Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - Posts
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Tim: Last week you challenged us to reveal the reasons women cheat (or want to) in response to our posts about this Philip Weiss article. I'm late to the party. But first I wanted to second Ellen's no-nonsense answer: For the same reasons men do. Desire, selfishness, the thrill of novelty, love, boredom, a boost to the ego—the list goes on.
Second, though: You second Weiss in suggesting that the female sex drive is, in the aggregate, less "pronounced," as you put it. And you write that you hear stories about women who don't want to have sex with their partners, but "[y]ou don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex." But in fact, you do-at least, you do if you're a woman. I've heard this very complaint from female friends whose husbands/partners are too busy or stressed or distracted for sex. And according to some reports, like this one in Psychology Today, low male libido is reportedly on the rise, affecting some 20 percent to 25 percent of men. Meanwhile, several couples therapists—most notably Michele Weiner-Davis, author of The Sex-Starved Marriage—have suggested that male sexual apathy can powerfully affect marriages and long-term relationships. On a Yahoo Answers thread about low male libido, you'll see a post from a woman bemoaning that her male partner would rather "snuggle" and "bond" than have sex.
Now, low male libido probably has cultural and environmental causes. (Anti-depressants, estrogens, etc.) And so yeah, there may be real underlying differences in male and female sex drives in the aggregate, as you argue. But I think most women who've spent much time talking openly to other women would say that the desire for sexual novelty within a long-term relationship hardly seems to be the exclusive province of the Y chromosome. On second thought, though, maybe it's better for everyone if men still think it is.
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About Clinton I have nothing to say. But I do want to give a shout out to my girl, Marjorie and say this: I've got your back! Anyone brave enough to write about the fallout from the gender wars for Newsweek, that magazine of Middle America, is going to need it. I mean, even conservative poster girl Condi Rice gets the smack-down when she dares to discuss the reality of race in America. (Thanks to The Root's Jimi Izrael for pointing me to this gem!) But don't worry, Marjorie. I'm pretty sure I can take Lou Dobbs if he comes sniffing for trouble. He looks a little soft around both the middle and the head.
On a different and more interesting note, I've been wondering around the meaning of this report by a nonprofit adoption-advocacy group that concluded that a decade of de-emphasizing race in adoptions might not have been such a win-win idea. The report examines the impact of the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994, and finds that although there has been a small increase (17 percent to 20 percent) in transracial adoptions since the law went into effect, many of these children end up struggling with being "different" and face major challenges in their quest to develop strong identities. Meanwhile their well-intentioned parents have not been prepared by social workers for the racial and cultural challenges they are likely to face because the social workers fear violating the law.
Having covered the foster care system for the New York Times, I can tell you this much: It sucks. No child should be left to linger there one minute longer than absolutely necessary. Yet even with the law, African-American children are still disproportionally represented in foster care and remain there longer than children of other ethnicities. It seems to make only common sense not to discourage any qualified and loving family who wants to adopt a child from doing so. The problem is that, once again, we can't seem to find a middle ground on these issues. Either we insist on only matching like to like, and children suffer. Or we shove these families together, then close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears and shout, "Love is colorblind! Love is colorblind! Love is colorblind!" until whoever is saying something we don't want to hear gives up and goes away.
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Not to beat a not-quite-yet dead horse but I agree with Emily and Melinda about Hillary Clinton's assassination comments. Clinton knew exactly what she was saying. That's why she repeated the comments after having already made the same point to Time magazine in March. How can she say her comments were prompted in part by Kennedy's cancer diagnosis when she had already said the same thing a few months ago when there was no talk of Kennedy having cancer? Perhaps the fact that her original comments did not get wide notice explains why she wanted to re-telegraph those sentiments to a wider audience. She seems too smart and calculating to be making so many subtle and not-so-subtle racially tinged remarks by mistake. Does anyone believe that it's not more effective to send these signals out and then say, "Oops. So sorry. Never mind," than it is to not say them at all? Once she has sown doubts, raised fears, and planted ideas in the minds of people who have racial fears and animosities, she has effectively turned those people against her opponent. In Obama's case, the threat of assassination has real resonance in the black community.
On another front, the racial overtones of some of Clinton's comments overall are further eroding relations between black women who support Obama and white women who support her. The extent to which these two groups will now see themselves as having shared political agendas is highly in doubt. Judging by the strong reactions of diehard Clinton and Obama supporters to a piece I wrote on this subject in Newsweek this week, it will be a very long time before we see strong black/white feminist coalitions being formed. My feeling is that by criticizing black women's support for a black male candidate over a white female candidate, white Clinton supporters are ignoring the duality of black women's identity and alienating them by expecting them to choose between their gender and their race. This is a luxury that black women just don't have.
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