The Illusion of Monogamy

 “I don't believe this, Liz!” said Ashley, staring at me, clearly upset. “I think Kyle might be cheating on me!”

Funny how the threesome she'd had with her boyfriend and another girl hadn't bothered her, but his meeting up with some co-worker behind her back at a festival we'd attended with him did. Even funnier would be her confession two months later that she was meeting up with an ex-boyfriend at a hotel downstate; she wasn't sleeping with him, she insisted, she just needed some attention, but of course her boyfriend didn't know about this trip.

Sometimes I feel like the only difference between so-called good girls and myself is their ability and willingness to lie, even to their closest friends, to save face. The cheating men do is often out in the open, careless and easily able to be found out, or even right in front of their girlfriends' faces in the case of a consensual threesome. Girls on the other hand do their cheating in the dark, unable to tell anyone for fear of losing the man they're with.

It's insanity, I tell you. Monogamy is an illusion, a fake social contract that I suspect was designed by men so that their women would stay good under the bounds of their so-called mutual agreement of monogamy while they ran off with whomever they pleased. That's not to say that girls don't cheat, of course – they do – but they at least know they need to keep that shit on the down-low because no man is going to forgive that behavior even as they're supposed to be forgiving of his supposedly uncontrollable male sex drive.

The common refrain I hear when people are offended by their partner cheating is that they can't believe they're not enough for their partner. I hear this even in cases of mutual cheating like that of my friend Ashley. Apparently it's fine and dandy for her to run off with an ex-lover because it doesn't mean her boyfriend's not enough, but she can't stand the thought of him sleeping with someone else because clearly that means she's not enough.

Can you imagine a world where people could be honest with each other about their sexual desires that fall outside of the bounds of their relationship? A world where wanting to sleep with someone else didn't mean you didn't love you primary partner, merely that you were human like all the other humans out there and had sexual urges that didn't fall neatly within the bounds of monogamy even though we wish they did? Where everyone wasn't terribly insecure and didn't assume the worst when their partner wanted someone else? I can, but it would take a new type of human being, one is secure in herself and in her relationship with her primary partner and could withstand not being the only apple of his eye. After all, if couples have more in common than just wanting to fuck each other – if they have mutual values and hobbies and life goals – then why is sex still considered the most important thing they have together?

The biggest barrier is men, not women. According to one survey, 76% of women would forgive her man for cheating, while only 35% of men would forgive his woman for cheating; what this means is that only men have to actually follow the rules in a monogamous relationship. I don't pretend to understand why so many women are willing to forgive a partner they know damn well wouldn't forgive them back; maybe get some self-respect, ladies? I can't help but picture a world where everyone who's been cheated on woke up tomorrow morning and knew about it; that would create a whole new world, one perhaps where women would stop agreeing to “monogamy” in order to makes their partners happy. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, after all. Even though people try to claim women are naturally monogamous, our evolutionary history suggests that's bullshit: we would not be here as a species unless some women had born children by multiple fathers because there wouldn't be enough genetic variety for us as a species to survive. Furthermore, even though women are indeed more selective when it comes to sexual partners than men, women still have a biological urge to seek out the best genes possible for their offspring, meaning even if a woman has a steady partner, a guy with better genes than him is still going to be irresistibly attractive to her. Now that we have the means to prevent unwanted children, we should theoretically be able to behave as we please without the consequences of the past, but we as a species have not caught up to the new reality created by this technology, not by a long shot.

The end result is misery. I know too many couples who are dissatisfied with their sex lives or constantly suspicious their partner is cheating on them even though they themselves are cheating on their partner to think that monogamy really works for most people. For some reason we still feel the need to live up to an ideal portrait of monogamy passed down to us from the past even though it doesn't work. Can people not think for themselves? Or would people just rather continue to cheat in the dark and tell themselves their partner isn't doing the same? Perhaps most people prefer the fake “happy” illusion of monogamy to an honest and open relationship; all I can say is they deserve what they get in that case, because people who don't have the ability to be honest with themselves about their and their partners' desires are people who of course aren't going to be happy. We act like children about the realities of sex rather than confronting it like adults, so we end up miserable. We expect our partners to be superhuman and only want us even though we don't only want them, and then we wonder why we're unhappy. It's not a mystery, people. For most of us, monogamy is an illusion; perhaps it's time for the illusion to end.

The Male Biological Imperatives Of Sexual Promiscuity and Jealousy Are Going Extinct

A common refrain from men is that they have a biological imperative to spread their seed and keep their mates on sexual lock-down as a result of our evolutionary history. The logic goes that since sleeping around and ensuring his mate did not do the same worked really well for a man's reproductive success in our species' distant past, men have almost no choice but to repeat that behavior in today's world.

Sorry, gentlemen, but you are wrong.

It is my belief that male sexual jealousy and promiscuity are no longer useful evolutionary tools in first world cultures and are doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs at some point in the near future. While it was once of vital importance for a man to prevent his mate from sleeping with other men because her doing so meant she had a high likelihood of bearing some other man's child, modern cultures now have highly effective birth control and access to abortion. A man's jealousy in the face of such technology serves little real purpose and should therefore slowly begin to die out as a trait in human males. Similarly, sleeping around does little for the average man to increase his reproductive success – while I assume there will always be some men with enough resources to provide for multiple women's children, that has never been case for the majority of men and now that condoms prevent most casual flings from resulting in offspring, male promiscuity will start to become less useful. Most men reproduce with one, maybe two partners in their lifetimes, a state of reproductive success that puts them on par with most women. As male promiscuity and jealousy die out, men will indeed start to more closely resemble women, and their testosterone levels will drop since the hormone of aggressiveness, sexual possessiveness and high sex drive will no longer be necessary for men to produce offspring.

If you don't believe me, there is evidence to suggest this is already happening in western nations. According to the Massachusetts Male Aging Study published in 2007 in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, male testosterone levels have been steadily dropping over the last two decades and the changes cannot be attributed to health and lifestyle changes. While the authors of that study voiced concern that this was bad for the male population's health, other men have a different take on the matter. David Longhi, author of When Women Cheat, suggests that perhaps male testosterone levels are dropping to accommodate higher levels of female infidelity. The cheating rates for men and women are extremely similar these days, standing at 65% for men and nearly 50% for women according to David J Ley, Ph.D., of Psychology Today, so it is no surprise that male biology would evolve to reflect new behaviors in their female partners, especially since male jealousy in the face of birth control serves no real purpose and could in fact drive a potential mother of his child away from him, ruining his chances of reproductive success. It is my belief that women's newfound freedom thanks to modern technology will radically alter the way the genders approach each other and cause both genders to behave more like the other, resulting in a more equitable society where sexual relationships outside of one's primary relationship won't be as socially unacceptable and the imbalance between expectations for male and female sexual behavior will slowly dissipate. Perhaps that would be more fun for all of us if we could learn not to be so jealous.

For men who claim men simply must be hard-wired for jealousy and promiscuity and cannot help themselves, I must ask: you call women the hormonal, illogical gender when you're literally telling me you cannot help your behavior because of your hormones? That's rich. While the numbers suggest that men are still currently less forgiving of a partner's infidelity than women are – according to a 2014 survey of 5,000 people on the dating site Victoria Milan, 35% of men would forgive a cheating partner vs. 76% of women – it's important to remember that in the span of humanity's existence, reliable birth control is an incredibly recent invention and therefore needs far more time than we've given it to have a lasting impact on human behavioral and cultural norms. For most men, I can't help thinking that refusing to forgive a partner's infidelity when it has literally no impact on their chances of producing offspring with that partner is no longer a particularly helpful move, and since the odds of both genders cheating are so similar, the double standard really just needs to die out already. Luckily current trends predict it will.

How to Get the Fuck Over Someone

Having trouble getting over someone? Sick of conventional advice that tells you to quit the person cold turkey and block them on social media and your phone as if that gets them out of your head? Great,  I've got some tricks for you to use.

The first thing you have to realize when you can't get over someone is that, if you're obsessively thinking about them all the time, it's not so much that you love them as that you're infatuated with them. Infatuation is a bitch and a hell of a drug, a mean evolutionary tool designed to allow two potential long-term mates to find out as much information about each other in as short a time period as possible.

Why Is Infatuation Necessary?

To answer this question, think about how interested you usually are in finding out every single detail about another person's life. The answer is typically not much unless they happen to be extraordinarily fascinating or have a ton in common with you, and even then, you still don't need to hear them go on and on about themselves. Most of us would prefer to talk about ourselves than listen, if we're being honest.

With infatuation, you are as fascinated with this other person as you are with yourself. Your brain reacts to this new potential mate in the same way it does to drugs, alcohol, yummy food, and anything else that triggers the reward system of your brain: you crave this person and their words, their contact, their presence. This is awfully convenient if you're trying to gauge how much you and a new romantic interest have in common: suddenly you hang on their every word and care about mundane details like their favorite ice cream flavor or whether they prefer Coke or Pepsi. Nothing is too boring, typically, when it comes to someone with whom we're infatuated because it's nature's shortcut to rapid intimacy.

Unfortunately, even once a relationship ends, if we're still infatuated with that person, we're really not going to be able to get over them. Our brain still craves them the way we crave anything else that's a bad habit. Luckily there are some tricks you can use to get over that individual, because while it's important to realize that the object of your affection isn't actually important – your brain is just telling you they are, and you know damn well you've felt this way about plenty of people before and gotten over them just fine – why you are so obsessed with that person is the key to getting over them.

We Fall for People Who Complete Us

Make a list of qualities that you love in this other person. Are they incredibly confident in a way you're not? Smarter than you are? More fearless, more social, a deep thinker, charming, incredibly self-disciplined? Whatever the case may be, look at this list and now circle the items that are qualities you yourself do not possess.

Those qualities, right there, are what is important about your crush on this person. Again, the person is not actually as special as you think; had you stayed with them your brain would've calmed down eventually, the infatuation would've ended, and you'd have found out what they're like when they no longer make you feel so good with their mere presence.

We fall for people who have things that we lack, qualities we wish we had. So if you really want to get over someone, start developing the qualities they have that you wish you did.

For example, I once fell for a guy who was so incredibly confident he actually came across as desperately cocky to most of my friends. They couldn't understand why I was so obsessed with him; once I realized he was an asshole and dumped him, neither could I. It should come as no surprise to you that at the time I was having issues with my own levels of self-confidence; I was a push-over at best, someone who couldn't speak up about her needs and couldn't handle confrontation in social situations. At first I was having trouble getting over him, but I applied this rule and started developing my own confidence without his presence. I spoke up, pushed myself to do new things, and got myself out of my own comfort zone. As a result, getting over him was incredibly easy once I did that on a consistent basis. It was never him as a real person I actually needed; it was the self-confidence he had that I lacked.

Whatever you think is so great about this person is probably something that you lack in yourself. When you realize you're just projecting qualities you wish you had onto other people, crushes lose their power over you. You can focus on developing those qualities instead of mooning endlessly over the other person, and you'll find that you become a better person for it.

A variation on this is that many of us act differently when we're around a new love interest than we did before. Perhaps you're more eloquent around your flame, or more willing to try new things and take risks, or witty and intelligent in a way you weren't around other people. Again, start acting the way you did with them all the time. It really is that simple. Think of yourself as addicted to what you thought you were around them, and then be that person without them. You'll move the fuck on, improve yourself as a human being, become more attractive to new potential mates, and find that your life is happier for it.

Why You Should Hate Compulsory Femininity

One day in high school, one of THE hottest girls in our grade according to every guy I knew walked into first period math class about twenty minutes late.

I almost didn't recognize her. Her normally straight hair was curly, her eyeliner-drenched eyes & bronzed everything were bare of makeup, and she was wearing glasses; the only thing that was the same as usual was her extremely tan skin. For once, she hadn't had time to transform herself into the girl we normally saw, and seeing the difference was striking to me.

Why? Because she so consistently changed everything about her natural appearance that I had always assumed her fake look WAS her natural one. As a male classmate joked that SOMEONE clearly hadn't had time to get ready, as she ducked her head & mumbled in an embarrassed way that indeed she hadn't, as he laughed and smiled and said, "Aww, c'mere" and gave her a hug, I felt in that moment a flash of pure rage. Our suburban high school placed a lot of pressure on us to perform and get into good colleges, and this poor girl on top of her huge courseload had to spend God knows how long transforming herself into the hot look of the moment on top of all that?!

As you can imagine, my rage was not abated by the fact that the popular guy hugging her had curly hair & a hoodie on. No loss of sleep for the sake of beauty for this guy.

Half a year later, another hot popular girl I took English with gave an extra credit presentation on her personal version of hell. You know what she said? That hell was a more intense version of all the pressure there was on girls to be thin and pretty, "like ten times worse".

In other words, her hell was THIS reality. As she spoke I remembered a time in Spanish she had refused tiny toffee bars handed out to our class as a treat, asking instead if she could split with someone. I remembered how many salads I had seen her eating at lunch, all veggies & the kind of low-calorie vinaigrette that made our teacher complain about the smell when she brought them into the room. I remembered how often I had seen her obsessively blotting her face & touching up her makeup in the bathroom mirror between classes. I also remembered a crush of mine calling her the hottest girl in our grade, but it was impossible to feel jealous of someone like this; once again, I felt nothing but anger on her behalf. Here was a girl seemingly every guy desired; the cost of that desire was more than I personally could have beared.

For me, high school was not a hell. The look at our school was straight hair, tan skin, and lots of makeup; I had curly hair, very pale skin, and at best a casual but definitely not committed relationship with makeup. Why? Because between AP & honors courses & all my extracurriculars, I couldn't imagine losing a precious 45 minutes or more of sleep every morning to straightening my hair & painting my face. I didn't feel motivated to hit the tanning salon a few times a week. Sure, I didn't date, but I'd never seen the point of that in high school anyway: weren't we all leaving in a few years for college anyway, making relationships kind of pointless, and weren't we all so busy that there wasn't any time?

Apparently not, at least if you wanted to be one of the hot & popular girls.

My own wave of paradise ended after college when I took a business-to-business sales job in downtown Chicago. Though straightening my hair & tanning my skin were still largely optional - I've always loved my God-given curls & porcelain skin - I was at that point wearing makeup on a more or less daily basis. Because my commute from the suburbs was literally two hours, however, and because the job had no dress code due to us conducting business entirely on the phone, I began to stop bothering with makeup on certain days because I desperately needed sleep (that commute was two hours ONE WAY).

That was when it happened. Half the time I came in without makeup, my boss or his wife who helped run things in the office would comment on my appearance, asking if I was tired or had been out the night before. No matter how many times I chipperly explained that I just wasn't wearing makeup, the questions never stopped. I got the impression that my bosses thought I looked worn down or ragged simply because I hadn't painted my face that day. Meanwhile, a male co-worker who consistently walked into the office sporting a hoodie & an ever-growing five o'clock shadow - his shaving pattern seemed as about consistent as my makeup routine at that point - never had a word said to him about it. It got to the point that I wanted to snap at my bosses to please pretend I had a dick so they could focus on my work performance and not my appearance, but I feared that might be out of line.

By now you can see my point. My experience at that office wasn't at all unique. Not only do women feel the need to modify their appearance to be sexy - which on weekends is actually something I personally quite enjoy! - but our performance of femininity is so expected in society that it can even affect how we're seen at jobs that should have nothing to do with our appearance! This is an outrage, plain and simple. I can already hear people replying that one has to fit into society or that what women have to do to their appearance isn't that bad, but that's precisely why I chose to use stories for this article instead of bullet points: if a woman is saying her personal version of hell is the society we live in, that should be a fucking wake-up call.

Think about it, ladies. In order to be socially acceptable, a woman in our society must at the very least shave off most of her body hair. To be considered desirable, many women feel they must style their hair, pluck or wax their eye brows & any other unwanted facial hair, do their makeup, do their nails, wear heels that harm their bodies in the long-term, wear at least a bra & perhaps a push-up bra, remove some or all of their pubic hair...the list goes on and on.

Here is a list of what men have to do: shower, shave, put on clothing, maybe put product in their hair.

I'm aware some of this is a difference in sexuality between the genders, and I actually don't have a problem with that part. As a (mostly) straight woman, I totally get that urge to slap on heels & a push-up bra & a sexy dress to attract male attention; I don't mind doing those things when I feel like it. The problem is when it becomes compulsory - and for many women, it still is.

If you think this doesn't impact women in a very real & deep way, let me have someone other than me - someone who holds a considerably more demanding job than I ever have - explain how this stuff has affected her. In an article on one of my favorite blogs, Jezebel, entitled "The Price of Getting Pretty: Productivity," a female lawyer detailed how the double standards for outfits & appearance at work negatively affect women like her in the law field.

Even for women with professions that aren't as time-consuming as law, the same concept applies. Performing femininity takes considerable time and money, meaning that women get fewer hours in the day to do things with their lives than men do and less of their own money to enjoy life with. (Sometimes I wonder if this is why we as ladies still want men to pay on dates - to even things out - but that's a topic for a later article.) I'm not the first person to notice this: Naomi Wolf covered this topic extensively in the 1980s book *The Beauty Myth*, but now that our society has declared itself post-feminist, a lot of women don't stop to think about or even believe they shouldn't question the daily modifications they make to their appearance just to feel "normal".

The solution? To demand that performing femininity be a choice we as women make, not a chore society imposes on us. To shut down men who make comments about our lack of heels or need for a push-up bra or our hair or a little stubble on our legs (all comments I've had to deflect - what can I say, I've never quite had the drive to try all that hard unless I feel like it). And, I hope, to one day banish from ALL workplaces the notion that it's acceptable to have two different standards for workplace appearance based on gender. It can only happen if we bother to stand up for ourselves, so let's start. I promise all the fears society has planted in our brains about not being desirable enough aren't real - if the main threat for us is not attracting men, well, I at least can safely say as someone who doesn't bother with a lot of it that men still find us as women attractive just as nature made us.

Why Even Good Girls Lose the Good Girl Game

Many members of our society still believe in a "good girl" vs. "bad girl" system in which good girls only have sex under socially appropriate circumstances while bad girls have sex when they're not "supposed" to.

This is a completely bullshit system. As a woman who has sex when she chooses, I've never had a problem with my friends who choose to wait until they're in a committed relationship before having sex because I think of it as a difference in personal preference, not a difference in morality. I'm not hurting anyone by not waiting & they're not hurting anyone by waiting, so what on earth is the big deal?

At the same time, though, I feel concern for the women who buy into this concept because when you participate in a system that treats your sexuality as a bargaining tool for relationships rather than a personal choice, you are agreeing that you are not fully human: you are a commodity. Even good girls lose the good girl game; the reasons follow.

1. The system of "good girls" vs. "bad girls" is designed to ensure women don't feel particularly comfortable with their sexuality.

I once asked a male acquaintance why he didn't like the idea of being with a woman who'd had a lot of partners, and his response astonished me: he worried that a girl who'd been with multiple guys would inevitably find one of those men better in bed than him, and he didn't want to have to worry about that. He was literally admitting that he would prefer a partner defer sexual pleasure until she met him so that she would think of him as being good in bed. To avoid this, he, like most men I know who worry about that sort of thing, actively shamed women who'd been with multiple people.

Women who buy into this shame learn to think of sex as something they shouldn't desire unless it's a "reward" for men who have invested enough time & often money to "earn" sex. Sex isn't thought of as something that brings pleasure, first and foremost: it's thought of as something that brings shame and derision. It is awfully hard when you think of sex this way to really get in touch with your own desires: after all, you're not even supposed to have or acknowledge them!

We've all seen the results of this in our personal lives. Who doesn't remember an instance where a female friend felt guilty for sleeping with someone "too quickly" and became completely neurotic about the whole thing? Instead of being allowed to enjoy and live our lives, we as women are expectd to maintain constant vigilance when it comes to our sexuality, and it's competely absurd when you think about what it's based upon: male insecurity about THEIR sexuality.

Ladies, I urge you not to let whiny little boys - and that's what "men" like this are - have any kind of impact on YOUR personal choices. If a man like that is my prize for behaving, I sure as hell don't want the prize. I'm not even saying you should or shouldn't wait; I'm just saying it should be YOUR choice, not one influenced by insecure, often relatively sexually inexperienced men. The reason for this is simple: not all men think like this. The men I know who can talk to women easily and who are comfortable in their own sexuality & masculinity strangely never seem to hold these opinions. The next time you meet a guy like that, recognize him for what he is - an insecure loser - and move on to somone who gets that sex isn't a zero-sum winner-takes-all game.

It should be noted, however, that I have no problem with men who prefer to wait for a relationship before they have sex & want a partner who holds similar values: these men are not sexist.

2. A man who holds a double standard for sex before starting a relationship with you is going to hold that same double standard after.

This point is so obvious to me that I find it incredulous many women don't see it. If a guy brags about past conquests but expects a woman he dates to have as little of a past as possible - often using the excuse that he as a man "needs" sexual variety & has an inborn urge to spread his seed - what the hell makes a girl think he's not going to hold that same attitude and use those same tired excuses once he's in a relationship with her? They don't magically go away. Men like this, once they hit that inevitable point in a relationship where infatuation wears off & maintaining a good sex life begins to take actual work & planning, seem far more likely to me to cheat & use the same excuse for doing so that they did for having a past.

I've seen this a lot in my personal life, sadly. Many of my female friends have boyfriends who hold these attitudes, and literally none of them haven't been caught doing something shady with other women: asking for waitresses' phone numbers, making plans to meet up with other women one-on-one, sexting other women. The girls involved all know what's going on but turn a blind eye, probably beceause they have so bought into these men's bullshit about needing to be this way that they actually believe it's true.

If this sounds like a pleasant way to spend life with a partner, by all means, girls, be my guest & date guys like this. Just don't say you haven't been warned.

3. When a man cheats under this system, he is never to blame; only women are.

Under the good girl/bad girl system, men are never really to blame for their sexual actions; only women bear the moral responsibility of making sure sex doesn't happen when it's not supposed to. Why? Because again, men are portrayed in this system as being unable to control their sexual urges, while women are expected to be the gatekeepers of sexuality. It's the primary reason women who find out their men have cheated or acted shady with other women often blame the other women involved, not the men: they have literally been brainwashed to the point that they believe men can't control themselves, so the burden of making sure their partner doesn't cheat falls on *all other women*, not their partner. What an exhausting state of being that must be! Instead of placing the blame on their partner, the person they can and should be able to blame for this, they have to worry instead about countless nameless women they've never met, don't interact with, and have no control over. The number of times I've heard a girl with a boyfriend like this complain about "tarts" or "sluts" daring to respond to their man hitting on them, as opposed to taking the considerably easier route of blaming him for his actions and dumping his ass if he doesn't change his behavior, is astonishing to me.

Funnily enough, the women who don't buy into this system are the ones capable of laying the blame where it should be placed: with their partner who claims to love them & be trustworthy.


The bottom line: don't date guys who hold a double standard toward sex unlesss you want to be actively miserable.