if I was asked such a weird question as, "If you got pregnant by someone other than your boyfriend, would you lie about it?" I would go through some weird contortions. Well, let's see. I wouldn't be cheating. But I guess if I was, then I'm already lying so why quit now? Luckily for the hysterical men that are swinging this around, they didn't bother to survey men, which might uncomfortably demonstrate that lying, especially in hypothetical situations, is a common human behavior.

I know, I'm being unfair. Why should men and women be compared as if they were members of the same species?