Lori Lothian explores the evolutionary biology behind why men cheat, and why women forgive them.
In his most recent Jezebel article, gender studies professor Hugo Schwyzer wants us to believe that the Uncontrollable Boner—a man’s inability to resist his dick’s imperative to cheat—is as unreal as the Abominable Snowman.
Spurred to commentary by the recent NY Times Modern Love piece, After the Affair, in which a woman forgives her philandering husband, Schwyzer contends this boner myth gets men off the hook for extra-marital affairs, and women off the hook from demanding accountability of their mates.
But what if the boner myth is real and Schwyzer is simply wishful-thinking men aren’t horny-sex-driven-mindless creatures in need of extra-marital ego and cock strokes? What if men really are sometimes propelled by forces beyond the logical mind and the loyal heart—you know, that intoxicating mix of testosterone, testicles and evolutionary biology that sometimes, under the right circumstances, lures a man to infidelity?
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What galls Schwyzer is not so much the idea men are capable—if not evolutionarily equipped—to cheat. It’s that women are so damn forgiving, ostensibly because we’ve bought into the myth that “he just can’t help it, he’s a guy.” He seems to want us woman to make men into honest men.
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In a Salon interview, Sex at Dawn author Christopher Ryan explains what I’m getting at here:
Our testicles aren’t as big as those of chimps and bonobos, but our ejaculation is about four times as big in terms of volume. The theory is that when males compete on the level of the sperm cell, they develop much larger testicles, because in promiscuous animals, the sperm of the different males is competing with the sperm of other males to get to be the first to the egg. And the fact that our testicles are not as small relative to our body as the monogamous gibbon or gorillas reinforces the idea that we have been non-monogamous for a long time.
As a woman once married to a man with big balls and a whole lotta sperm, I can put my hand up in a class when asked “How many of you have been cheated on by your husbands?” I can also put up my hand to the question, “How many of you have cheated on your husband?” (Even though my justification was the affair happened in the eleventh hour of a marriage rigged to explode.)
What galls Schwyzer is not so much the idea men are capable—if not evolutionarily equipped—to cheat. It’s that women are so damn forgiving, ostensibly because we’ve bought into the myth that “he just can’t help it, he’s a guy.” He seems to want us woman to make men into honest men, perhaps with conditional forgiveness (I forgive you, but don’t ever cross me again) or maybe even a lecture-laden pardon from a moral pulpit.
But he is missing a key variable in his boner-myth equations: He’s not accounting for a woman’s natural propensity to turn a blind eye when faced with a cheating man—forgiveness comes easy when we would rather not have known all along. We forgive to forget.
In my marriage, I fooled myself into believing my husband’s Friday over-nighters on his office sofa truly were orchestrated so he could meet deadlines, or the extensions to business trips to places like Hawaii were for his alone downtime. Or I’d pretend the women from his office holiday parties, who would stare at me when they thought I wasn’t looking, didn’t really know something I didn’t about their boss or colleague.
Only when the marriage was over, and I happened to read in his new girlfriend’s diary (no comment) “he has cheated on every woman he has been with, even his wife,” did I let in what I had always known. He was driven by his Uncontrollable Boner to have affairs, and I simply did not want to deal with the upset necessary to confront him with it.
Why do women like me put our head in the sand? For one, it’s easier, especially if kids are involved. My maternal imperative to create a stable nest overrode my female pride and my desire to look under the marital rug where I knew I’d find the dirt of infidelity
And then, there’s the sex bit. He was getting elsewhere what I had little desire to provide at home—at least at the frequency his testicles desired. I’d probably have made a great harem wife in another era because at some level, I was only too happy to share the sex load. (Condition: I knew he was a savvy health economist who worked often in AIDS ridden Africa, who was far too smart to practice unsafe sex).
And last, getting real about our marital problems, seeing a therapist, feeling vulnerable, working on the unspoken regrets, resentments and fears I had bottled up: all of that muck held zero appeal. Even had I caught him, lipstick smudged tie in hand, I would not have had the courage to follow through with repair. I would have let the damaged union limp along, albeit with an injunction to “stop seeing her.” Whether I would have enforced that demand is another matter.
In his focus on the Uncontrollable Boner as myth, Schwyzer clearly attempts to discredit the physiological and hormonal reasons a man might philander, and make a case that women insist their men be good men, no boner myth as excuses. But what he completely fails to address is a perhaps even more potent cultural node—the myth of the Scorned Woman.
Writes Schwyzer, “This is what makes the ‘myth of the uncontrollable boner’ so seductive; it’s preferable to think that a painful betrayal was the result of irresistible evolutionary imperatives rather than choice. “My man is so manly that he gets urges that trump his very real love for me” is ever so much prettier than “In the end, he didn’t care about me enough to keep it in his pants.”
Except what if the woman doesn’t care enough to insist he keep it in his pants? What if instead of the Scorned Woman, she is simply able to hold the contradiction of his love for her, and his sexing elsewhere? Or, as in my case, what if instead of an enraged hell-hath-no-fury response to my cheating man, I simply saw the convenience of feigning ignorance? Because instead of a scorned woman, I was a women looking at my husband’s choices from a cost-benefit analysis: I was weighing the well being of my children, my own psychic status quo, and more, into the equation.
In the end, the myth of the Uncontrollable Boner might be as unreal as the Abominable Snowman. But probably not. After all, the latest fringe news is a pending multi-sample DNA study to be released in peer-review journal, indicating there really is a living, breathing creature called a Sasquatch.
Just maybe then, there really exists a creature called the Uncontrollable Boner. A creature most likely to mate with wild abandon with all other mythic creatures, including a Woman Scorned.
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Photo: wcdumonts / flickr