I'm getting tired of hearing that phrase. I've heard so many women say it (including, on occasion, myself) and it's so unfair.
I understand that men as a group of people have done some pretty shitty stuff to women over the last few millenia. I'm not denying that for a second. I also understand that there are plenty of men out there who ARE bastards. But it's not all of them.
It's desperatly sad that the actions of few complete arseholes could make it difficult for some women to ever trust men again. It's sad that there are still men in the world who think it's appropriate to have a wife AND a girlfriend, with neither knowing about the other's existence. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about someone who makes one big mistake, or someone who has a small crossover between two relationships. The sort of men I'm talking about are those who deliberately and systematically live their life with one woman for cooking and cleaning, and another for shagging. They think they deserve two women. And they think that a woman who has two men is a slut.
That kind of person makes me really, really angry. But women who treat men in that way make me angry aswell.
I think it's really important to remember that these men are a dying breed. In their heads they're still living in the fifties, wearing a trilby and saying "Hi Honey, I'm home!" Decent men will thrive as the other sort are Bobbited out of existence. They won't last long. We won't let them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
17 comments:
On a semantic point, if a bastard technically used to just mean someone whose parents were not married, how come only men seem to get called bastards? That's rather sexist, dontcha think?
It's been my experience that behind every unfaithful man is an equally unfaithful woman. That said, the male attitude to sex tends to be more about a desire for novelty. Since men don't get pregnant they have much less inclination to be selective in choosing a partner.
Perhaps all men are not bastards, but I believe most of them are dogs. It's quite a rare breed that will turn down flattery, attention and sex when it's offered. I've been a bastard myself and I have the maintenance payments to prove it. But that said, I've also been well and truly hurt and hurt by a woman who made duplicity an art form.
Sex ensures the continuation of the species, and sex with strangers ensures a healthy mix of genetic codes. While ever we live in a society that sets standards for living that run contrary to our biological instincts we will have a large percentage of people who are unable to live up to the dogma.
Are you advocating men cheating on their wives/girlfriends, then? And what about women - what do our biological instincts say? And if our biological codes say different things, should we therefore have different norms of sexual behaviour?
PS to I'm over the moon: I believe I knew you when we were both v little - our mums were friends. If you don't remember the name, ask your mum if she remembers Alison McBrayne. I'm sure she will.
Lindsey McB.
David, I'm not sure I understand how 'sex with strangers ensures a healthy mix of genetic codes'. Surely genetic coding only becomes important when you're talking about offspring which presumably is the last thing people consider when having sex with strangers. Surely as far as genetic coding is concerned you just have to avoid having children with blood relations?
And as far as living in a society 'that sets standards for living that run contrary to our biological instincts', do you REALLY think that is the case?? I think we live in a society that allows our biological instincts to run riot. It's no longer taboo to have sex before marriage, people can have sex without worrying about getting pregnant by taking the Pill, using condoms etc etc. Moreover our society actually ENCOURAGES this sort of behaviour through the TV, billboard adverts, magazines etc etc. Victorian attitudes to sex and the body were perhaps a bit repressive and prude, but we've dispensed with any boundaries whatsoever. There will always be people (both male and female) that can't live up to 'the dogma' as you put it, but that's no reason to take it away. We may have biological needs but we are more than this. To reduce humans to pure biology seems to me a sneaky way of legitimising us to act on our basist instincts, to act like animals when we are actually very different. Morality sets apart from pure biology - why do we think so little of ourselves as a species?
OK, that's my moral rant over. Sorry.
I removed this because I got my HTML wrong. I'll try again!
I'm not advocating anything. We are where we are, and I'm not claiming any idea is a "good" one just because it happens.
The desire for sex is entirely driven by the need to reproduce, Katrina. The fact that we're (supposedly) clever enough to circumvent the pregnancy side of it doesn't alter the hard wiring that creates the biological desire in the first place. Dress it up with hearts and flowers all you like, but sex is for babies.
In most mammals, females are hardwired into finding strangers more attractive than familiar mates. Check out Prof Robert Winston's research presented in the BBC series "The Human Instinct" on this. Effectively he argues that men continue to produce sperm simply because women tend to be unfaithful. He makes that point very clearly: Statistically, speaking, far more women cheat than men.
And yes. I do believe that monogamy is an artificial construct, which runs counter to our instincts. Biblically, men took many wives (Which I'm not "advocating", by the way) and treated them like property. This is still accepted practice according to many aspects of Islamic and animist religions. The counter-biblical idea of monogamous marriage was introduced in Feudal Europe by a church that was worried about landed gentry gaining too much wealth through dowry.
In a similar fashion, Catholic priests are forbidden to marry simply so as not to allow them to have heirs which to pass on the church's treasures to.
You claim that to reduce humans to pure biology is a sneaky way of legitimising our instincts. I maintain that claiming that we are anything other than biology is an act of delusion and wishful thinking.
All of which is reasonable evidence to use for either side of the argument, BUT what is love then? does that come from biological or social programming? See i have the same skin crawling 'get it away from me' feelings towards babies and children that most people have towards spiders, but i love my husband and his, ahem, hardwired bits! I don't have an answer to that, just the question!
More importantly Hello Linzee! I remember you! You have a little brother and your dad was on blue peter once, right? oh the odd bits we remember from our childhoods! How's it going?
Hi. I'm doing good thanks. Cannot believe you are married and all that. Yes I have a little brother (who is also getting married, in only three weeks) but my dad never went on Blue Peter (unless he's hiding something from me!)
My mum says, why did your parents move to Wiltshire?
I think David speaks a lot of sense. I do think you have to accept that we are basically animals and we are programmed to want to reproduce (though there are exceptions, as I'm Over the Moon points out). However, I am not comfortable with the unavoidable conclusion that if it is in our interests as a species for people to fuck around, then it is acceptable for individuals to do so. There is this tricky thing called love which gets in the way. However, maybe that doesn't actually distinguish us from animals after all - after all, many animals mate for life.
And this morality thing you mention Katrina. Well, that's a whole other issue... Anyone care to take her up on that??!
Yeah - we have a discussion going!!
David, I agree that sex is for the need to reproduce (or you could say procreate), but that doesn't mean as a species we are 'naturally' inclined to have sex with as many people as possible. As 'I'm over the moon' and Lindsey quite rightly point out, love confuses the picture. It can be argued that a key role of love is to draw men and women together into a stable unit. Humans may have biological needs to reproduce, but we also have instincts to look after our young (as do animals too obviously) and some sort of permanent structure helps this, i.e. families. So I think the picture is more complicated than us simply being 'hardwired' to have as much sex as possible. Robert Winston's programmes are always interesting to watch, just for his fascinating moustache alone, but I haven't read enough about biology yet to come to an educated opinion about his theories so I don't take them as 'gospel' as it were! In the meantime I see plenty of other evidence on a day-to-day basis that tells me clearly that there is more to humans than biology.
Yes, I had heard that the Church wasn’t involved with marriage to begin with, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t support monogamy from the outset. I need to do more reading on this topic, but I remember being struck by something I read in one of the gospels recently. Being questioned by the Pharisees on the topic of divorce, Jesus “…said to them, 'Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 'And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery' (See Matthew 19:1-13 for full text).
Now, I know that the Bible has been interpreted in many different ways, but what is said here about monogamy is unequivocal and it is significant that it predates the institution of the Church itself and Jesus’ words refer back even further – to Creation. I’m not arguing for whether the Bible is the truth or not here, just trying to challenge your assertion that marriage is counter-biblical!!!! See -http://www.newmanroad.com/article3.html
Finally, and putting religion aside, there is something I don't understand David. How can you say that we really are pure biology on the one hand and then talk about social constructs. That's paradoxical. If we have the ability to construct highly complex societies (even if you think we’re deluding ourselves) then it is obvious that we are more than just biology. We create art, we have language systems, we bury our dead, have the opportunity to appear on Blue Peter (or not) and discuss it all on blogs (unlike animals). Even from a secular point of view to say that we are pure biology is nonsensical. Aside from the implications that my Sociology MA is a waste of time, to reduce us to pure biology runs contrary to common sense.
Yours sociologically,
Katrina
Many apology for personal conversation on your blog, Meg! Please feel free to give linzee my email address so we can do it elsewhere!
That being said, so, it's not your dad who was the pianist then? Say congrats to your brother from me! They've moved to Somerset, (unless they moved again last week and didn't tell me!) they'd wanted to live in the country for a while, but they actually went because Chloe went to uni, dad's parents died, and i'd long since moved out so it was finally the right time.
Now, where were we? Sex, pigeons, literature...
It's perhaps not possible to talk about 'us' like human beings are similar to each other. Don't think i'm wandering blithely towards eugenics type attitudes, but if we look at ourselves as a species the way cats are a species, should we not expect differences in 'types' of humans the way we see them in types of cat? i don't mean 'caucasian men are like this, asian women are like that', I mean sociopaths are a different type of human to depressives or 'normal' people (that is lacking an obvious diagnosable condidtion!). If you think of a person as a unique point where an almost infinite number of bell curves cross, height, weight, temper, ability to remember, role of mother in upbringing, amount of trauma in childhood and so on and on and on (there's a fuller explanation of this little theory of mine on my blog under http://sincerelyboredoflondon.blogspot.com/2005/02/we-worship-you-oh-brian.html,) you would surely expect some people to have family as a priority and driving factor, some companionship, some romance, some wierd deviant disfunction. you would expect some people to be utterly faithful and some pathologically unfaithful, either as one of the variables, or as the outcome of the variables.
We often forget we're a species and are surprised when population centres or places were industries are concentrated move, whereas other animals just go where the resources are. we also forget we're quite a young species, and not a great one. we're all crippled up if it rains too hard or we lose our shoes. Compared to dinosaurs, we're crap, and we've not lasted anywhere near as long. Nor are we likely to at the rate we're going...
I do like lots of discussion on my blog! Hurrah! (And yes, personal e-mail addresses shall be passed on to the correct parties).
Personally, I don't think there is a moral right or wrong with regards to divorce. I think it's morally fine to
a) Have many diferent partners throughout your life
b) Have many different partners at one time as long as they all know about each other and are perfectly happy with the situation.
I do, however, take issue with people who are persistently dishonest with their partner and make them look stupid behind their back.
I also take issue with the popular notion that men have higher sex drives than women and are therefore 'expected' to have several partners. As David said, in nature females are more likely to have multiple partners than males. I'm not particularly proud of that fact, but it's better than the patronising notion that we women just lie back and think of England!
There's a lot of stuff to be going on with here, but I wonder about your assertion that such men would be "Bobbited" out of existence. I realise many women think it's a perfectly fine thing to do to a man who cheats on his wife, but I can't help wondering how many of those who applauded her actions would have been so quick to congratulate a cuckolded husband who'd amputated/mutilated a woman in the same way.
That would be completely different. if a woman cheated on a man there'd probably be a really good reason for it. Silly Boy.
You know David, I think you raise a good point here - I certaintly wouldn't "congratulate a cuckolded husband who'd amputated/mutilated a woman in the same way."
Now I don't seriously think that Mrs Bobbit's actions should be applauded but at the time the story did make me laugh, feeling that he got what he deserved. Also I confess I probably felt some sort of female solidarity thing, her actions symbolising women fighting back after years of being treated as merely sexual objects without the proper respect they deserve. And therein lies probably part of the explanation as to why the same women who applauded Mrs Bobbit's actions would probably have been horrified if it'd been the other way round.
I'm not in anyway justifying the above by the way, two wrongs don't make a right and revenge is not the answer, but I suspect this might go some way to explaining the apparant hypocritical attitude.
Dang...there are some long ass comments here. Bastard men...yes! But what about the 'shagging whore' who knows her man is married? What shall we call her?? If more women were willing to smash the cajones of a man suggesting she be his 'shagee' maybe less men would be looking for such an arrangement.
hurrah! she right of course. we should be much firmer with them. they only banned smacking actual children, right, not mental ones?
Post a Comment