UBT: Why Women Cheat
The Universal Bullshit Translator digests an article in Marie Claire about why women cheat. Reportedly, women have caught up to men as being equally likely to be unfaithful. This is laudable why exactly?
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The Universal Bullshit Translator cannot even. No it really cannot. An alert chump sent this “Why More Women Are Having Affairs” dreck from Marie Claire magazine this summer and I read it before I read it. Monogamy isn’t natural, blah blah, bonobo monkeys, blah blah, Esther Perel, blah, blah, bleccch.
No, said the Universal Bullshit Translator. Not another one. Sent me a drunk sext. A superior missive on parenting from a Schmoopie. A plea for Jesus cheater understanding. Anything but that treating-people-like-shit-is-feminist-progress nonsense.
I backed off for several months. But it’s time. I’m sorry UBT. Send Lebkuchen.
Treating people like shit is not progress.
Before we send bits of the article into the crushing mandibles of the Universal Bullshit Translator, let me reiterate a point I’ve made on this blog ad nauseum. Enjoying the spoils of oppression is not equality. We shouldn’t celebrate “women have achieved parity as corporate raiders!” any more than we should celebrate “women cheat on their partners as often as men!”
Women are human, ergo some of them are assholes. To be fully human means some of us will not be good people. Being marginalized doesn’t make us saintly. Same argument for LBGTQ+, left-handed Presbyterians, or quadriplegic dwarves. You would hope that being marginalized might give a person more empathy, or perspective, but no. History is replete with dick suckers of the overlords and Vichy sell-outs.
With that out of the way, let’s begin.
The first time Zara* cheated on her partner, she felt nothing. No guilt, shame or regret. Not even an inkling that she had done something wrong. Her conscience, it seemed, was otherwise occupied.
Zara had her first inkling that she might be a sociopath.
No guilt
As she made her way home, the 32-year-old thought the guilt would surely kick in as the alcohol wore off. But in the morning, there was nothing but a throbbing headache.
So she did it again. And again. And again. Multiple times a week for a month or so, Zara and Mateo* met up in secret. Her partner, Joshua, was none the wiser. “We’d been together for six years but didn’t live together, so there was a lot of time I didn’t need to account for,” she says. “I would text him to say I was at dinner, and he never wondered who with, or when – or if – I got home.”
Joshua never wondered if Zara was cheating on him, so it’s really Joshua’s fault that Zara was cheating on him.
Logistically, sexually and morally, the affair was easy. But at some point, Zara did start to wonder if she had a morality chip missing.
Narrator: Zara had a morality chip missing.
Why didn’t she ever feel guilty? “I started to become really consumed with, ‘Why don’t I feel bad?’ and the only thing I could come up with was that I’d been cheated on by an ex, and now it was my turn. And the universe was making it easy for me because I’d had such a hard time all those years earlier. It’s pretty deranged logic.”
Deranged logic works for Zara.
Cheaters need a ‘listening ear’
Eventually, Zara broke up with Joshua without telling him about the affair, and continued to see Mateo for another year – until she cheated on him, too, with a friend of a friend, Ben. “I still never felt guilty, but I definitely felt like there was something wrong with me,” she says. “Like, I’d never done this before, and now I’m doing it twice in a row? I should be in jail,” she jokes.
“I should get STD tested and inform my partners” is something that never occurs to Zara.
Far from being locked up, what cheating women need is understanding and a listening ear that’s curious rather than judgemental. Silence stands in the way of honesty, repair and the ability to build stronger relationships – with their partners and themselves.
The UBT notes the narrative shift here. Who is supposed to be offering understanding and a listening ear to cheating women? Their shrinks or their partners? Society? Who are we talking about? Why do we ASSUME there is a chump there to receive and repair this “stronger relationship”? (After the chump doesn’t judge, of course.)
Women cheat as often as men
When men have affairs, it’s the stuff of locker-room talk and boys’ night bragging. It’s not entirely shocking to hear of a married man straying. But when a woman does it, she’s treated with contempt, judgement and scorn. And so women don’t talk about it, and they think there’s something wrong with them.
Women are made for romance, for settling down, for fairytales and happy endings, we’re told; it’s men who stray, who roam, whose sexual appetites are so heightened that they’ll look elsewhere as soon as their partner claims one too many bedtime “headaches”. But all the while that narrative has been spinning, the rates of female infidelity in heterosexual relationships have been increasing yet men’s rates have remained steady.
Why should we be surprised that women cheat as often as men? Who else are men cheating with? Other men? Goats?
According to research cited by the wildly popular psychotherapist and author Esther Perel, between 1990 and 2017 there was a 40 per cent jump in the number of women having affairs. And last year, a study found that we’ve achieved infidelity parity.
Wildly popular quack with one-year degree in art therapy from third tier teacher’s college cites infidelity parity research.
Huzzah. Women can behave as unethically as men. Another round of Chlamydia for Esther on the house.
Women are wired for ‘novelty’
“Women are wired for sexual variety, novelty and adventure. Women cheat in every society, even in ones where they are put to death for it,” says Wednesday Martin, a New York-based researcher, social commentator and the author of Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Adultery is Wrong. “It’s time we accept that, however we feel about it personally, stepping out on a long-term partner is a regular feature of female sexual behaviour, not just male sexual behaviour.”
Interesting choice to describe cheating as novel and adventurous. So is robbing banks if you’re writing from the perspective of the armed robber. Not as much fun for the pistol whipped teller tied to the chair.
However we feel about it personally, bank robbery is a regular feature of humanity.
We may have closed the affairs gap, but insight into the reasons women cheat has been understudied. We know men tend to cheat from a place of insecurity or a lack of attention or praise from their primary partner,
Do we know this, really? Himpathy much?
but until now researchers have struggled to agree on what drives women to look outside their marriages.
Why should we care what motivates cheaters?
It seems pretty obvious — their own entitlement.
In the 2024 study, published in the journal of Evolution and Human Behaviour, researchers surveyed 254 heterosexual men and women from across the globe who were currently or previously engaged in an affair with the precise mission to find out why women were cheating.
The findings were interesting: many women rated their sidepiece as more physically attractive but less parentally attractive and with a worse personality than their primary partner, which dispelled the hypothesis that women cheat to “mate-switch”, an upscaling tactic that also minimises the chances of being single in a society that’s taught women they need a man’s resources to survive.
So, if women weren’t necessarily looking for a new relationship, what were they looking for? One participant said she wanted extra help with her kids, many said they were seeking revenge on their unfaithful partners, others wanted to feel like they were still attractive to other men, and several said they were simply bored. The study also found that women are more likely to cheat when they feel dismissed by their partner or fall in love with someone else.
The UBT is not a data scientist, but wouldn’t it be a more valid study if researchers looked at all the women who also wanted help with the kids, had unfaithful partners, felt unattractive and bored and did NOT cheat. Otherwise, how is this causal?
The UBT is growing weary… another mountain of bullshit….
Let’s try another quack.
Dr Tammy Nelson is a sexologist and psychotherapist and the author of several books on infidelity, including 2019’s When You’re the One Who Cheats. She’s seen the difference between men’s and women’s affairs play out in real time in her practice and undercover online as a consultant for Ashley Madison, the infamous dating site where married people go to have an affair. Despite the 2015 data leak that saw the names and email addresses of its 36 million users made public, the site still claims more than 65 million members.
Oh, the UBT always takes advice from consultants for Ashley Madison.
Having direct access to that many unfaithful spouses is an infidelity researcher’s dream.
Curious how these academics never want to study the chump archive. I guess we aren’t novel and exciting enough.
Earlier this year, Nelson was allowed to create two profiles: one male, one female. She provided little by way of personal information: no photograph, only a name, hair colour and height. She didn’t respond to any messages, but watched them pour in. “When I was a woman, men sent me requests saying, ‘I’m not going to leave my wife, but I am really not interested in a one-night stand. I really want a girlfriend who I can connect with. I want to text every day. I don’t want you seeing a whole bunch of other people.’
They really wanted a relationship,” she says. “All of them.”
And you can believe what men with double lives on the internet tell you anonymously. This is solid science!
When Nelson was a “man”, “all the messages I was getting from women were all lingerie photos, boob shots, and they all said, ‘Look, I don’t want to hear your problems. Don’t tell me about your day. I just want to have hot, Fifty Shades of Grey sex while my kids are at school.’ Women are tired. They want to escape. Whereas the men, they’ve already got a relationship, and they want a second one.”
Has it occurred to Tammy Nelson that you bait your hook differently for different kinds of fish?
It’s a generalisation, Nelson says, but the men who are cheating often do so because they “feel emotionally abandoned. Their wife or partner is overwhelmed by the responsibilities of being a woman. He wants to be her first priority, and when he can’t be, he finds someone else. Whereas the woman just wants to have sex and enjoy herself because she’s already taking care of everyone else.”
Dolphin flipper pancakes! Hapsburg dynasty car wash and balderdash finds someone else. Because rock salt.
The UBT has expired.
There’s more, but the UBT can’t face it right now.
I hope you unapologetically follow up in sections when you (and the UBT) can stomach it. Extreme levels of toxic bullshit like this really deserve a complete and multi-installation takedown.
The Ashley Madison consultant (?!) has a book called “Open Monogamy.”
That’s the thing — to justify this garbage, one has to use double-speak and twist language around so that words have no meaning whatsoever. Monogamy is, by definition, a closed relationship. If you have to use double-speak (i.e., LIE), then that’s a clue that it’s not honest.
Anyway, yes, equality does not mean “let us all join together in brutalizing other people.”
She had another one awhile back “The New Monogamy” (spoiler, it’s non-monogamy.) I criticized it back in the day. As I recall she got her PhD from a diploma mill in Orlando FL, but I can’t seem to find her credentials online any more. Maybe someone can go down that rabbit hole. Anyway, she’s a nitwit and lists Esther Perel as a reference on her CV.
I put a toe into the rabbit hole and searched the California Department of Consumer Affairs’ database for professional licenses which includes nurses, manicurists, and other licenses. The only therapist named Tammy Nelson is PIORKOWSKI, TAMMY NELSON License Number: 11490 License Type: Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor License Status: License Renewed & Current Expiration Date: April 30, 2026
At the Amer Assoc of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists’s search list, she is listed in California as Los Angeles-based Tammy Nelson,, PhD, Sex Therapist, Supervisor of Sex Therapy, AASECT Certified, Supervisor, Certified AASECT Organizational Provider, and AASECT Certified Sex Therapist Therapist.
Years ago I did deep searches of several “experts” and found decidedly inexpert and dubious credentials from diploma mills and discredited schools. If there’s a way to search my old comments, that info may come up. I don’t recall who was using those dubious credentials.
Thanks for the deep dive.
https://www.chumplady.com/a-new-monogamy/
Out of a survey of 254 men AND women, one woman said she wanted extra help with her kids, several said they were bored, and “many” said they were seeking revenge. What kind of data and study is this? The sample seems too small to make any decent conclusions. I suspect that the participants from “across the globe” were likely to be from a few, perhaps limited to the “researchers'” home countries or vacation spots. And how did they find participants?
Nelson claims that men stating that they want someone they can text daily and who isn’t seeing a bunch of other people is proof that they want a relationship. That sounds more like they want their sidepieces to provide the monogamy and adulation they demand from their wife appliances, but aren’t willing to provide themselves. They may want to text often for the excitement and the thrill of duper’s delight, and possibly to keep their hookups on the hook solely for them.
Nelson’s claim that “Women are wired for sexual variety, novelty and adventure,” left me wondering about her choice of words. What if she stated it as “Women are wired for novelty, adventure and sexual variety?” Novelty and adventure are not necessarily sexual. Regardless, there can be novelty, variety and adventure within a committed relationship. Sexual variety could refer simply to different positions, oral sex, etc.
Without reading if there was a counterpoint, it could be that the author simply cherry-picked quotes to support the desired conclusion.
The author may even have fabricated sources. I assume that the asterisks after Zara’s and Mateo’s names means the author used a pseudonym for them. If Zara felt no guilt, why didn’t she use her real name, and if she wasn’t willing, why didn’t the author find a source who was willing to go public? I notice there was no asterisk after Joshua’s name–the partner who was the unknowing victim of cheating.
This seems more like an essay than an article.
My pet peeve came up repeatedly in this article. I hate when people paraphrase someone else’s paraphrase of a study.
Paraphrasing a study with accurate citations is needed.
Writing a paraphrase of a pop psych author’s paraphrase of a study for a women’s interest magazine is lazy as heck.
A few times I’ve read my way backwards down the chain (article –> book –> peer reviewed study) and found that the article has the study’s findings backwards because the article author really misunderstood the book’s paraphrase.
Or the book author missed the fact that the study’s design was obviously flawed, underpowered and/or studying a clearly stated subset not widely applicable – and the article author didn’t read the original or couldn’t understand it.
One of my grad professors made us read a study and follow the citations backwards to the original article. You could see where “researchers” went astray by paraphrasing findings that were then misinterpreted.
It was eye opening, because the common beliefs about the study were wrong, due to repetitions of misinterpretations.
I’m not sure any more who it was, but I believe it was Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, who wrote about geese imprinting on humans.
I think Zara is probably a real person, she reads like a narcissistic sociopath to me. Her admission of no remorse is chilling. The author probably would have made Zara more sympathetic if fabricating the profile.
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Or…maybe just maybe these men figured out how to say what they think women want?
Seriously? Reviewing a bunch of dating profiles (on a website specifically for liars!) and assuming that everyone is being honest? Using that information to come to some conclusion about what people are looking for in a relationship? Are you kidding me?
Hey, I’m a woman who was cheated on by a woman (with another woman!). I can’t tell you why all or most women cheat, but I can tell you that in the case of my ex, it was definitely about her ego and selfishness. In her own words, she felt neglected after both my parents died, she didn’t like that I wasn’t as emotionally available for her needs and she found it “difficult” that I had my own emotional needs, for the first time in our relationship, apparently.
So my situation, despite not involving a man at all, followed a very similar pattern to straight relationships. My ex said all the same garbage that many cheaters say. And she found someone easy and available who fed her stupid ego.
I guess my point really is that I don’t know about a huge gender gap in “reasons for cheating”. I think they’re all just selfish turds.
Maybe instead of constantly studying why people cheat, we should be looking at why so many other people who ALSO feel neglected in their relationships don’t go out and cheat.
I agree this stinks of junk science. It seems pretty obvious because the lead author, Macken Murphy, is a thirty-something whitey-white tattooed hipster gym rat dude with only an undergrad degree in bio anthropology who elsewhere deigns to mansplain what women want. https://www.teachusconsent.com/newsletter/why-a-specific-type-of-sexism-attracts-women
I find it a bit surprising that Teach Us Consent, the organization founded by Australian sexual consent advocate Chanel Contos, would host this kind of quasi victim-blaming blather by someone so poorly qualified. But then I looked up the organization’s corporate sponsors (hookup app Tinder, condom and sex toy maker Lifestyles, and a software maker beset by a sexual misconduct scandal) and it suggests that Contos might have cashed in and sold out a bit. Or she might just lack life experience (she’s only about 27) and/or have a muddled agenda to promote particular culty sex pozzy ideologies like the utopian belief that monogamy is an artificial social construct at the root of all human violence without which humans would act like peacenic-y bonobos and life would be lollipops and rainbows 4ever…
Never mind if one glance at the history of human and ape violence(not to mention carbon dating) makes it clear humans are more closely related to regular rapey, warring chimps than kinder-gentler bonobos and, because of this, maybe shouldn’t be seeking to “return” to our true primal nature but instead keep trying to overcome some of the shittier aspects of it (like cannibalism, infanticide etc.). It still seems a lot of younger millennials buy into the new “Noble Savage” view of human nature (which worked out so well in the Jacobin Reign of Terror).
Great point, why should we trust the self-reported motives of people on the liar website!
Exactly. You’re making my point. It’s about entitlement. Any human FW can feel entitled.
Totally. These articles saying oh it’s really about neglect or a fantasy or boredom or whatever whatever whatever….no, really it’s just about entitlement, selfishness, and often, narcissism.
They just suck and are devoid of character; the whole article is full of victim blaming, the men and husbands all sucked.
The article has a weird vibe to it. It reminds me of feminist articles in the 70’s where they took an article about men and substituted female pronouns just to show how ridiculous it was to stereotype. This article has that same sort of feeling about it. They took an older article about why men cheated (“wired for sexual adventure, novelty, and adventure”) and why women cheat (“a place of insecurity or a lack of attention or praise from their primary partner) and swapped men (this article says men cheat for lack of attention) for women (And now women cheat for adventure). It seems like if I had proper research tools that I could find the older essay.
I don’t think I’ve explained it very well and in the arena of cheating, it doesn’t matter why.
Lead author of the “study” is a tattooed white dude with only an undergrad degree who elsewhere opines that women are their own worst enemies because we’re attracted to men who express so-called “positive sexism” (chivalry, a view that women need protection, etc.) which, in his opinion, is even worse than outright violent misogyny.
Cause, like, when I want to understand the challenges of my life as a woman and mother, I always turn to childless blond gym rat hipster bros with upper middle class dental work a decade or more younger than me…
I also don’t have the tools to really rip into these arguments but me thinks there’s probably something wrong with the data and methods being used for this so-called “research.” I would love to hear the analysis of a genuine expert and someone versed in deconstructing the politics of backlash junk science.
I hate this trite unsourced “When men have affairs, it’s the stuff of locker-room talk and boys’ night bragging”
I am a 50-year-old man. I have lots of male friends. I have an all-male mountain-biking group, an all-male kayaking group and an all-male poker group. I dare say it’s hard to find any more stereotypically male environments than those. I have never heard anyone say anything positive about affairs, much less brag about them. The closest thing I’ve ever run across was my neighbor whose childhood friend had an affair and lost his marriage; my neighbor said his friend had always been impulsive and had repeatedly made bad choices, but he wasn’t going to cut him out of his life because they had known each other since elementary school. That is the most positive thing I have ever heard another man say about adultery.
All these people who say they’re surrounded by men promoting adultery are either lying, or unintentionally revealing some very unpleasant truths about the social circles they move in.
I guess maybe if your profession puts you in contact with infidelity day in and day out then you’re likely to run across lackadaisical attitude towards monogamy due to an obvious selection bias, but don’t go around putting that on the rest of my gender. It’s not healthy for other men – particularly young men – to hear “oh, all men think it’s OK” when that is most emphatically not the case.
Plus one from me – add these supposed (by the author of the magazine article) bastions of chauvinism; an all-male engineering workshop workplace, all-male industrial-history-hobby friends, all-male motorcycle clubs. I have never heard anyone *ever* boasting of infidelity; on casual acquaintance there might be occasional jokes about (not) getting (in-marriage) laid a lot (because anyone older in a long-term relationship knows that’s kind-of funny), and after a few years of being friends with people, one or two have opened up one-to-one about previous family / relationship disasters, always to share being appalled at someone else’s sketchy / abusive behaviour. I dare say there is the odd shallow bravado merchant, but I am certain they would get short shrift from all the blokes I know – and I know a lot.
It’s reportedly a clinical trait of abusers to avidly cherry pick information, collect “arguments by authority” (“Professor Helmut Von Douchebag says women can only be raped if they want to be raped…”), cultural “evidence” and “palliative comparisons” (“John Wayne hits women in his films and people loved John Wayne”) that normalizes their worst conduct in order to “neutralize” any sense of stigma or guilt. Part of that effort would probably be to fabricate a false sense that the majority of people “share” their views or engage in the same conduct and invest in the belief that anyone condemning the conduct must be a hypocrite.
In other words, if you listen to cheaters take on it, everyone cheats and anyone who judges it is a dork or hypocrite. But the most recent Gallup polls report that the vast majority of average people think infidelity is one of the worst things anyone can do.
Just commented to similar effect. Maybe I just have friends who aren’t sociopaths, but I suspect the men who are all about illicit sex are talking about it through feeling out the scene first, screening out the people who don’t want to hear their BS (i.e., most people). Like when I went with my girlfriend to someone’s house for dinner and their talk kept kinda subtly hinting around the idea of swinging, followed by those sizing-up looks people sometimes give. And we left as quickly as we politely could.
I think these dudes find their like-minded sorts in just that way. They don’t go around just talking about it, unless you help them open the door.
I worked in LA for several years and I’ve been in quite a few situations where swingers were throwing out hints to see who was game for group sex or partner swapping. Clearly they’d developed a fishing routine because, at least every once in a while, someone might bite.
But, the funny thing is that these were usually the most unfuckable specimens imaginable which is why I laughed myself sick when I saw Chris Fleming’s “Polyamorous”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTsdKycVZZ4
Evidence that normal people weren’t really into this kind of thing is the fact that most of the “fwee wuv” swingers I had the bad fortune of encountering (my former industry was full of pervs and freaks) kept large stashes of club drugs and other contraband to bait the hook. I had the feeling they were hoping to bag a few still-attractive people who’d very recently fallen into addiction but had not yet crossed the line into becoming crusty, toothless syphilitic sex workers to support their habits.
I would like to add my own perspective on this as a man.
I don’t know where all of this locker room talk is coming from.
The only time I have heard other men brag about and celebrate their affairs was in high school and college to equally toxic undifferentiated ego mass. That has really been it. For the record, I’m pretty sure that most of them did not amount to anything (and probably were not going to, but that is beside the point.) As I have been saying-this sort of behavior does not occur in a vacuum. I tried not to associate with those people.
You are correct-if you are surrounding yourself with people with garbage behavior perhaps it’s best to look inward. And realize that “Fix Your Picker” doesn’t just apply to mate choice.
As for my adult, professional life-every time that a male in my universe has confessed to adultery it was pretty roundly met with “dude, what the fuck is wrong with you? Fix your shit!” Because every time it blew up pretty spectacularly. There was at least one where it was a cautionary tale to the younger folk at dinner that night. “Dude, I fucked up.” I went home and hugged my now-ex a little harder after that more appreciative of what I had (SHE, on the other hand, must have been sweating bullets).
Then again, I tend to surround myself with decent people that do not look at other people as tools or expendable, and I guess I’ve been fortunate that most of the other men in my life do not view women (or other men) as sexual conquests, so there is that. I have not made a secret of having been betrayed-if male friends and colleagues of mine (that I wasn’t already aware of, see above) they have definitely picked their spots and not bragged. Hell, we’re in the information age now-it’s easier than ever to be exposed and part of somebody else’s deposition.
Thank you for your perspective. In my experience the ones that would be bragging in a bygone era now reach out one on one to FW to hang out in person. Secretly trade tactics or to smear the wives
I can say that the “I don’t know why this is so easy for me” trope immediately turned into DARVO blame-shifting tactics for my ex wife’s affair. It was like being shot in the heart and being told that I had pulled the trigger.
The reality that all of us know too well is that cheaters struggle with being the villain of their own stories. They will compartmentalize and justify no matter what. Even if they put in the work with a therapist, they might get to 80% acceptance of what they’ve done, but right as they are making progress, a switch will flip in order for them to feel like the victim and that they didn’t do anything wrong.
There are bad people in the world. There are broken people in the world. There are people who need help but don’t know it. There are people who will never accept help out of stubbornness. Then there are cheaters. These are people who live in their own universe with an endless life source of entitlement.
It was jarring the first time I dated someone who wasn’t driven by entitlement. I thought I had fallen in love after two dates. That’s how much my brain was starved for emotional availability, for unconditional attraction, for someone who was there for me. (Of course, that dating situation crashed out hard on my end, but it was a learning experience.)
There are people out there who don’t wake up in the morning seeking attention, validation and service from everyone around them. There are people who wake up looking for selfless, unconditional love that is predicated on loyalty and trust. My current relationship feels like I live on a different planet suddenly. This sort of respect and connection exists?
For that, I am grateful for my ex wife’s affair. I would have never known how much better a relationship can truly be.
“…right as they are making progress, a switch will flip in order for them to feel like the victim and that they didn’t do anything wrong.”
Yep. The problem with redemption is that most people who do offensive things can’t cross back over the jagged mountain of their own misdeeds and make amends in order to genuinely redeem themselves. It’s like doing something nasty condemns people to an eternity of denial and minimization which automatically forfeits any possibility of forming healthy intimate relationships.
You might almost feel sorry for how people like this paint themselves into a corner of perpetual alienation and existential loneliness… except for the fact that these types tend to viciously blame everyone around them for their alienated and unfulfilling existence.
Given that many FW are personality disordered liars surveying them is a terrible way to get any information much less insight.
Just look at the thousands of posts here regarding FW rewriting history and conducting smear campaigns against the Chump years before the discard.
“While men still constitute the vast majority, the female prison population
has been a growing concern and has increased faster than the male population globally. ”
YIPPY YAYEE WE ARE CATCHING UP!!!!!!!!!!
I know, progress right? Yay, women can be predators!
Except this spin is bullshit. Rates of female-perpetrated violent crimes didn’t increase even after the advent of feminism. I think the only female-perpetrated “crimes” that increased after the 70s were truancy and runaways but rates of genuinely violent crime committed by women haven’t budged.
True that some women can be scary predators and this has probably always been true since the dawn of time. But it doesn’t appear that feminism really increased rates of that kind of conduct.
As someone who works in one, I see the exact same horrible behaviours.
A lot of people reckon female prisoners are harder to manage- I tend to agree.
That’s so much incredible idiocy in one place!
My fave might be that women have “achieved” infidelity parity and “closed the affairs gap.” What a fantastic “achievement!”
As a man cheated on pretty dramatically by a woman, I really wonder about this assertion that “lack of attention or praise” causes men to cheat. Because if that was true, a lot of men, including me, should have been cheating for years (hint: I never cheated, at all, ever).
It’s like the culture at large simply can’t take on board the idea that a cheater didn’t cheat for an external reason. It just has to be someone else’s fault, or the fault of “wiring” that just can’t possibly be overcome by having a will. It’s kinda sad so many people apparently want to let go of guilt and become one of the fabulous people who cheat.
And yeah — men aren’t bragging about cheating. At least not in any context or locker room I’ve ever been in. Never heard that. Not even once.
its funny how this person took such a specific group of cheaters and thought they had done enough research – how many cheaters do not go on ashley madison? but my real point is thank you chumplady for reiterating that the real core – universal problem that defies gender, orientation, race, societal oppression – is Entitlement…..the style of cheating is irrelevant its the sense of entitlement that is universal. Making excuses for people because of their orientation or gender or economic background or whatever childhood problem? it just justifies their actions and hurts the victim more….
Having known a lot of clinical narcs and psychos in my former industry, I think that a sense of entitlement tends to be over-compensation for various horror show developmental experiences. But this realization doesn’t make me feel sorry for the people who do this. I might recognize that their way of living sucks and they’re probably walking abortions who never truly experience joy or trust or love. I might feel sorry for the damaged and betrayed children they once were. But stick a fork in these damaged and evil adults. They’re just dangerous and use other people’s empathy to fuel cruelty and abuse.
Is it just me, or does the Zara story seem made up? I think the author wanted an anecdote to support an article she was assigned to write about women and infidelity.
My ex’s AP was married when they started their affair. Why did she cheat? Before shutting off all communication with my ex, I heard that these were the AP’s rationales for cheating:
*reason 1: she, a nurse, “just fell in love” with her much-older boss, a wealthy physician. My ex argued the same. It all sounds so innocent and outside of their control. Doesn’t it? Cupid appeared and, poof, they were stabbed by love. But, as VH reminds us, “Love is a verb.” Interestingly enough, those two really seemed to think that everyone would buy into this narrative. When most family and friends did not, they felt unfairly punished.
*reason 2: my then-husband turned her on SO much,” [That my ex chose to give me details about this as a rationale is both laughable and abusive. Btw, he is the same guy who, in his 60s, believed that the 20-year-old lap dancer meant it when she told him he was handsome 🤣]
*reason 3:her own husband was “emotionally abusive.” [re: emotional abuse–Assuming my ex hasn’t changed, the AP-now-wife has gone from the frying pan into the fire; Also, I find it interesting that she felt it was ok to participate in emotionally abusing me by having a 3-year secret affair with my ex.
Anyway, it’s all blah, blah, blah…empty, pathetic justifications for poor character and an outsized sense of entitlement.
Another possibility: The author is “Zara.”
LOL
It sounds like BS to me too- not unusual for these fluffy magazines to make up a scenario that sounds ridiculous 😆
First, I don’t think the writer has ever been in a men’s locker room. I have. Played high school and college sports so I have seen a lot. And I’ll tell you, celebrating infidelity was never once something I saw. People’s perceptions seem to be shaped by “Any Given Sunday”. It’s really a lot more like “Ted Lasso”. And for what it’s worth, I’ve been part of a group of men who have confronted a team mate over his actions. There was no backslapping for his masculine prowess. There was a group directive that he come clean. I know, crazy right? We walk among you!
As to the cheating, I wish researchers would talk to us chumps, or talk to a control group of non-cheaters. I wish they would hear our stories about how we tried everything to keep our spouses not bored, or how mental health disease makes them prone to risk-taking and gaslighting which often results in cheating, or how we tried to have adult conversations about rekindling our sex lives only to have them go slink around the night, cover it up with flimsy lies, and then make us feel crazy and pathetic for addressing it.
Lastly, the writer has a failure of style by writing “Men cheat because…” or “women cheat because…”. It ought to be “Cheating men cheat because…”. and here’s why: saying it the first way assigns cheating behavior to an entire gender. And that makes the noncheaters, and especially the chumps, think “well gee maybe I don’t want to expose myself to that. I’ll just stay single.” Ask me how I know. Big picture, it’s extremely unhealthy for our society to not be able to have healthy dating and courting because these cheating skinwalkers actually do live among us, hunting their next prey.
(P.S. Tracy, is there something you can do about the frequency your site reloads? It wipes these long essays before I can finish. There were some good rants in the first draft!)
I entirely agree. Even if it’s common, I don’t think cheating is the norm as in “normal/healthy.”
Most woman cheaters I encountered in my life would have thrown any other woman under the bus at the first opportunity. For many of them, it is just another way of trying to “game the patriarchy” by goading men into the pick-me-dance.
Personally, I am glad (!) that women aren’t facing harsh (and one-sided) punishments for cheating anymore (or even the suspicion thereof). Doesn’t mean this is “empowered behavior” in any way, though.
I’m really glad people aren’t getting their hands cut off for theft anymore. But that’s not an invitation for anyone to steal from me or a bid to befriend thieves. Thieves can go fuck themselves… with both intact hands.
I’ve observed the same. FW first affair partner eons ago was an unattractive b****h who loved the male attention she got because of being in a nearly 100% male environment. No/few female friends. Similar to the older female FW I’ve known about in my older life. They’re never genuinely collaborative, kind to, or true friends with other women.
One of the reasons the workplace whistleblower reached out to me to inform me of FW’s office affair was because the AP hadn’t exactly earned herself any brownie points or loyalty among female colleagues. She apparently had a tendency to undermine younger and prettier women (which was almost everyone since she was a dumpy, pockmarked mutt) and also side with the perpetrators in sexual harassment standoffs.
Any psychotherapist who could be legitimately described as “wildly popular” has got to be a quack who tells people what they want to hear. The truth about human behaviour, particularly around cheating and other forms of abuse and chicanery, is unpalatable and therefore the one telling it is unlikely to be wildly popular. To me, wildly popular means you have a following in the millions. Even our own dear CL probably doesn’t have that, though she deserves to. She tells the truth, and the truth is never going to be that popular. Would that it could be, but people suck.
**The findings were interesting: many women rated their sidepiece as more physically attractive but less parentally attractive and with a worse personality than their primary partner**
How very interesting it is indeed that cheaters think their paramours are better looking than their mates. This is groundbreaking stuff!
Sure ladies, maybe the male stripper you fucked at your friend’s bachelorette is better looking than your fiance. And….? He’s also less “parentally attractive” because he isn’t supposed to parent with you, nor is he your daddy, dipshit. Oh, and let’s be real, you didn’t even notice his personality, just his schlong and his flattery, so it stands to reason you would rate it poorly.
**’It’s a generalisation, Nelson says, but the men who are cheating often do so because they “feel emotionally abandoned. Their wife or partner is overwhelmed by the responsibilities of being a woman. He wants to be her first priority, and when he can’t be, he finds someone else. Whereas the woman just wants to have sex and enjoy herself because she’s already taking care of everyone else.”**
Here’s an novel idea for the sad sacks out there who feel “abandoned”😭 because their wives are overwhelmed with responsibility, and I’ll bold this to make it harder for them to skip over it and continue to believe their moronic rationalizations have any merit;
DO YOUR SHARE AROUND THE HOUSE SO SHE WON’T BE OVERWHELMED. YOU AREN’T ENTITLED TO BE A LAZY, USELESS GIT AND CHEAT ON YOUR WIFE, USING THE LAUGHABLE EXCUSE THAT SHE’S BUSY DOING YOUR WORK FOR YOU. GROW UP YOU WHINY LITTLE BITCH. SHE IS NOT YOUR MOMMY.
So we can actually glean a kernel of truth from all this drivel. FWs, whether male or female, parentify their partners, then feel sorry for themselves because the partner isn’t exciting to them (surprise surprise) and use it as a rationalization for cheating. But we knew that.
Waaah emotionally abandoned, are they?
That’ll be the day.
Print out that bold type statement and plaster it on every billboard.
I remember I had a public speaking class as an undergrad where the prof thought it might be cute to give myself and somebody else opposing views on the same topic. And then let the “anti” person go first. They laid out a similar trail of inferential logic predicated on pseudoscience and lack of peer reviewed material to back their “conclusions.” They used a very similarly flimsy article from a regular periodical. Which when I read it turned out to be more of an opinion piece.
I went up for my speech the very next class session, gutted their entire argument based on that, and presented actual, peer reviewed information to the contrary. I also posited the cornerstone of behavior modification-the person committing any action still has free will and does what they do out of their choices-we simply do not talk too much about when people elect not to. Easy A.
I see things like this and I think we need to teach Research Methods in high school (along with political process, but I digress.) So thank you for your hard work thus far, UBT.
I’ll take it from here.
Coffee up Chumps and Chooms, let’s talk science!
So for review, you learn pretty quickly in ANY research coursework the following things:
1) For it to be generalizable to the entire population, you need to have an approximately equal control group. As our friend the UBT (and I hope your replacement parts do not come from China-the tariffs must be killer on finely tuned bullshit detectors right now!) points out, there was no mention of 254 non-cheating individuals in the same predicament.
2) Your research has to be peer reviewed. In other words, there is an editorial pass overseeing what you did, you have to make your findings and all of your data public, and it has be able to be reproduced.
3) Your research requires that you filter out “noise” and discuss shortcomings/oversights to the best of your ability. This “article” achieves neither.
And finally, by extension
4) You have to concede that you may have happened to have found an effect that you can only generalize to that specific population. Vis a vis, if your data collection is not scientifically collected from a website where the marketing says “You come here to do something wrong”, there is a higher than likely probability that people that are already being significantly dishonest in one part of their life are probably being dishonest here, too.
So for example, if only one respondent out of 254 cited something? Noise. Not generalizable. It’s an outlier (if possibly interesting data point.) 0.4% is not something you bring up if you’re trying to prove a point.
See, if the pitch/hypothesis of the article was “The emergence of polyamory as a means to address the increasing difficulties and complexities within the family system”, they may have actually had a point or a valid argument. Instead it was really “I did something wrong, I don’t feel bad about it, so here is some echo chamber confirmation bias “science” to back up my personality disorder.”
I found it fascinating that they were able to postulate (again, not seeing a lot of actual science here) that the affair partner was more physically but less parentally/caregiver-type attractive and desirable. That makes sense to me!
Apart from saying “this person had an unmet need” over and over (I can actually HEAR my research methods prof from my undergrad years from beyond time and space(nested parenthesis-pretty sure he’s still alive?) shaking his finger and saying “oh, and Jeff, did you notice that none of the respondents actually admitted to having an affair? Wouldn’t it be more valid to say “people interested in having affairs are more likely to believe these things?” I mean, the whole argument here already doesn’t play in Boise scientifically…think I just excavated some more terrain in their argument here…sorry!)
(carriage return-sorry, I’m on a roll) what new information is there? That a woman’s life is hard and that popular research tends to be male-centric? We already knew that. That people cheat because they are biologically wired to? I don’t see a bibliography, a link, or a name drop. I DO see Ester Perel’s name dropped here, so that tells me the writer understands how references work.
Again, presuming that the information presented here to be true, I am seeing far more support for “ethical polyamory as an answer to the complexities of modern life” than “cheating is OK.” There is no “family and societal systems have changed relative to how we were socialized.” There is no “due to the increase of resource strain correlated with the rise of cost of living it is more difficult than ever to meet the needs of family let alone the needs of oneself”. There is no “Run your life like a corporation-a different person for a different role and everybody wins”. Or being Love’s Executioner here, “Life is hard and rather than coping prosocially or adjusting their expectations to align with what is ethical and realistic, people with unmet needs are more likely to turn their attention inward and in turn end up victimizing other people.”
Having described my objections to their methodology above and compartmentalizing my lived experience as a victim of infidelity, I hereby reject this individual’s article. No causal link is satisfactorily demonstrated (to wit-while the emotional stab of “women commit infidelity in places where it is punishable by death” has a nice sting to it but we can also infer that about other morally and ethically wrong behaviors) and the literature review and research methodology is questionable at best. The writer fails their attempt to construct a logical argument with their actual hypothesis of “what I did was actually ok.”
I agree-we need more scientific research on this! Along with a hard scientific look on trauma informed care associated with the people that this victimizes. Might help at least 254 people think twice about what they were planning to do as they winked and nodded at it as they drove past “it must not be wrong or bad if I don’t feel bad about it/it isn’t illegal.”
On the bright side, if anybody ever decides to tackle this from a genuine research perspective they are able to use that in their literature review (if nothing else, “holy cats look at all of those holes!” Pause.) I’d be happy to read what they discover-I am going to go out on a limb here and say the Discussion section will be riddled with “needs further research” and, you guessed it, “it is difficult to ascertain how valid the information gathered here can be utilized given the possible if likely dishonesty of respondents in the Experimental group”. I would imagine that part of the survey response process would have to involve both evaluation for mental health/personality disorder as well as some internal check and balance for dishonesty.
And I very much doubt you are getting a good amount of longitudinal data so it would have to be “one and done” with your data gathering here-something tells me you are going to get significant drop off on data gathering across multiple surveys…can’t quite put my finger on it. Have fun getting any of that past an IRB, let alone gathering enough research participants to do the actual math. It’s sort of like legalizing prostitution-we’re probably a couple of more generations away from any of that being realistic.
(Insert “empathy lacking” and sarcastic commentary here about society slanting into victim blaming pro-gratification/anti-science).
Feliz Jueves!
Great analysis.
Applause for “I did something wrong, I don’t feel bad about it, so here is some echo chamber confirmation bias “science” to back up my personality disorder.”
And I also barf at the idea that women committing adultery in places where this is punishable by death is somehow an act of honorable resistance. Yes, on the one hand the punishment exceeds the crime by miles but the same cultures that punish adultery with death also punish infanticide with death. Does this make baby killers renegade heroes?
Great post!
Whether they’re an xx or an xy flavoured FW is irrelevant.
The commonality is entitlement, delusional chutzpah and being hard wired to be a massive arsehole.
The arsehole gene- it’s worth a decent funded study.
Reminds me of one of my professors’ comebacks: “Were you born an asshole or did you go to school for it?”
For the record, after half a century of genetic testing and more than a century of eugenic speculation, science is no closer to proving that genes code for criminal or unethical behavior. Because they don’t– at least not measurably more or less than anyone else in the same species.
Agreed!
When I see rhetorical question like, “Why do (X) people cheat?” My first response is always, “because they’re selfish assholes”. Anything else is flourishes.
Anyone can cheat on their partner if they want to, period. It happens. Many others do not, even those who travel a lot or who are working apart from their partners for a time.
I don’t know how publishers can justify these inane articles, but they do.
Not that I’m an expert, but my understanding is that a very substantial proportion of women on Ashley Madison are prostitutes. So I’m not so sure this unscientific survey is particularly reliable — maybe all the lingerie photos and boob shots are business promotion.
Here’s what Google’s AI tells me:
“Reliable public data does not exist to determine the percentage of women on Ashley Madison who are sex workers. Analysis of the 2015 data breach revealed that the vast majority of female accounts were fake bots, not real users. However, some reports from that time period suggest that among the few real female accounts, many were sex workers.”
Wow, wow, wow, this subject is my favorite chew toy ever though I’m up to my neck in yard work and will have to save my big spiel for a bit later. But I simply could not leave this first glaring bit alone: Wednesday Martin, one of the “”researchers” they quote, seems to be not only a shill but someone who passed off so much fabricated spin as fact in her memoir that the publisher had to add a disclaimer to her book: https://nypost.com/2015/06/07/upper-east-side-housewifes-tell-all-book-is-full-of-lies/
If the researchers happen to read this blog, here are some counter experiences for them:
-My husband didn’t cheat for attention, praise or from insecurity. He’s very secure – living a double life for 25 years gives you major balls. Also, it was one of my full time occupations to heap praise and attention onto him because, well, he needed it so much that I was constantly fawning over him and how amazing he was so he could function. He was certainly not lacking praise at home.
-He didn’t want another relationship. He wanted a variety of holes and some compliant women who would perform his dark sex acts with him. And I mean dark – I don’t want to blow up the internet by describing it. Suffice to say it was awful and he pretty much had to pay a lot for it until a very damaged woman came along who let him do whatever he wanted with her body. So now they’re shacked up as a couple (how charming).
-As for me, he wanted to stay married so that I could be the loyal toaster who cooked, cleaned, parented and made money. And super gross-we still had sex all that time, so NO – I wasn’t holding out. If anything, I was sexually bored, unloved, lacking attention, etc.
Thank you, Tracy, for constantly changing the narrative and for firing up the UBT when stupid articles like this get thrown in our collective faces.
Were you living my life, FKA? It’s pretty much 100% a description of my marriage, other than the sex with wife part.
Read this blog long enough and you’ll see it’s actually the Chump that’s starving for attention, kindness, intimacy and love while being gaslighted and betrayed by serial cheaters. The FW twist everything to look like victims and so many dumb people buy it.
Tracy, I love that you used the word “dreck“; I haven’t heard it since my Yiddish speaking Bubbie uttered it during my childhood!
Dear God, that reads like some of the crap my ex was spouting and being told by her therapist before she took off to be happy as the pass around girl for her cousin and his friends.
How the hell does one purchase and read a book called “When You’re The One Who Cheats” without your spouse noticing? You can’t leave it lying around, or put it in the trunk of your car, or buy it on your Amazon account. You would basically have to buy it in cash and read it in your hotel room while away on a business trip, then throw it away. And if you’re a cheater and you’re on a spouse free business trip, I bet you don’t have time to read.