CNN recently published an article titled 'The changing reasons why women cheat on their husbands'. The article claims wives cheat as a way to stay in their marriage.
Its author, Kim Brooks, writes:
"I began to wonder how many of my friends were actually faithful to their husbands. From a distance, they seemed happy enough, or at least content. Then one day, one of them confided in me she'd been having two overlapping affairs over the course of five years."This wife was not only cheating on her husband but also her boyfriend too. Yep - definitely a reliable, high quality women (said sarcastically).
Brooks continued:
"Almost before I'd finished processing this, another friend told me she was 100 percent faithful to her husband, except when she was out of town for work each month."
"What surprised me most about these conversations was not that my friends were cheating, but that many of them were so nonchalant in the way they described their extramarital adventures. "
"Often, they loved their husbands, but felt in some fundamental way that their needs (sexual, emotional, psychological) were not being met inside the marriage. Some even wondered if their husbands knew about their infidelity, choosing to look away."The journalist is claiming when a married woman cheats, it’s her husband’s fault. He failed in some manner. The married woman, a grown adult, is not responsible for her actions.
The journalist then states:
"The fact is," one of these friends told me, "I'm nicer to my husband when I have something special going on that's just for me." She found that she was kinder, more patient, less resentful, "less of a bitch."This seems like narcissistic reasoning from a self-centered wife.
Brooks goes on:
"It occurred to me as I listened that these women were describing infidelity not as a transgression but a creative or even subversive act, a protest against an institution they'd come to experience as suffocating or oppressive. In an earlier generation, this might have taken the form of separation or divorce, but now, it seemed, more and more women were unwilling to abandon the marriages and families they'd built over years or decades. They were also unwilling to bear the stigma of a publicly open marriage or to go through the effort of negotiating such a complex arrangement. "
"These women were turning to infidelity not as a way to explode a marriage, but as a way to stay in it. Whereas conventional narratives of female infidelity so often posit the unfaithful woman as a passive party, the women I talked to seemed in control of their own transgressions. There seemed to be something new about this approach."In otherwords, the unfaithful wives wanted to remain married. However they did not want an open marriage because that would require equality & respect for their husband. Rather, the wives wanted a marriage where they could abuse and mistreat their husband. They wanted to cheat while still demanding he remain faithful. It’s called exploitation. There is nothing new about it.
The CNN article then references a book titled 'In The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women's Infidelity' by Alicia Walker.
"sociologist Alicia Walker elaborates on the concept of female infidelity as a subversion of traditional gender roles."
"Many of the women Walker interviewed were in marriages that were functional. Like the women I knew who cheated, many of the interviewees said they liked their husbands well enough. They had property together. They had friendships together. They had children that they were working together to raise.
"But at the same time, they found married life incredibly dull and constraining and resented the fact that as women, they felt they consistently did a disproportionate amount of the invisible labor that went into maintaining their lifestyle."Walker calculates 'a disproportionate amount of labor' only from the wife's perspective. A husband's perspective is deemed irrelevant. Walker also claims a married woman’s infidelity is her husband's fault. He did not meet his wife's demands or failed in some other manner. Walker describes infidelity as a 'secret defiance of the expectations of marriage'. However, her sexist description only applies when the wife cheats. It is not applicable for cheating husbands.
CNN's article concludes:
"I think there's an incredible amount of deep resentment for women in America about divisions of labor," said sociologist Lisa Wade. "We now tell women that they can have it all, that they can work and have a family and deserve to be sexually satisfied. And then when having it all is miserable and overwhelming or they realize marriage isn't all it's cracked it up to be, maybe having affairs is the new plan B."
[Kim Brooks concluded] "Maybe these women were on to something -- valuing their marriages for the things it could offer and outsourcing the rest, accepting the distance between the idealization and the actual thing, seeing marriage clearly for what it is and not what we're all told and promised it will be.CNN is promoting the exploitation of husbands. Their article advocates fraud, lies and mistreatment toward married men. Neither CNN, nor Brooks, nor Walker, nor Wade find it acceptable for husbands to 'value their marriages for the things it could offer and outsource the rest'. Outsourcing is strictly for wives. Additionally, a cheating double standard is being advocated. Husbands are blamed for their wives cheating. Married women are not held accountable for their actions. Yet, CNN previously published an article titled "Husbands of female breadwinners most at risk for cheating, says study".
Nowhere in that article was a husband's cheating blamed on his wife.
It should be no surprise many younger men are not interested in becoming husbands. During the past three decades, the American marriage rate has been falling and has recently reached a historic low. Bloomberg News reports the rate is forecasted to continue falling (see chart below).
Why should men get married when a national news organization is advocating the exploitation of husbands? Why should men become husbands when a major network is promoting a cheating double standard? Why should American men get married when paternity fraud remains legal in most states? CNN's nationwide promotion of abuse is an example of why men increasingly remain single.
