Sexual Irony - Philandering Husbands And Wives Who Love Them For It

Herman Fleishman, doctor of philosophy and fine arts, professor at the Bavarian Institute for Social Biology of Munich had done extensive research on female mating behavior, and in particular how single women fall for 'bad boys' and how married women not only do not leave their husbands for infidelity, but love them more for it. 

The first phenomenon is well known and linked to classic primitive mating behavior.  So-called 'bad boys' are the most male - aggressive, fearless, risk-taking, and confident - whereas good boys, while dutiful, respectful, and loving are the most feminized; and what red-blooded woman wants more of the same?  Of course Professor Fleishman put it differently and couched it in appropriately scholarly terms:

While survivalist logic might predict female preference for a mate most likely to care for her and her offspring and unlikely to stray, this oxymoronic, Prelapsarian conclusion fails to convince on many levels.  The sexual wanderer, the Lothario, the Casanova, the man loved by many women abhorring sexual settlement and prizing sexual conquest is exactly what women want.  They instinctively are attracted to the high-testosterone, double YY chromosomic, men of challenge and emotional hyper-charged desire.  He might not care for her, but she wants his children.

Feminist outcry upon publication was deafening.  'Professor Fleishman is the tool of the misogynist far Right, the patriarchal bullies who dismiss womanhood without concern - fools, ignoramuses, and backwater imbeciles'. 

Yet Fleishman stood his ground, and simply asked these critics to look around.  'Who are zey fucking?', he replied in his thick German accent.  

Bob Muzelle was one of Fleishman's good men - dutiful, obedient, supportive, and self-effacing when it came to his wife, a professional, feminist, and woman of some intellectual weight.  He not only stood behind his wife no matter the cause, not only agreed to her every condition and demand, but enlisted in The Cause of Women.  The glass ceiling must be broken, sexual abuse must stop, patriarchy must be tossed aside, and women must be given their due as sexual primus inter pares.  Sexual equality was good and valid only so far.  Women were the stronger, more intellectually agile, and more 'tensile' of the species, and men should accept their own role as second fiddle. 

August Strindberg's Miss Julie offers some inkling into Bob's sexual immaturity.  Julie's mother, a Scandinavian proto-feminist of the Victorian era, brings her daughter up as a man, and Julie learned how to become a sweat-stained, brute of a thing, able to master all; and so it was that in reverse Bob was trained.  He was brought up to be a sensitive, caring, sweet and demonstrative person unafraid to show his emotions - not to be a girl, actually, but to be a girl in boy's clothing, a faux female but in the vaudevillian transgenderism of the early days, a sexual double entendre. 

He was no queer, and was as horny as his mates when it came to girls and women; but because of his training, he was inept and unconvincing as a suitor. He demurred when he should have pro-acted, he waited for a girl's initiative, her suggestiveness, her intent; and as a result every evening ended in wilted, unsatisfied desires.  

Just when he was ready to throw in the towel, along came Corinne, a woman of modest means, intelligence, and desire who was more than happy to be courted by this surprisingly tentative young man, but beggars can't be choosers, and she had waited long enough in her shabby Long Island home, and so made the first move, and Bob was hooked. 

But even Corinne was surprised at Bob's bowing and scraping, a virtual Dickensian Uriah Heep "I'm an 'umble man" servility, and although Bob was an ideal husband who did the dishes, took out the trash, kept his hairs out of the sink, and deferred to her on matters large and small, she felt frustrated, angry, and cheated; and before five years were up she took a lover. 

Blanton Figgis was not her idea of a macho man, nor any woman's for that matter, but at least he was forward enough to suggest a maleness and real desire, so they met every Thursday afternoon at 4 in his Adams Morgan walkup, left promptly at 5, and were home in time for dinner. 

The piece de resistance of Fleishman's work, the centerpiece, was The Holdens.  Loft Holden was a ladies man, an attractive forty-something sexual libertine whom women adored.  The more women he had, the more other women wanted him, wanted to know what made him so sexually attractive, and wanted to be the ones to tie him down.  

Beth Amory Holden, his wife, knew of his affairs but was socially enriched by them.  Her husband was not just one of these run-of-the-mill suburban duds but a real man, and he was hers. His affairs turned her on, and when they made love she imagined being Sheila, Usha, or Luisa, taken in a hundred different locales, coming a hundred different ways. 

All this of course is anecdotal, but the more Fleishman collected similar stories, and compiled an impressive dossier of women's desires, the more convinced he was of some evolutionary compulsion going on.  Women wanted the football captain headed for State, not the computer geek on his way to MIT; the chisel-jawed boy wonder, not the little Jewish kid reading Torah.  It was set in stone, the way of all women, an evolutionary, hardwired compulsion. 

The Beth Holden affair was more complicated, more to deconstruct and decipher about the twists and turns of marital infidelity; but Freud and Jung were both eloquent on the subject.  In his seminal paper on Marital Fidelity And The Female Voyeur, Freud wrote about how the attraction of bad boys does not disappear after marriage but recurs in extramarital affair and most pronounced in the revelry of a wayward husband. 

 

The wife is cognizant and complicit in her husband's serial affairs.  She wants to be both wife and illicit lover, to have the comfort of a caretaker and the virtual excitement of a sexual brigand.  The savvy husband knows and understands this and uses it to his advantage.  Knowing his wife will be ever faithful and non-judgmental about his affairs, he is free to roam. A mutually satisfying conclusion.

When feminists read these Freudian excerpts, they were outraged.  Both men - ach, men! - had demeaned women, robbed them of their dignity and independence, and should be discredited; but again Fleishman held his ground.  He knew what was what, and he suspected that most women did too.  As much as their radicalized sisters might howl misogyny and sexually abusive abandonment, they knew that what they wanted and never once demurred from the desire, a real man. 

Professor Fleishman almost lost his position at the university, but then the tide turned and conservatives rose to power in America and Europe.  Gone were the days of woke political correctness, and freedom of investigation, inquiry, and objective conclusions and free speech were back.  

'I love women', the old professor was heard to have said, much to the consternation of still progressive women; but that burnished his resume, put a star on it, and gave him even more currency and audience.