Oh sexuality, how we ignore you and use you and spit in your face!

This week’s New York Times Magazine article, “The Affairs of Men: The trouble with sex and marriage,” which, by relating to the Eliot Spitzer scandal, begins a defense of an inherent need for men to fuck lots of women, misses the mark big time.

I was actually trying to post the following as a comment on the Huffington Post’s “The Secret Lives of Married Men,” which brings together a number of other people talking about the same topic, therefore also missing the mark, but was having trouble getting into my account there.

Talking about married men’s “natural” need or undeniable urge for sex with multiple women is like talking about blood’s “need” to run out of a neglected wound. Sure, perhaps hypothetical dude #1 genuinely feels an undeniable urge to fuck a woman or two besides his wife, but I would gander that that there is a hypothetical dude #2 out there somewhere in the same situation who could stop that “bleeding” if he changed his job, spent more time relaxing, dropped his desire to become wealthier and more important, took some yoga classes, or read some Eckhart Tolle. Bad relationships and obsessions with sex are symptoms of a society that needs a lot of healing.

Sex and sexuality is rampantly used as currency, used for emotional comfort, used to gain power. The very obsession with sex and sex by men with multiple female partners is largely due to a cultural obsession with sex as a fix-all, and as something that helps us feel in control. Orgasms are like taking a drug—one that relaxes and destresses and just plain feels good.

Sex and sexuality, desire, and flirting, these are natural, they don’t have to be bad. Unfortunately the way it is expressed—from abstinence education to boys-will-be-boys—in the world today is really pathetic. How big are our brains, again? Are we this collectively out of touch with our bodies and minds?

Further, it is a shame (and almost insulting) that the Huffington Post article is called “The Secret Lives of Married Men,” because it cuts off the possibility of the conversation going into the deeper complexities of this issue—it ignores and invalidates the fact that just as many women are unhappy in their lives and marriages AND sex lives, and skips right to the assumption that the behavior of cheating or polyamorous men is justifiable because their unhappiness is more important or somehow distinctly different from women’s. It is also insulting to men because it assumes that men are one-dimensional, that more “strange” sex will actually make them happier and more content. Another commenter on the Huffington Post article made a good point:

“Men and women are attacked daily with advertizing that uses sex as a weapon to get our money. Growing up with this constant barrage of sex and the sense that sex and wealth are the end result of all great accomplishments.
At one time men and women had sex when their lifes were good and they felt good about life in general. Today sex is promoted as a cure all from depression to heart disease.

Maybe the guys are trying to heal themseves like many women!”

Phillip Weiss, the author of that NYT article, outed himself as having major emotional problems more than anything else he tried to express.

The point that Esther Perel makes (in the Huffington Post article) is a good one: that couples are unfaithful in so many other ways that are just as hurtful as sexual infidelity. This is not proof that polyamory is right, however, instead it is evidence that having a lot of sex just isn’t all that important to a healthy, full, happy relationship.

Unfortunately, we are a sex-obsessed world, so we treat sex-obsessed urges and addictions as their own rational behaviors instead of as symptoms—indicators that other things are wrong in our lives.

Check out this book!

Sex and Sensibility: Ten Women Examine the Lunacy of Modern Love…in 200 Cartoons is a new hilarious (and feminist) book of cartoons that covers everything from the (perceived) importance of boob size and the inequalities of traditional marriage to sex, adultery, and dating.

Bastards cost a lot of money

Yesterday at CNN.com there is an an article, here, about a Georgia State University study on the federal costs to taxpayers of “divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing,”—an arguable $112 billion a year. The study more or less concludes–with approval by its sponsors–that the federal government ought to be spending more on marriage programs in order to reduce welfare spending.

But wait, remind me again, how does marriage guarantee two responsible parents with reliable incomes? Marriage by itself does not work like that. Maybe for some guilt-ridden folks living in Puritantown a marriage document helps keep them in check just long enough to raise a few kids together. But beyond those few (who, incidentally, are the same folks supporting said governmental “marriage programs”), marriage doesn’t mean squat if the people making the commitment aren’t educated and don’t have reliable job prospects, if they aren’t socially mature enough to have respect and love enough for each other, if they don’t have enough sense to figure out if their values and goals for family and lifestyle interlock enough to enable long-term stability, if babies are born without mom and dad really having grown up first, or while drug and alcohol abuse is occuring.

There are a lot of social implications there and none of them have to do with marriage per say. How are marriage programs going to fix all of the underlying problems that make successful marriages almost impossible in the U.S. right now?

Well, thank God there are people with a little bit of sense on this too, arguing that more jobs for parents and better education are more effective tools for keeping people off of welfare than attempts at getting them to tie the not, and for good.

40 percent of kids in the U.S. are born “out of wedlock”–wow! But isn’t that a harsh term for marriage (”wedlock”?) Can we get rid of that term, please