-- Conal Ho

After reading Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times regarding the subject of men and infidelity and love etc., and also Melissa Levine's column in Salon regarding the different (but related) subject of coming out as straight after years of identifying as a lesbian, I want to chime in.

Don't you feel at all icky to be passing off prejudicial slurs and stereotypes as fact? Sorry, ladies, but men are not all the same; it is not "that simple." We are not all emotionally "unavailable," "predictable" dogs. To hear men referred to as such is akin to me calling all women fragile, emotionally random, gold-digging prostitutes. Either stereotype smacks of sexist bigotry.

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Particularly, I doubt that either of these columnists would feel comfortable describing all Italians or Asians or Africans or Canadians as the same. But somehow, in our current culture, it has become acceptable to pass off the motivations and inner workings of another minority, men, as coming from the same predictable place. This prejudice is patently unfair, and doesn't describe reality.

I specifically reject Dowd's notion that one sex is more predisposed to monogamy and nurturing than the other. While I will concede that middle-aged men do cheat more often than middle-aged women, this statistic does not in itself prove anything.

Perhaps the reason that men are more likely to be unfaithful in middle age is because of another stereotype, this one involving women. Biologically, women seem to be attracted most to success, power and wealth -- traits that represent security. Married middle-aged men possess these three gems in statistically higher amounts than younger men. Available women of all ages are therefore more likely to find middle-aged males attractive, hence enabling and empowering these men to flirt and subsequently to cheat.

Paradoxically, males seem to be biologically more attracted to female traits that would point to fertility, such as youth (or health) and vivacity, the things we commonly (and frowningly) refer to as "physical attractiveness." Married middle-aged women are less likely to possess those traits and therefore are not as enabled or empowered to find themselves as attractive as their male counterparts. Hence they don't even attempt extramarital infidelity. I assure you, otherwise they would.

It is an unfortunate fact that women and men both have a propensity to cheat and can both feel trapped in long-term relationships. The difference is that men are more likely to have attractive alternatives (albeit often fantasized ones) as their age progresses.

Among younger people of both sexes, the level of infidelity is closer to equal. The differences that do exist between the sexes in younger age groups appear to be more based on cultural taboos and restraints on women. Melissa Levine talks about the attraction of "incestuous friendships" as a plus of lesbianism. Obviously, she feels that female promiscuity is less frowned upon in lesbian culture than in heterosexual culture, and that is why it is less common than straight male infidelity or homosexual infidelity.

Women want what Dowd calls the "unknowability of new conquests" as much as men do; they are just less likely to feel empowered to follow their urges. However, this doesn't mean that straight women can't or won't follow those urges, as any cursory viewing of "Jenny Jones" will tell you, but that women are more secretive and seductive in their pursuits. They won't necessarily tell their friends or admit them to a pollster.

And since when are sexual fantasies and masturbation evil and worthy of ridicule again? Dowd describes a fictional married man's masturbation to Internet porn and fantasies of a co-worker as "frightening and so banal." Apparently, in Dowd's view men are dogs if they live out the desires that they can't choose to have or not to have, and they are also dogs if they choose to stay faithful and not to act on those desires. This is strangely similar to the Christian right's arguments about homosexuality. In their eyes, it is a sin to act on gay desire and also evil to have the desires in the first place. Sounds like a Catch-22 to me, and it also sounds like prejudice against a minority for a biological factor that is out of their control.

-- Todd Patrick

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