Adultery: Is it the grown-up way to love?

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.”

Things are a lot more complex than that, or else men with high IQs would have women crawling all over them. Different women have different biological responses and different opinions about what is sexually attractive in potential mates. And often the two are in conflict.

Instead, “superior DNA” is very subtle. In some cases, women take cues from other women as to who the most desirable males are. Some are totally oriented to the wealth of potential mates. Some physical attractiveness and physique.

Importantly, while it *almost* seems random, it is anything but random. Science knows there are patterns, but has a very hard time figuring them out.

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 is a nonsense statement. A dowry is provided by the bride's family and a girl with a substantial dowry would have her pick of spouses, not be married off to an old man. Depending on the culture, the dowry may indeed go to the couple and be the bride's personal property and not enrich the groom's family.

It is cultures where brides must be purchased that young girls end up with old men. This is frequently seen in polygynous societies because older, wealthier men with multiple wives create a scarcity of women in the marriage market and drive up the average cost of a bride.

One of the most vicious examples of dowry today is in India, with the practice of bride burning. Because women sold by dowry become members of her husband’s family, and there is a strong prejudice against remarriage for women, but not men, as soon as the groom’s family gets the dowry, one of them pours gasoline on the bride and sets her on fire.

Then their son can get remarried, and get another dowry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_burning

Odd article from an Arab named wench

I think moneyed whites cheat much less today than in my youth

Many reasons

Money

Divorce favors women in their class

Men are more submissive

Folks who marry are motivated to marry

It all contributes to less cheating amongst married whites

Poor people do not marry as much now as my youth

I agree completely with her remark on fembots

the Internet enables women to enjoy what she calls harmless “playfairs” — beneficial “holidays” from a marriage.

It's also a great way to meet psychopathic serial killers. Wooo! the thrill of rolling the dice!

I am sick to death of a culture that lies to people and constantly denigrates character and self discipline. Everything has a simple shortcut that requires no self-restraint: pills that replace exercise and controlling diet; giving in to destructive impulses that destroy relationships and lives; killing the unborn out of convenience, and smug, convoluted thinking that indulges the dark side of human nature.

The evil that permeates today’s elitist thinking makes the best and most compelling argument for the existence of satan, which has led me on a personal journey from agnosticism to a deep, abiding faith in God.

My own observations lead me to the conclusion that the desired “superior DNA” is a combination of looks/physical traits and intelligence. Cultural influences as to what constitutes “desirable” are significant, but 7s marry 7s and 3s marry 3s, for the most part, be it in looks or smarts.

All of that has little to do with the long term. Compatibility is also needed for long term success, and that is where I think culture has an even bigger influence. Women are conditioned to think that they are entitled to it all, regardless of their own worthiness. “it all” doesn’t exist in the real world. Western women have been poisoned by feminism. Every signal given by popular culture is that the husband/father is a buffoon, while the wife is a snarky/clever (but far superior) hen. The meme is that your balding, pasty, wimpy husband isn’t worthy of you; and it doesn’t matter if you are an overweight, nagging bag of neuroses, it’s all on him. It’s pure poison, eagerly consumed on a daily basis.

The bright side is that Helen Gurley Brown died last month.

Which is why India made dowry illegal in 1961. It's the non-enforcement that has made custom continue.

If the Indian government got as serious about punishing bride burning as the British government had about Sati, it wouldn't be a problem.

"This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. -- General Charles Napier

Her definition of a “successful affair while married” is 100% fiction - one with no negative consequences. That is freaking impossible.

She’s just blown her own ship out of the water.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.