Posted on 05/27/2015 2:18:45 PM PDT by drewh
Washington Post reporter Caitlin Dewey’s beat is the Internet. But her big piece on the front page of Wednesday’s Style section is about something broader: “Forsaking monogamy: The evolution of relationships has made affairs less clandestine and less combustive. And of course there are Web sites to help match tryst-seekers.”
This being the Post, there is no space for critics of the "evolution" of online adultery Web sites or their users. Dewey promoted the “non-monogamous dating site Open Minded,” where her married female subject, Jessie, advertised, “I’m into building deep and loving relationships that add to the joy and aliveness of being human.” She talked her husband into “ethical non-monogamy.”
The Post also used the term “monogamish,” the cutesy term of radical gay sex columnist Dan Savage to describe the married-but-cheating lifestyle.
The online headline was “Are new dating apps killing monogamy? Or has it always been dead?” Dewey pushed (B). Or monogamy is an old “agricultural” tradition that’s fading away in the modern age. Adultery is the new mainstream, according to Open Minded founder Brandon Wade:
Open Minded is a new kind of dating site for a newly mainstream lifestyle: one in which couples form very real attachments, just not exclusively with each other. He expects swingers, polysexuals and experimental 20-somethings to use his site. But he guesses that most of his 70,000 users are people like Jessie: Those in committed, conventional relationships, who realize that, statistically speaking, few modern couples stay with a single person their whole lives.
“If you look at marriage, it developed as a survival strategy and a means of raising kids,” Wade said. “But relationships are no longer a necessary component of life. People have careers and other interests — they can survive without them.”
That’s not wrong, says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and one of the world’s leading relationship researchers. In the caveman days, humans teamed up in non-exclusive pairs to protect their children. Later, as people learned to plant crops and settle in one place, marriage became a way for men to guarantee kids, and for women — who couldn’t push heavy plows or carry loads of crops to market — to eat and keep a roof over their heads....
In fact, given the history and prevalence of non-monogamous relationships throughout cultures, it’s not scientifically correct to say the human species mates or pairs for life. Dogs mate for life. Beavers mate for life. Humans have one-night stands, paramours and a 50 percent divorce rate.
Fisher dubs it a “dual reproductive strategy”: We’re biologically programmed to form pair-bonds, yes, but some people — many people — are also programmed to seek out variety.
So, if you stay true to your spouse, you’re more like a dog or a beaver than a human. To the Post, this is about empowering the ladies, not the men:
More and more women will make this choice or consider it, Fisher expects; it’s in keeping with decades of widespread social change and women’s empowerment. Just 30 years ago, when Jessie was in her 20s, the average woman married at 23 and had her first child within the year. Her mother’s generation didn’t even leave the home. The majority simply raised kids, preached chastity and finger-waved their hair.
“That’s all sliding away from us,” Fisher said. “We’re shedding all these agricultural traditions.... [and] returning to the way we were millions of years ago.”
The Post story doesn’t quite explain that the Open Minded site is selling threesomes and other polyamorous hookups from its home page. Wade tells the Web surfer on the home page he’s created “a safe and stigma-free environment that brings the ease and flexibility of online dating to the currently underserved world of open relationships.”
Dewey ends with a little slam on that ancient Christianity thing, and how millennials have no use for it: “Thus far, most of its self-declared ‘monogamish’ users are under 33. In other words, they’re women (and men) who paid off their own student loans, fooled around on Tinder — and grew up with a notion of personal independence much different from the one taught in the 1st century A.D.”
'Forsaking Fatherhood'
Yes.
Nor does she seem to realize there are a lot of other things that can be rationalized via an evolutionary biology lens. Things that may not be as benign as fooling around.
The Leftist utopia demands destruction of any power outside the state. That includes, most specifically, families and religions. Families must be broken up, religions must be made harmless to Leftist interests. They are succeeding quite well.
Make no mistake guys.
Long before homos bubbled openly to the surface and made everyone celebrate them, immorality with sex was in full swing. It is we heteros who flouted morality openly and made society accept screwing around without marriage, etc. Homos simply latched onto that slipping morality.
Homos would be nowhere without hetero loosening of morality.
We really have no one to blame but ourselves.
I think they really meant wolves.
Hey it worked great in Rome.
Hey it worked great in Rome.
If the Libs had their way, only the homos would get married. And they are certainly not monogamous even after they are married.
Well, the Living God has not evolved; He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, and was always the same in His eternal existence. And, His view of sodomy has not changed—it is and always will be an abomination.
This is the next thing being floated.
Polyamorous.
There are reasons so many people are moving to Portland and Seattle.
There is, in fact, a new factor today. The modern welfare state systematically subsidizes illegitimacy (and a host of other dysfunctional behaviors). But I agree with the rest of your observation.
Precisely. God is not mocked.
The people in this story are trying to explain away sin.
Ew. No thank you.
“First, dogs do not mate for life. They mate all their lives, true, but anyone who has been around free ranging dogs knows very well that they most certainly do not mate for life.”
Heck, they’ll mate your leg if you will stand still for it :)
Maybe so. Some people claim grey wolves are monogamous, but others say they will “cheat”.
I think it is probable that two alphas mate, and keep the others away from the most desirable (alpha) of the pack. Given opportunity, I reckon a wolf will be a dog.
“Heck, they’ll mate your leg if you will stand still for it”
Yeah, but when you come back 3 years later, they are ready to mate your leg again....isn’t that devotion sweet?
Finally I can marry my horse....
AMEN. You are 100% right.
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.