The "Patriarchy", Again

The Apostate:

I accidentally happened upon this anti-feminist catastrophe of an article: Why Men Cheat.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"For over 20 years, [I've been] living along with women, counseling, seeing the devastation and how overwhelming it is when they are cheated on and what it subsequently does to the children and the family," he says. "You want to help children of divorce? I said, 'Well, let's get really down and dirty and find out what we can do to save marriages and make them better.'"

What precisely is anti-feminist about that? The Apostate explains:

I mean! The title alone! As if only men cheat! Implicit in that is the suggestion that men are horny amoral sex fiends and women - into whom God forgot to inject a sex drive - just want to have a nice peaceful stable family, in which process, they forget to put out, driving oppressed under-appreciated husbands into the arms of harlots. Gah. I know this is what our culture would like us to believe, just to subjugate women a little bit more, but it’s belied by the statistics of marital infidelity.

The Apostate doesn't link to such statistics.

The article itself - oh LORD. My head exploded. I was going to do a line by line, and then realized it would be EVERY line. Almost the worst aspect of it is, the way men are fucking infantilized.

What a charming rebuttal: The article is bad because OH MY GOD! it's sooo bad.

Perhaps, some of my readers could comment on the article and enlighten me on how exactly it is sooo bad and sooo anti-feminist. Preferably without exploding heads.

Comments

[Alex]

Actually, she's right about the statistics, even if she doesn't link 'em. I'm not sure what the hell that has to do with "subjugating women", though. If anything it's a demonization of men, but really, it's just a self-reinforcing false perception.

[Mike T]

I think what she means is that the article assumes a Victorian Era view of women, which is to say that women are inherently more virtuous than men and always the victim unless caught completely red-handed doing something "out of character for a woman." One of the areas where the article is completely full of it is that not only can the wife be the reason her husband cheats, but in a decent number of cases mostly definitely IS the reason he has the affair, as evidenced by this telling paragraph:

What's the number one reason men cheat? Ninety-two percent of men said it wasn't primarily about the sex. "The majority said it was an emotional disconnection, specifically a sense of feeling underappreciated. A lack of thoughtful gestures," Gary says. "Men are very emotional beings. They just don't look like that. Or they don't seem like that. Or they don't tell you that."

American women in particular are often very selfish these days. They have affairs in numbers almost equal to American men, and initiate about 72% of all divorces, most of which are "no-fault." The culprit is the culture of treating women like they're a princess-goddess who "deserves it," whose every whim is justified because "she's worth it."

[Laura(southernxyl)]

"American women in particular are often very selfish these days.... The culprit is the culture of treating women like they're a princess-goddess who 'deserves it,' whose every whim is justified because 'she's worth it.'"

Mike T, I'm not your friend today. I am an American woman. I've been an American woman since my birth in 1960. Your statements describe neither me, nor my female family members, nor any woman I've ever known or would ever care to associate with. I'm not saying that bad women don't exist, I'm saying they're not the default "American woman". If a man thinks he's looking for a woman but is attracted to Barbie dolls, well, that's a different story.

As to the article: The title is "Why Men Cheat". One knows that women cheat too. Presumably if a person feels moved to write an article entitled "Why Women Cheat" there's nothing stopping her. That's not the article he wanted to write. I mean, I could complain that he wrote "Why Men Cheat" and not "Why Cats Throw Up" because that actually is more relevant to my life right now, but that would be kind of stupid.

"It's not about blaming the wife. It can't be. I mean, cheating is ridiculous. It's wrong. And you can't justify it." How a woman could be offended by this, I'll never know.