Marriage is in decline throughout the West, so should we be surprised cuckolding your husband is now just a thing a woman might have to do?
New York magazine’s “Beta Male” fully lived up to its pegged name Thursday when it released an article entitled, “Women Are Now Cheating As Much As Men, But With Fewer Consequences.” The piece, written by a woman, aims to answer the question as to why this phenomenon is occurring in the most sympathetic light possible.
The takeaway from this article is that men, upon entering marriage, should be fully ready for the chance that if they fail to satisfy their wives, she will cheat, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The article begins with a light-hearted anecdote about how multiple women in a New England soccer mom circle have cheated on their husbands, before mentioning the “milestone in the march towards equality” in that women are now having as many extramarital affairs as men. The writer, Alyssa Giacobbo, offers a variety of factors for this development — ranging from more female breadwinners and the prevalence of the internet — before reaching what she believes is the primary culprit: women wanting to “have it all” and feeling deflated at not attaining it.
“Women now are more aware of the alternatives to monogamy and more inclined to demand to have all their needs met,” anthropologist Helen Fisher told New York. “That’s because happiness is such an important part of marriage. Fewer women are marrying out of need; instead, they’re marrying to please themselves. But that also means when they’re dissatisfied with something they feel justified to go elsewhere.”
A self-described relationships expert says in the article this dissatisfaction is a result of the increasingly egalitarian nature of marriage, with all the sharing of chores and such. The familiarity with the husband breeds boredom and a desire for something more “spontaneous.”
So that desire is answered by the wife with late night rendezvous with the boss, according to the horrifying stories Giacobbo recounts.
One 41-year-old Brooklynite began sleeping with a co-worker she thought more her professional equal after eight years of marriage and a child with her “low-earning husband.” “A healthy attraction to a person does demand you have a little bit of intrigue and imbalance, which in male-female-empowered relationships is not a priority,” the woman admitted to NY mag, essentially saying the progressive ideal of equal marriage is bland. “A lot of women I know stick with [the empowered relationship] and suffer through it even as they have that fantasy of being with someone who is their equal, or even their superior.”
But the suffering, according to Giacobbo, is now the “man’s job.”
According to the experts consulted by the article, the cuckold is desperate to try to make things work out after finding out about his partner’s infidelity. The examples given by the article of men clinging to their two-timing wives are, like the previous anecdotes, males of an inferior status to their wives.
One man knows his wife is sleeping with the neighborhood “douche bag” while he does the menial tasks of cleaning the cages of the family’s bunny. He’s staying with her because he hopes it’s just a phase.
The “fewer consequences” part in the title comes with the woman facing hardly any backlash from her peers. Most women report that their friends are fine with their cheating and understand it’s just something that must be done in order to achieve full happiness. This contrasts to the social opprobrium that men would face if caught cheating.
The takeaway from this article is that men, upon entering marriage, should be fully ready for the chance that if they fail to satisfy their wives, she will cheat, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
And we wonder why young men are retreating from marriage like the plague.
A minor controversy erupted this month when the popular conservative education service Prager University published a video arguing for why men should marry. The presenter, University of Virginia professor W. Bradford Wilcox, offered numerous reasons for why males should settle down, including benefits to health and to economic security.
However, many viewers disagreed with Wilcox’s assessment and barraged the scholar with hundreds of angry comments. Wilcox wrote a piece about the experience and the responses he received, many of which stated men didn’t want to commit because they felt it was “emasculating.” Modern marriage, to the critics, amounts to giving a woman power over you and your income.
The professor interpreted the backlash as an indicator of how the divorce revolution has turned a disturbing number of young men into women haters and marriage despisers. He believes men are fearful of marriage because they could lose their children and possessions in no-fault divorce cases.
The devastation of marital separations has driven some men to reject the values a good marriage requires, like sacrifice, commitment and love. Additionally, Wilcox castigates an increasing number of men for falling prey to “Peter Pan syndrome” in withdrawing from adult responsibilities and trying to live a care-free life.
The perspective expressed here is the predominant conservative view of marriage madness. A deadly combination of liberal divorce laws, a changing culture and a rising tide of man-boys have put the sacred union for procreation at jeopardy. While knowing that it’s incredibly difficult to change long-standing laws and deeply-ingrained cultural norms, conservatives have encouraged a thriving genre of literature of shaming young men to “grow up” and marry.
The assumption in this advisory genre is that there are tons of good, wholesome young ladies who are 100 percent imbued with the necessary marital values, but there’s too many men who won’t put down the video games to commit. Thus, it’s up to the men to follow the manly call, sacrifice themselves before their Cinderella and help with the dishes and laundry in a masculine manner.
The gist of the argument is that while modern marriage may be flawed, it’s the man’s duty to accept it and make it work to the best of his ability.
The New York mag piece puts a different light on the issue. Rather than scores of women anxiously waiting around to be dutiful wives if only those man-boys put down their iPhones, we have a narrative of women expecting “it all” out of a marriage and reality not meeting expectations. They’re taught to believe they want an egalitarian marriage, yet they dump their nice husband who does the laundry for the alpha gym instructor who’s never done laundry in his life.
There was some very politically incorrect nuggets of truth buried between the lines in the “Beta Male” installment, whether its writer realized it or not. Rather than serving as an objective account of a social trend, it turns into an indictment of the modern marriage ideal. It’s nigh impossible for the super-empowered woman to be satisfied by her feminist husband, and to the man, the pairing encouraged by the upper-middle class is one hell of a raw deal.
More so than a divorce, there’s nothing more humiliating for a man to be cuckolded. It’s only worse when that affair was encouraged by your wife’s social group and condoned as a necessary act by social elites.
There’s not one, absolute reason for why marriage as an institution is struggling at the moment. There’s multiple factors. But the phenomenon of rising female infidelity shows that the new marriage seems like a terrible idea for all involved, and a return to traditional, imbalanced pairings may be a better model.
Either way, we can only hope NY doesn’t promote allowing your wife to cheat on you for the sake of your marriage…
Never mind, the publication already published that piece.
