Posted on 09/02/2012 6:17:39 AM PDT by Loyalist
Catherine Hakim is a controversialist. She says prostitutes are role models, most women don’t want to work in career jobs and feminists are an elitist minority whose battles are irrelevant to all but a small group. In her latest book The New Rules: Internet Dating, Playfairs and Erotic Power, she argues in favour of adultery.
In what is probably the first academic guide to what she calls “good infidelity,” Hakim, a social scientist at the Centre for Policy Studies, says a love affair “requires some skill and savoire faire. A successful affair while married is one that makes both parties happier than they would otherwise be, but has no negative consequences for the two families and does not of itself prompt any divorces.”
Hakim analyzed the confessions of people who had had affairs via online chat rooms. She concludes that, thanks to the Internet, Britons are becoming more continental in their attitudes about adultery.
Past surveys have suggested about 80 per cent of Britons disapprove of affairs, Hakim says. By contrast, only two in five Italians regard affairs as unacceptable, while a quarter of Spaniards “do not regard sexual fidelity as fundamentally important.”
Now, however, according to Hakim, “the unforgiving Puritan Anglo-Saxon response to affairs ... with all the misery and trauma that entails,” is changing, as the Internet enables women to enjoy what she calls harmless “playfairs” — beneficial “holidays” from a marriage.
The New Rules, to be published next month, is, like several of Hakim’s works, likely to provoke fierce debate on publication.
Last year, in her book Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital, she argued that attractive people had an advantage in life that could be measured in terms of greater earning power.
Harness your erotic potential, she suggested, and you could not only land a partner but get ahead at work and in society as a whole.
Now she suggests that women should capitalize on their scarcity value in infidelity chat rooms, where willing females are a commodity in short supply. While men pay, it costs nothing for women to sign up to such sites. Extramarital affairs go wrong for women, Hakim says, only when they are really looking for love.
“I have always been baffled by the sour and rigid English view of affairs,” she writes.
Conversations with people who use social networks to cheat — none of whom, for obvious reasons, is willing to be named — suggest that Hakim is on to something. No-strings fun is what made one divorced man switch from normal dating sites to encounters of the more illicit kind. “John” works in marketing and described infidelity websites as: “Perfect for me. No strings. No hassle. I’ve given up on dating websites. I couldn’t stand the pressure. The women are all frightening, they’re box-ticking nutcases who make you feel like you are being interviewed for the job of husband.”
Women on infidelity websites, John says, are different. “These are frustrated, bored women who want to live life like Sex and the City, go for drinks, have fun, romance and lots of sex.”
Elena, 37, joined a website five years ago “because I was married to a wonderful man, living a picture-perfect bucolic life and was desperately unhappy. I joined the site because I wanted to gauge what I had, get scared of losing it and fall back in love with my husband.”
Things did not go to plan, and shortly after joining: “I met a man and fell deeply, madly and desperately in love. Within a month I filed for divorce and launched into an insanely passionate, life-changing affair. We are still together.”
That’s how infidelity websites are used, according to Sophie, who says extramarital affairs that are set up online are common among her set. “They are used literally, as a test bed. Doing it online, if a woman discovers the grass is not actually greener, she is protected from being found out and having her life shattered.”
Emma emails answers from her iPad while “hubby” watches television: “I would recommend this to anyone but I’m not sure many women are brave enough emotionally and you need to be to have a double life. I regret none of it. My marriage has survived because of my lovers. I would never leave my husband.”
As she sees it: “An affair is fun, frolics, dinner, cocktails, expensive hotels and passionate sex. It is not real life.”
The Times, London
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
“Catherine Hakim is a controversialist. She says prostitutes are role models”
You’re in. You’re officially invited to speak at the DNC convention.
It is interesting in our day that sodomy is called homosexual, adultery is called affair, the drunkard is a respected alcoholic, and the murderer is temporarily insane. We should go back to using the orginal words. Moslem should remain Moslem.
Not real life, huh? Until her husband finds out. Then the party is over.
I don’t know of any husband that would look kindly on being cuckolded. I love my wife & kids, but if I ever found out she was cheating on me, the marriage would be over.
Perfect description. I'm right there with ya, brother!
Remember, Onan wasn't punished for rubbing one out, he was punished for disobeying God. He could have been told to water the garden and failing that, got the same punishment. He just happened to be told to have impregnate his sister-in-law and didn't.
I’ve been stunned over the years by the number of women who will cheat on their significant others at the drop of a hat. Many of them you would never suspect from how they look or act. My conclusion is that they are better at it than men.
Oddly enough, there may be some biological truth in there, though she misunderstands it.
To start with, men have the basic biological prerogative to spread their DNA around, resulting in offspring from several different women. Women, on the other hand, have the double basic biological prerogative to get the best male DNA donor, *and* a male who will be best at providing for her offspring. And when there are more than a minimum number of men, these are usually not the same two men.
But this is basic biology. Humans innovated socially enforced marriage, which gives a better outcome to children, women and men than does basic biology, even monogamous biology.
Marriage helps assure men that the children his wife has, have his DNA, for which he gives up on having multiple female partners. In exchange, the woman is given some assurance that her husband will not make children with other women, splitting his provision between them, however she accepts that neither his DNA nor his provision will be the best, just adequate.
And marriage definitely helps children, because a two parent family raises children oriented to success and prosperity; whereas a single parent child is raised to a survival orientation, a much harder life, which is why they have a 60% greater chance of becoming a criminal offender.
However, marriage has two problems outside of the family. The first of these is the dowry, that girl’s families do not select mates for their DNA and prosperity, but to enrich her family, not the couple and their children. This results in very bad couplings between elderly men and very young girls.
The other problem is that many people are neither designed to breed, nor, according to biology, should they. However, they still *want* to breed, and thus interfere with the married couple and their children.
Now all of this is background to explaining why biology itself has come up with means to distract the non-breeders, to prevent this interference. This includes a litany of tricks, possibly including homosexuality, prostitution, and sexual aggression in postmenopausal women.
But again, these are just basic biological tricks, and humans should come up with a better means for non-breeders to quit interfering with the breeders. This does not have to be oppressive, but it does have to be clear that while non-breeders are mostly still compelled to want sex, they should “keep it to themselves” and others like them, who also should not be breeding, or raising children for that matter.
“...best male DNA donor, *and* a male who will be best at providing for her offspring. And when there are more than a minimum number of men, these are usually not the same two men.”
Does that suggest that good DNA and success in providing for offspring are unrelated? It appears to be a contradiction. The best overall indicator for potential success in our culture is IQ, and there is most certainly a genetic component.
LIBERAL females are not worth it
avoid them like the plague
LLS
Onan being the son of Judah, from whose line would come our Messiah! (as in The Lion of the tribe of Judah!) No wonder God the Father was unhappy with Onan. Satan’s first opportunity to try to genetically mess up the line from whence Jesus would come!
All a person has to do is watch some of the daytime talk shows, where people have embraced the “do what you want to and be free” culture.
Then ask yourself: Are these people happy? Has their lifestyle made them happy?
Well...date American TV addicts at your own risk. :)
Well, she is actually right about these two things. The rest is just bomb throwing to get attention.
“A successful affair while married is one that makes both parties happier than they would otherwise be, but has no negative consequences for the two families”
That is one of the most pathetic, self-delusional things I’ve ever read.
If you are cheating on your spouse, you are lying to him. A marriage based on lies and distrust is a sham. Living with a lying, dishonest spouse is a pathetic shadow of what should be. If it survives, it’s because there is something wrong with both partners.
It isn’t just that they refuse to grow up and be decent people.
No.
They have to find stupid ways to make it sound good.
Is that good enough?
No.
Then they find ways to tell all the grown ups they are the ones with the problem
And even then, is that good enough?
No.
Then they have to burn down the world.
Is that finally good enough?
No.
They have to do it in the name of peace and love.
They are a plague on life itself.
You’ve probably got me beat because our anniversary is 12-20-80 but basically 32 years.
The love of my life manages things with “To Do Lists” so the kids are off to school, laundry is done, things are organized, vacuumed, dusted, shopped for, etc.
A year or two ago I suggested that she put me on the “morning list” so I’d have a nice wake up and a tension free day but NO! I have to be nice, buy her nice stuff and take her to the beach. Women. I even have to make my own coffee and toast. Ridiculous. ;-)
Yes they are.
Biology hasn’t kept up with technology. Biologically both men and women are still programmed for the physical world of hunting, gathering, enduring, ie self-sufficiency in the wild.
Women also have a biological drive to vary the genes of their offspring. It’s the perfect flip-side of the male drive to distribute seed. Several recent studies have confirmed this.
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