[It is important at this moment..] that we think about how hard monogamy is, how hard marriage is and about whether we make unrealistic demands on the institution and on ourselves.
That, anyway, is what Dan Savage, America’s leading sex-advice columnist, would say. Although best known for his It Gets Better project, an archive of hopeful videos aimed at troubled gay youth, Savage has for 20 years been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage. In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.
Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest….
…straight talk about the difficulty of monogamy, Savage argues, is simply good sense. People who are eager to cheat need to be honest with their partners, but people who think they would never cheat need honesty even more. “The point,” he wrote on his blog last year, “is that people ”” particularly those who value monogamy ”” need to understand why being monogamous is so much harder than they’ve been led to believe.”
Let me just note that one’s view of the value and prevalence of monogamy seems to vary importantly between many straight and gay couples:
1. In 2010, NORC, a research center at the University of Chicago, found that, among those who had ever been married, 14 percent of women and 20 percent of men admitted to affairs. [That is something over 85% of married women and 80% of married men report themselves faithful over their entire lifetimes]
2. A 2010 study of gay couples noted that 49% of gay couples interviewed, “opened” their relationship within 12 months of their relationship beginning.
There is a fair quantity of evidence that monogamy has an importantly different significance in many (though by no means all) gay couples’ relationships than straight couples’. If I wanted to understand the value, ethical and practical, that the vast majority of straight couples ascribe to monogamy I don’t think I’d first look to a gay man in an open same sex relationship.
It may however help us to understand some important differences, on average, in what folks want when they desire to be “married”.
What a pack of lies! What this creasture has said is this: If you are honest about your sins and transgressions, then everything will be OK sooner or later because your partner will (A) get used to the condition of infidelity and (B) benefit from practicing infidelity also. This makes a mockery of fidelity. This is called flexibility. Notice how the meaning of words begins to get slippery and soft and slimy. What does “flexibility” really mean? It means doing what you feel like without having to feel guilty about any of it. In short, its makes selfishness, irresponsibility, and self indulgence acceptable by refusing to admit that betrayal of trust, e.g., is a real and terrible moral crime. And it makes self discipline and self restraint spurious and false.
Is this the world anyone, except a homosexual or a utter hedonist would want? This IS the homosexual world, and a shameful one it is, full of moral twisting and falsity dressed up in upscale left coast clothing. Read and be revolted. Larry
Having suffered reading through the entire article, Larry has it right.
So on to the new “marriage” without fidelity and monogamy and without children. Why would the state ever want to sanction this?
Truly the sign of a sick and degenerate culture.
If you have the stomach (I suspect it’s a very big if) you should look at some of Savage’s columns in the Stranger, a free Seattle rag. Truly vile. That he merits mention in the NYT as something serious is frightening.
What an awful article.
sydney video production
See Ross Doutat (sp?) op ed in today’s NYT, so you can see how falsities become possibilities for those who accomodate themselves to pressures. This is called spinelessness. Others call it flexibility. Homosexuals call it victory.. Larry
How is it that all this glorious rhetoric of freedom, liberation and choice coughs up at a terminus that is as squalid, banal and soul-less as approving men cheating on their wives?