"Monogamy is failing men." At least, that's the judgment of the Huffington Post's Vicki Larson, who opened her Jan. 4 piece "Why Men Need to Cheat [1]" with that exact phrase.
Larson's article attacks "monogamy's stranglehold over our beliefs" and declares that "cheating however, serves men well." Her jump-off point is a book of sociology by Eric Anderson [2], whom she introduces as an "American sociologist at England's University of Winchester and author of the provocative new book, The Monogamy Gap: Men, Love, and the Reality of Cheating."
What Larson does not include in her bio of Anderson is that Anderson's field of specialization is largely homosexual in nature. Anderson's University of Winchester bio [2] declares that he "is an American sociologist known for his research on sport, masculinities, sexualities and homophobia. He shows an increasingly positive relationship between gay male athletes and sport, as well as a growing movement of young heterosexual men's masculinity becoming softer and more inclusive. Professor Anderson also researches matters related to men's monogamy, men's improving recognition of bisexuality, and the increased acceptance of young heterosexual men kissing."
So naturally, the Huffington Post turned to a professor of homosexuality and opponent of traditional marriage to discuss how unreasonable monogamy is.
And attack monogamy Anderson did with a vengeance, declaring in Larson's article that "Infidelity does not break marriages up; it is the unreasonable expectation that a marriage must restrict sex that breaks a marriage up" and that "Women also cheat; they also lie about it; and they also want to be able to cheat without their partners doing the same. Monogamy is a problem for all sexes; it builds in an ownership script regardless of gender."
Anderson performed a study to test his conclusions. His study featured 120 undergraduate men, both straight and gay. (No word from Larson on how many were straight, and how many were gay.) His analysis declared that "78 percent of those who had a partner cheated, even though they said that they loved and intender to stay with their partner."
Leaving aside the question of the small sample size, undergraduates in a college setting are hardly the best judges of whether fidelity is possible or not. And it's difficult to not to question whether a homosexual professor with a vested interest in proving monogamy's impossibility might have stacked the sample group so as to obtain his desired result.
But such questions did not seem to occur to Larson (she did mention the small sample size) in her interview with Anderson. Instead, she let him rail against monogamy.
The media war on monogamous marriage (of the heterosexual variety; the media seem to have no problem with homosexual marriage [3]) has intensified lately. Both NBC [4] and CBS [5] did segments in Oct 2011 questioning whether traditional marriage was coming to an end. ABC News did a segment [6] on Jan. 4, 2012, celebrating the lifestyle of a polyandrous (one woman, multiple male partners) family. Anderson's argument was made earlier made by a June 30, 2011 piece [7] by Mark Oppenhemier in the New York Times Magazine, which liberally quoted gay sex columnist and internet bully Dan Savage.
But the Huffington Post seems to have taken a special interest in attacking the institution of marriage. The Huffington Post infamously created [7] a Divorce [8] section for its website before adding the marriage section, with the tagline "Marriages Come and Go, But Divorce Is Forever."
Larson herself is no stranger to attacking the institution of marriage. She wrote an article [9] on Dec 20, 2011, examining the legal implications of marriage to and divorce from sexbots. In a Dec 28 post [10] on her blog, OMG Chronicles [10], Larson declares that "one kind of forced reinvention - divorce - generally seems to be a positive thing, especially if you're a woman [11]. Divorce is when most of us redo our look, tweak our attitudes and beliefs, examine our own baggage, embrace new challenges, revisit long-shelved passions and rediscover long-lost sexual passions."
The constant attacks on marriage as a "morality cage," [5] as "the nation's top dating coach" Matt Titus [12] argued on CBS's Early Show on Oct 12, 2011, are part of an attempt by the mainstream media to attack traditional marriage out of existence. Larson's argument that men are slaves to sexual urges unnaturally restrained by monogamy is merely the latest shot in the media war against marriage.