Blame affairs on evolution of sex roles

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Blame affairs on evolution of sex roles

By Stephanie Coontz, Special to CNN

updated 8:34 AM EST, Sun November 18, 2012

Gen. David Petraeus, 60, resigned Friday, November 9, as head of the CIA and admitted having an affair. His mistress was later identified as his biographer, Paula Broadwell. The retired four-star general formerly oversaw coalition forces in Iraq as well as U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. He and his wife, Holly, have been married 38 years and have two grown children.

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Stephanie Coontz: Male politicians repeatedly step into illicit sex situations. Why?
• She says at one time they were encouraged. Now infidelity scorned, but old habits persist
• She says in an unequal history, men learned to expect adoration; women to admire men's power
• Coontz: Retro pattern persists, draws men to young adoring women, women to older men

Editor's note: Stephanie Coontz is Director of Research at the Council on Contemporary Families and teaches history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her most recent book is "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s."

(CNN) -- How could they not have known they were asking for trouble? In the past few years, Rep. Mark Souder of Indiana had an affair with the staff member who had helped him produce a video promoting sexual abstinence. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford flew to Argentina for an extramarital tryst, instructing his staff to tell the press he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Sen. John Edwards tried to pass off the daughter he fathered as the love child of one of his aides.

And now a stockpile of sexy e-mails has simultaneously brought down the head of the CIA and delayed the nomination of the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan to head NATO.

Stephanie Coontz

Many Americans believe these scandals reflect a precipitous decline in respect for marital fidelity. If anything, however, such respect has never been higher. In a 2006 poll by the Pew Research Center, 88% of Americans said adultery was immoral -- a higher number than for any other of 10 unsavory behaviors they were asked about. According to a 2009 Gallup Poll, only 6% of Americans believe extramarital sex is morally acceptable.

Tolerance for male adultery is certainly at a new low. In letters and diaries written during the Colonial and Revolutionary eras, men routinely bragged about their extramarital conquests -- even to the brothers and fathers of their own wives! In the 1850s, it is estimated that New York City had one prostitute for every 64 men, while the mayors of Savannah, Georgia, and Norfolk, Virginia, put the numbers of prostitutes in their cities at one for every 39 and 26 men, respectively.

As late as 1930, Somserset Maugham's play, "The Constant Wife," was considered shocking because the heroine confronted her husband about his affair instead of simply ignoring it, as most women in polite circles did.

Opinion: OK to flirt your way to the top?

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President Thomas Jefferson fathered a child by his mistress. So did Warren G. Harding, who also carried on an affair with the wife of a family friend. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had a long-term relationship with the woman who was his driver in England during World War II. CIA Director Allen Dulles, according to his own sister, had "at least a hundred" affairs, including one with the queen of Greece. President John F. Kennedy's affairs and one-night stands may have numbered even more.

But times have changed. The press and political insiders no longer turn a blind eye. So why do men continue in behaviors that now carry so much risk of exposure and punishment?

Part of it is probably a sense of entitlement. Powerful men have "people" to take care of the mundane details of life. They are briefed on the names and backgrounds of whomever they meet, told when it's time to leave, and extricated from awkward encounters. Someone else keeps track of appointments, money and time, fetches whatever they have forgotten at home, makes excuses when they change plans, and picks up after them when they leave a room. No wonder they get careless about picking up after their indiscretions as well.

But why do equally powerful women so seldom engage in such risky affairs? Some believe that the very qualities that make men successful also make them vulnerable. Powerful men are rewarded for being risk takers, a political consultant once told me, whereas women feel more need to control their emotions and impulses if they are to succeed. There is some truth to this. But I think the answer is more complex, and in some ways sadder.

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After all, these men don't necessarily take such risks in other areas where emotions run strong. Political leaders calibrate their positions, moral convictions and emotional impulses with a degree of calculation that would put Machiavelli to shame. Many even shove aside their most deeply held beliefs at the faintest hint that these might expose them to risk.

As someone who has studied the evolution of love, sexuality, and marriage over the centuries, I believe the frequency of these sexual scandals reflects the fact that many men and women have still not fully incorporated into their daily emotional lives the new ideals about gender equity and mutuality that have emerged in the past 40 years.

Opinion: Media, stop stoking Petraeus sex saga

Today many -- perhaps most -- men sincerely want to marry women who are partners rather than subordinates. And women now want careers of their own, whether paid or unpaid, rather than defining themselves entirely through a husband's achievements. Yet many of our romantic fantasies and cues for sexual arousal are still shaped by the unequal division of roles, power, resources and prescribed character traits that prevailed from the early 19th century up through the 1960s.

Before industrialization moved production outside the household unit, husbands and wives were partners in home-based production, equally responsible for provisioning the household and dealing with the details of daily life. But the experiences and emotions of men and women diverged as men began to earn money outside the home while women concentrated on meeting family needs.

Gradually, women came to see success, prosperity and status as only attainable through the achievements of men, while men became accustomed to receiving love and admiration for possessing skills, resources, and knowledge to which women did not have access. Women began to equate admiration with attraction; men began to equate being looked up to with being sexually potent. For 150 years, romance novels and the mass media have reinforced this confusion.

Opinion: Lessons from Petraeus sex scandal

I think this pattern helps explain why so few women are tempted by the adoration of younger acolytes but often fall for superiors or mentors, while many otherwise happily married men become so intoxicated by admiration that they risk their careers and families for its temporary rush. President Bill Clinton couldn't resist the hero-worship of a White House intern. Then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich carried on an affair with an admiring female aide while trying to impeach Clinton for lying about a similar indiscretion.

Presidential candidate John Edwards fell for the woman who followed him around with an adoring camera as well as an adoring gaze. Rep. Anthony Wiener apparently thought any woman who admired his political views would be turned on by an unsolicited picture of his crotch. And like his CIA predecessor Allen Dulles, whose affair with journalist Mary Bancroft was based on the excitement of what she described as her "overwhelming admiration," David Petraeus bonded with his own worshipful biographer.

Some of the men involved in these scandals are clearly pigs. Some of the women are opportunists. But most are otherwise decent people who have not yet been able to adjust 200 years of conditioned sexual responses to our evolving emotional and intellectual preferences. The challenge facing modern couples -- not just the men and women in these scandals -- is to root out our old psychological habits and incorporate our new expectations of love and marriage into our deepest emotional core.

We will know we have made progress when equality and friendship become more sexy than adoration and uncertainty.

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Blame affairs on evolution of sex roles

I thought it was great that the author of this editorial wrote about how even brothers of wives of men were told about affairs men had with other women during Revolutionary War times. This lends to the double standard in the extreme for wealthy landed men from that time. Though Ben Franklin wasn't married(I think his wife had died?) he was known as a constant womanizer while he was in France as the first U.S. Ambassador there. If you add most leaders in the U.S. and Europe down through history to this list you get a good idea of how marriage used to be for children mostly, so they could have a good future and not necessarily for love. 

The ideal of marriage being for love has always mostly been believed by women. It's not that men don't believe in love, too. It's just that men were always expected to be "expendible". When you treat men as "Beneath women" in that they don't have the same right to stay alive as women do, as in "who fought in all wars mostly?" you have to expect this kind of behavior especially from men who know they might die or lose one of their limbs and future at any moment as soldiers.

So, as women join the military more especially as officers their behavior tends to join the behavior of military men and officers down through the centuries for thousands and thousands of years. Understanding psychology this makes complete sense to me. So, in this context Paula Broadwell's actual behavior makes complete sense because she is or was a high ranking Army officer in Military Intelligence.

Also, during the 1960s and the 1970s my generation "believed in telling women the truth". So, this was a departure for us from the norm of hiding the truth from wives and girlfriends. So, all my friends my age believed in "telling the truth". Though people sometimes were upset with "the truth" less relationships ended because of this 'honesty' and less women committed suicide directly or indirectly because they were not being lied to by their men. However, this era is obviously over and I'm very aware that most men now who are unfaithful don't live by the values of college students of the 1960s and 1970s where honesty was everything. So, once again you have all the unhappy women knowing things are going on and being lied to once again.

It had been our hope in the 1960s and 1970s that women wouldn't be lied to anymore. We all saw women killing themselves on alcohol and valium then from unfaithful husbands. This was pretty normal and all of us knew someone in the 1950s who died from something like this. So, for me, the going back to lying within our culture is disgusting. 

Later: Some people especially women might say to me: "Why don't men change and become faithful?"

My first response is: "If AIDS couldn't do this nothing could." And my second response would be that desperation whether that desperation is real or imagined creates affairs in men's minds. And the third thing that I also had to learn is that if you flirt with women at all, often it eventually becomes more than flirting. So, to keep my present marriage I learned not to flirt with women. But then again I was 46 when I married my present wife and am now 64. So, I find that after 40 it all became much easier for me to deal with. 

Also, since I dated so many people in the 1960s and 1970s and in between marriages I don't have anything left to prove to myself that many men do that got married in High School or college before they were 18 to 22 years of age. By staying single until I was 25 it worked much better for me having the time to meet and to be with many women from 1969 until 1973 (age 21 to age 25). So, even though all this was more confusing than fun at the time it was helpful in everything this taught me and allowed me to make much better choices in practical marriage partners that could actually work out. If you are too young often you marry for love only which is never practical and usually causes unhappiness if it isn't combined with two practical people. And once you are married and have kids often it is too late to back out of an impractical or not useful long term union.