7:15 p.m. - 2008-03-18
In which there is more pontificating on the subject of gender relations

Apparently, it is time for my next reading selection. You have to take into account that I am not choosing these reading assignments myself, but they are getting sent to me. My opinion has been asked, and I find this the best forum for expressing my views to all of you who choose to care about my opinions.

So, this next piece is about infidelity. The case is being made that in almost every species on the planet in which animals make �pair bonds� there is inevitably some percentage of the male population that cheats. In addition, in many of these species there is not only cheating but some form of prostitution or sex for compensation.

I understand that this particular article is written in light of the recent New York governor scandal. That automatically puts it at an angle about male infidelity, but we all know that this problem is not solely a woman as victim scenario. Cheating goes both ways and all ways, genders and positions. I guess the real questions that I have when faced with this premise are: Does cheating necessarily mark the end of a relationship? Is it a sign that there are bigger issues at play and there would not have been infidelity in the first place if the rest of the relationship were solid? Is infidelity always a betrayal? If one accepts that their spouse or partner will cheat does it make them a victim or a lesser person somehow?

I know I just dumped a lot out there. I ask all these questions knowing that there is not only one answer to any of them. I do, however, bring this up because there have been so many examples of infidelity popping up lately.

One friend of mine recently bought a home with the so-called �love of his life.� He has known this woman since they were children but they could never get their timing right to be together. When he moved back to the state she was living in, she was already married. In the past eight months since his return, she has gotten a divorce from her previous husband. They are now moving into together. Now, my friend has told me that the married couple was not happy before he came into the picture and the husband was cheating on this woman before he started up with the wife. Does this make it right? Does this guarantee his happiness or is she now prone to leaving relationships if they start getting difficult and will my friend soon find himself staring down a divorce once she decides to move onto the next guy?

Another friend of mine recently was having a sexual relationship with a married man. She understood that this man was married and has two young children and home in his perfect suburban house. She felt awful being the other woman, but enjoyed the sex. She did end it mostly because she knew it would not lead to a relationship for her and because she hated the feeling of being the other woman. The man is still trying to continue the sex, and has made numerous comments about how boring his wife is. Who is at fault here? My friend was not the one betraying anyone. The man is the one with everything to lose. How come she is the one who feels terrible now and he still wants his jollies?

Many of my friends are married, in what seem to be very stable partnerships. But, many people out there believe they are in stable relationships until they find out later that it was not what they thought it was. Many women in the news recently have had to publicly face the media after finding out that their men were conducting extracurricular sexual activities. Most of them have stood with their husbands as the glare is upon them. Do these women really feel that their marriages are worth the heartache? Is this what it means to get through the hard times together? Is this part of the whole �settling� conundrum? Say the guy is a great provider, does the dishes, goes to functions with you and your friends, but occasionally sleeps in someone else�s bed, doe sit mean that he is not committed?

I have marginally dealt with this issue in my own life. I was told by a certain Ex that he was sleeping with half of Iraq. Mostly women in or out of uniform, but someone once suggested that there may have been camels involved.

Torque may very well be texting several other women right now, which would explain why I have not hard from him in awhile and why he is not making any effort to make sure that I am happy. I know that his last relationship lasted many years with a woman who was cheating on him while he was cheating on her. Is the old adage true, �once a cheater, always a cheater?�

As with most things in life, all must be taken on a case by case basis. I have my opinions, but I withhold my judgement, most of the time.

Please do read and let me know where you stand:

In Most Species, Faithfulness Is a Fantasy
By NATALIE ANGIER
You can accuse the disgraced ex-governor Eliot Spitzer of many things in his decision to flout the law by soliciting the services of a pricey prostitute: hypocrisy, egomania, sophomoric impulsiveness and self-indulgence, delusional ineptitude and boneheadedness. But one trait decidedly not on display in Mr. Spitzer�s splashy act of whole-life catabolism was originality.
It�s all been done before, every snickering bit of it, and not just by powerful �risk-taking� alpha men who may or may not be enriched for the hormone testosterone. It�s been done by many other creatures, tens of thousands of other species, by male and female representatives of every taxonomic twig on the great tree of life. Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy. Oh, there are plenty of animals in which males and females team up to raise young, as we do, that form �pair bonds� of impressive endurance and apparent mutual affection, spending hours reaffirming their partnership by snuggling together like prairie voles or singing hooty, doo-wop love songs like gibbons, or dancing goofily like blue-footed boobies.
Yet as biologists have discovered through the application of DNA paternity tests to the offspring of these bonded pairs, social monogamy is very rarely accompanied by sexual, or genetic, monogamy. Assay the kids in a given brood, whether of birds, voles, lesser apes, foxes or any other pair-bonding species, and anywhere from 10 to 70 percent will prove to have been sired by somebody other than the resident male.
As David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, put it with Cole Porter flair: Infants have their infancy; adults, adultery. Dr. Barash, who wrote �The Myth of Monogamy� with his psychiatrist-wife, Judith Eve Lipton, cited a scene from the movie �Heartburn� in which a Nora Ephronesque character complains to her father about her husband�s philanderings and the father quips that if she�d wanted fidelity, she should have married a swan. Fat lot of good that would have done her, Dr. Barash said: we now know that swans can cheat, too. Instead, the heroine might have considered union with Diplozoon paradoxum, a flatworm that lives in gills of freshwater fish. �Males and females meet each other as adolescents, and their bodies literally fuse together, whereupon they remain faithful until death,� Dr. Barash said. �That�s the only species I know of in which there seems to be 100 percent monogamy.� And where the only hearts burned belong to the unlucky host fish.
Even the �oldest profession� that figured so prominently in Mr. Spitzer�s demise is old news. Nonhuman beings have been shown to pay for sex, too. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University and the University of South Bohemia described transactions among great grey shrikes, elegant raptorlike birds with silver capes, white bellies and black tails that, like 90 percent of bird species, form pair bonds to breed. A male shrike provisions his mate with so-called nuptial gifts: rodents, lizards, small birds or large insects that he impales on sticks. But when the male shrike hankers after extracurricular sex, he will offer a would-be mistress an even bigger kebab than the ones he gives to his wife � for the richer the offering, the researchers found, the greater the chance that the female will agree to a fly-by-night fling.
In another recent report from the lubricious annals of Animal Behaviour entitled �Payment for sex in a macaque mating market,� Michael D. Gumert of Hiram College described his two-year study of a group of longtailed macaques that live near the Rimba ecotourist lodge in the Tanjung Puting National Park of Indonesia. Dr. Gumert determined that male macaques pay for sex with that all-important, multipurpose primate currency, grooming. He saw that, whereas females groomed males and other females for social and political reasons � to affirm a friendship or make nice to a dominant � and mothers groomed their young to soothe and clean them, when an adult male spent time picking parasites from an adult female�s hide, he expected compensation in the form of copulation, or at the very least a close genital inspection. About 89 percent of the male-grooming-female episodes observed, Dr. Gumert said in an interview from Singapore, where he is on the faculty of Nanyang Technological University, �were directed toward sexually active females� with whom the males had a chance of mating.
Significantly, males adjust their grooming behavior in a distinctly economic fashion, paying a higher or lower price depending on the availability and quality of the merchandise and competition from other buyers. �What led me to think of grooming as a form of payment was seeing how it changed across different market conditions,� Dr. Gumert said. �When there were fewer females around, the male would groom longer, and when there were lots of females, the grooming times went down.� Males also groomed females of high rank considerably longer than they did low-status females with nary a diamond to their page.
Commonplace though adultery may be, and as avidly as animals engage in it when given the opportunity, nobody seems to approve of it in others, and humans are hardly the only species that will rise up in outrage against wantonness real or perceived. Most female baboons have lost half an ear here, a swatch of pelt there, to the jealous fury of their much larger and toothier mates. Among scarab beetles, males and females generally pair up to start a family, jointly gathering dung and rolling and patting it into the rich brood balls in which the female deposits her fertilized eggs. The male may on occasion try to attract an extra female or two � but he does so at his peril. In one experiment with postmatrimonial scarabs, the female beetle was kept tethered in the vicinity of her mate, who quickly seized the opportunity to pheromonally broadcast for fresh faces. Upon being released from bondage, the female dashed over and knocked the male flat on his back. �She�d roll him right into the ball of dung,� Dr. Barash said, �which seemed altogether appropriate.�
In the case of the territorial red-backed salamander, males and females alike are inclined to zealous partner policing and will punish partners they believe to have strayed: with threat displays, mouth nips and throat bites, and most coldblooded of all, a withdrawal of affection, a refusal to engage. Be warned, you big lounge lizard: it could happen to you.

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