A reader quotes me:
Does this mean gay male couples should publicly challenge the social norm of monogamy? I don’t believe so. What we can do – and what some straight couples do – is contain the details of our relationships to one another. It’s called discretion.
I know you’re a conservative, and you’re framing this as a conservative stance. But as a woman in an open marriage, I think you’d really be doing us girls a solid by going ahead and challenging the social norm of monogamy. Monogamy is part of a larger set of stories that we tell women about how their desire works that are not particularly true because we want to control them.
My experience closely follows the experiences and ideas laid out in some newer books that take on female desire, including What Women Want and Sex at Dawn. My actual desire has an almost inverse relationship to the stereotypes and norms and expectations that surround me. I am visually stimulated. I get attracted to lots of different kinds of things. I walk around feeling kind of sexy all day long on most days. I crave casual sex. And most importantly, I need novelty, or my libido tanks.
Like a number of the women profiled in What Women Want, I did not have a very honest relationship to my sexuality for a long time. I assumed that I need romance and companionship in order to want sex, that I should therefore want my husband – and that if I don’t, I must not like sex. I’ve figured out how to listen to what I actually want, rather than what society tells me I want. And my conservative counterargument is that my marriage is stronger and more meaningful because I cat around.
My real issue, though, is with discretion.
If this were just about me and my pleasure, then discretion would be appropriate. But we control women by diminishing their sexuality, and this hurts! It is actively disempowering to feel as separated from your own desire as most women in our culture feel. It is terribly diminishing to assume that you’re messed up/frigid/broken because you don’t want to have sex with someone you love anymore.
Sex is social – this is why you talk about it so much on your blog! As a gay man, you live in a world where everybody gets the privilege of being straightforward about desire. Women, on the other hand, are charged with this impossible task of simultaneously inhabiting two social sexual spheres: the one that affirms your desire, in which short skirts or red lipstick are expected and rewarded because they signify sex, and the one that denies your desire, in which you are inexplicably expected to be wearing that lipstick for the same person that you regularly fart in front of.
Challenging monogamy challenges this double standard. Women deserve this!
The Dish 