"The Martyrs of Sex"

I saw this article in the latest issue of Esquire and found the author's POV sort of interesting but also kind of dickish. Citing the public comeuppances of "Tiger Woods, Larry Craig, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Gary Hart, Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, and all the rest," including Petraeus, his thesis seems to be that we should stop punishing powerful men for having sex, even adulterous sex.

Further, he says, social condemnation of extramarital affairs hurts women not via the infidelity but because "we have indentured our wives in the role of prison guard, in which she is expected to condemn the person she supposedly loves for the vitality that he is slowly killing inside himself."

Not ever having been in the marital prison guard role, I don't have much of a dog in this fight, but the article is more than a little distasteful to me with a soupçon of MRA.

What do you think?

Either trolling or MRA douchebag, I dunno. Lots and lots of words that mean just about nothing.

I'd wonder what he thought about his wife accepting her inner vitality and goinking the gardener...if the article didn't already scream out that the only experience of sex he has is vicariously through the exploits of celebrities.

Oh please god no. Not another MRA thread. No. Nooooo.

Heh heh. Yep!

Puny god.

While I think it would be nice if we would butt out to some degree (I hate when people judge the wife for how she does/doesn't react to it, it's not OUR decision if she should forgive him/tell him to fuck off/be cool with an open marriage/whatever), I have a hard time believing the person who wrote this actually gives the tiniest of a shit about the women involved.

I find myself agreeing somehow with his point : why should you give a fuck about celebrities' love lives ? As long as it's consensual sex between adults, it's no one's business. A singer won't sing any better and a politician won't lie any less if they are faithful to their partner or not. I'm growing more and more annoyed each passing day since our media turned into some sort of reality tv show where you can "punish" politicians for their private lives. "Point at him, point at him and laugh !" How is that ever relevant ? Those matters should be kept private between the spouses and the public shouldn't even show interest in them.

A lot of big words with an underlying MRA-core - the only thing that I agree with is the "None of our goddamn business"-part.

On the one hand, I agree with "why the shit are we involved, leave that to them".

On the other hand, there's nothing else to speak for this shitshow.

And we really don't need another Fucking MRA Thread. If we get one, I move that its name be "The Fucking MRA Thread: Broken Forum's Intellectual Curry & Beer Shits ITT"

Partly I think the problem is I think our media have the lost the distinction between "the public interest" and "things the public are interested in", which is a shame. Partly... I think there is some value is "sex scandals" to the extent that the person involved has made their career on the back of condemning the sexual immorality of others or using their "strong family values" as a club with which to beat their opponents. But, yeah, "people" shouldn't care, but they do, and the press should exercise some restraint, but they don't, and so... I guess at the moment, the rule is, if you're famous, you'd better have a conventional sex life, or else.

It’s always seemed to me that it was the lying that sunk these guys more than the actual sex. Clinton should have done a Jimmy Swaggart and made a tearful confession on national television. There’s nothing Americans love more than a repentant sinner. Instead he was so arrogant that he thought he could lie his way out of it. Clinton survived, but with someone like John Edwards we discovered that his entire life was a hollow façade. He wasn’t the dutiful man standing by his sick wife, he was off diddling his photographer and getting her pregnant. Lies and more lies.

Trust me, the last thing I wanted to do was start "another Fucking MRA Thread," but I think the posters who would have shit it up are gone, right?

I think the element of this essay I found most interesting was the author's contention that we (by "we," I mean "men") are meant to cheat and that we should encourage that to foster the "vitality" of men. If that's true, it seems to me that what we should really do is discourage committed relationships. Traditional marriage, at least in America, carries with it certain expectations (I'm not necessarily endorsing those one way or the other), and if those expectations no longer exist, is there any good reason for marriage to exist? Would it exist only as an economic arrangement and a framework for raising kids?

I do find it pretty despicable that the author feels the powerful horndogs had the "courage to betray" their spouses and that we should celebrate it. I disagree - courage is going to your spouse and saying, "I really, really want to fuck other women. Can we have an agreement that it's cool for me to fuck other women - and for you to fuck other men - or can we get a divorce?" Having it both ways isn't courage.

I really don't think that's his main point. It might be a side point, but the idea that by remaining monogamous is somehow antithetical to the male experience appears to be his main point. To which I say, fuck that guy. If you can't stay monogamous, don't get married. I agree with Damien Neil, I'd really like to know if his opinion goes both ways, or is marriage simply a method by which men can lock down women before they go on to plow their neighbor's fields? If anything, he's less concerned about that we respond to celebrity infidelity as much as he's concerned with how we respond to it. I doubt he'd care if our response to it was to whoop and holler and cheer that a man had done when a man must do and stuck his dick in anything that was okay with it.

As far as the celebrity angle goes, people love to see someone rise and they love to see someone fall. That's all there is to it. Tiger Woods' infidelity is the same as Lindsey Lohan's drug binges to the average tabloid reader. I'm not going to get my head up my butt enough to compare celebrities to Dionysus or anything, but people are hungry to see success and the sorts of people who invest themselves in celebrities to that degree also hunger to see their failures. It's part of the "gosh, she's just like me" feeling. Or, for the jealous, "he has it even worse than me!" I personally don't care about celebrity foibles, but I also don't care enough about people caring about them to tut-tut the existence of TMZ or whatever.

That said, I can't get enough of family values-driven people being outed for hypocrisy. I have zero problems with the dirty secrets of the country's top moral judgers being laid bare. And frankly there are times where it's handy to know that John Edwards is a piece of shit.

Like, before he gets nominated to run for President. We dodged a bullet there.

I just wanted to pop in and mention this is a pretty unfair thing to say. I realize that most marriages are monogamous, but that there is no requirement for them to be, nor should there be. However, I do agree with your overarching point that the guy is a douche for basically saying "We should be allowed to cheat!" but for some marriages, having another partner isn't necessarily cheating to them.

Agreed.

The thing is, that's the part that really matters. Whatever other stupid crap is in the article, we should stop punishing people for having extramarital affairs, because it's none of our business. That's for their spouse to deal with. For my part, it makes me sick to see Tiger Woods or whoever making public apologies for having affairs. He should be apologizing to his wife, not me. His wife is the person he wronged, and things are made harder on her by making a big hairy deal of it in the media and acting like he let down all of society, not easier.

You say "interesting," I say "tedious and disingenuous." There's nothing new about this idea. It's been peddled around by dipshits for probably centuries now, and it's a pretty transparent excuse that someone makes for not being able to control themselves. Whatever argument you want to make about nature is moot, because we don't live in a natural state in countless other ways and the ship has sailed on pleading natural order when it becomes convenient vis a vis getting laid. We live in a society where we make agreements with other people and are expected to honor those agreements; if you feel strongly that it's in your nature to not be able to honor an agreement you make to only have sex with one person, don't enter into that agreement.

A-fucking-men. You can't have everything in life, and if sleeping around is more important to you than being married you should have the balls to explain that to your spouse and work out an open marriage deal or become single again. If it isn't--and I suspect it isn't for the vast majority of married people who cheat--accept the fact that you gave something up to get something else, and live with it.

Agree. It's not for us to define how other people's relationships should work - that's another reason why this shit should stay private. If the wronged wife (or husband) wants to forgive, because other stuff is more important in their relationship or they, OMG, live in an open relationship, that's not for us to judge.

The exception is people, like some politicians, who make a habit out of judging others - their shit is fair game.

Christ. I figured my intent was pretty clear, but I will adjust.

IF YOU CANNOT BE MONOGAMOUS, DO NOT AGREE TO A MONOGAMOUS RELATIONSHIP AND MAYBE ALSO ASSUME THAT MOST RELATIONSHIPS, SPECIFICALLY MARRIAGES, YOU HAVE ARE MONOGAMOUS UNTIL OTHERWISE SPECIFICALLY STATED SO BECAUSE SAYING OH SHIT BABY I THOUGHT THIS WHOLE THING WAS WAY OPEN A YEAR OR TWO AFTER YOU GOT MARRIED DOESN'T COME ACROSS AS A GOOD EXCUSE AS MUCH AS MAKING YOU LOOK LIKE A HUGE DILDO.

Well this is true and it's an important distinction, but I think Bahimiron was speaking generally there. I think you could replace "stay monogamous" with "live within the bounds of your marriage" and express the same idea and include the marriages where monogamy is not the rule. It is an important point, though, because it's another way in which we do the opposite of the right thing when we punish people as a society for having extramarital affairs; we judge the act of having sex with someone other than one's spouse, but really it's the betrayal of the arrangement made with one's spouse that's the problem, whatever the specifics of that arrangement are.

Yes. You much more eloquently stated what I was trying to convey, extarbags.

extarbags already said it very well, but that's not interesting, it's bullshit.

I don't think political figures are in the same box as pro golfers and actors. We do have a vested interest in knowing if General Petraeus is cheating on his wife if he's also giving his girlfriend privileged access to secret military data, and if the President's infidelities are going to keep him distracted from doing his job. I mean, the real impact of Clinton's actions is that his second term was effectively torpedoed. That sucks for his legacy, but it also sucked for the American people.

Let me stop you right there.

Right? Holy shit.

Well, we have an interest in Petraeus' affair entirely due to the fact that if public it would be a scandal. We care that it's possible blackmail. I didn't look back to see if they found who was giving her confidential material though, that's a whole other ball of wax.

Distraction isn't the problem, weakness to espionage is. Same reason we care if people are in debt when doing background checks: those people are possibly open to bribery or other bullshit.

But I got as far in the article as Ben Sones did. That line sort of set the tone for the article, and it was not a good tone. Affairs are interesting in elected officials as a character flaw, but I don't find elected officials getting laid to be bad on it's face. If we elected someone who was single or in an open relationship it would be far less interesting. The concern is more someone willing to betray the trust of their spouse is likely not all that trustworthy.

I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.

Aside from the "we should worship all sex, ALL OF IT" attitude to that piece which i can't help but find really dumb, it kinda tries to slide over how the power difference makes the boss-employee affairs pretty icky in general and as such not really a "none of your goddamn business" material. Also the way it's so badly men-centered doesn't help the tone.

Reads overall like Brad Wardell piece, with slightly bigger words.

The em-dashes of the great are essential to their greatness.

God, how I love Jessica Walter.

I wonder what kind of feedback Esquire's going to get. Unlike, say, Maxim, Esquire's not as much a "lad mag," and that kind of thing may not go over all that well with its audience. In fact, a considerable number of their readers are women.

I just can't not like every Drastic post.

Why are these types always so astonishingly bad at reasoning? He makes an argument for sexual emancipation from societal norms, which doesn't bother me, but then immediately tries to use that as a justification for dishonesty, deception, and betraying promises. That does not follow. As jerri blank, extarbags et al point out there's nothing brave or heroic about hypocrisy. Bravery is living consistently by your principles. Treating a significant other like a dispensable casualty in the great struggle for consequence-free intern sex is not being brave, it's being a colossal dick.

Haha "All the greatest dudes were horndogs and all the greatest women were frigid ice queens SOOOO...I DUNNO...QED? (IT'S QED RIGHT?)"

Or maybe it's the double standard where non-virile men in power are considered impotent in all aspects and virile women are just considered...y'know.

It's always surreal to see how much the nation cares about where other people's gentials are.

I'd just like to state that one day I hope to find the courage to bone anything I find attractive regardless of previous commitments and without consideration of consequences. On that day, I expect to be lauded as the hero I will have become, and statues to be carved in my honor.

To be fair, that almost worked out for the other Rasputin.

Two reasons people don't suggest open relationships to their partner:

Partner won't be into it, and will possibly be suspicious which will make cheating more difficult.
Partner will be into it, and as much as you want to fuck other people you sure as hell don't want them to.

I've always wondered what percentage of people who complain that monogamy doesn't work are in actual non-monogamous relationships, and how may are just cheating arseholes who lie to their partner while enjoying the benefits of monogamy.