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How does it happen, Lisa Belkin asks, that we have no good terms to designate a married woman’s lover?
Married men have mistresses, concubines, favorites and
courtesans.
Why is there no equivalent for a man who is shagging a
married woman?
Normally, one would respond that such terms do exist. We
call such men gigolos, lovers or boy-toys.
Aside from the fact that these terms are derogatory, they are not, Belkin intuits, strictly equivalent to their
female counterparts.
She does not put it this way, but mistress is a
semi-official, semi-public title, even a form of honorific. In fact, a married
woman’s honorific, Mrs., is an abbreviation for Mistress.
As we saw in the Petraeus-Broadwell affair, an alpha male’s mistress
gains prestige and status. Paula Broadwell provoked the current crisis by guarding her position as No. 1 concubine
jealously.
By comparison, a gigolo is a hired lover, not someone with
whom a woman wants to be identified publicly. A boy-toy is, by definition, a plaything.
The term lover does not specify the fact that the woman is married.
Unfortunately, Belkin undermines her own analysis by whining
about the injustice of it all. She seems to believe that the absence of a term
like "mastress" signifies a flaw in our culture.
In her words:
Given
that one can not be a mistress without a... someone... what does it say about
our culture that we haven't given that role a name?
Unless Belkin is prepared to show that all or a large number
of other cultures do have terms for a married woman’s lover she is indulging in
sloppy thinking.
Language usage is arguably the freest of free markets. It is
extremely difficult for tyrants to change the way people use language. Surely
they have tried, but if language is normally used in a specific way there is probably a
good reason for it.
To chalk it up to a conspiracy or to pretend that married
women are being repressed because there is no term for their lovers bespeaks a
failure to understand the issues.
For all Belkin knows, conferring a semi-honorific title on a
married woman’s lover would make it more difficult for the woman to cheat.
I do understand that an incipient cultural tyranny like feminism
has been warring against kinds of language usage that it has deemed
offensive, and that its adepts have been trying, and often succeeding, to force
people to use words in a way that they find comforting. In my view, the free
market will out.
The most obvious reason why there is no semi-honorific
for a woman’s lover is that women who possess a modicum of wisdom prefer not to
advertise the fact that they have lovers.
Going public or even semi-public would compromise their
access to sexual pleasure, for reasons that have everything to do with human
nature and nothing to do with the vast right wing conspiracy.
First, consider the humiliation factor. If a man’s wife is
known to be cheating he instantly acquires the title of cuckold, along with the horns
that denote his lowered status.
Some men know in their hearts that their wives are cheating and choose to suffer in silence. If, however, the information becomes public knowledge they often feel obliged to take action.
I recognize that many so-called advanced thinkers dismiss
Darwin, but, for those who accept science, the difference is easily explained:
If a man has a wife and a mistress, when either woman bears
a child, the child’s paternity would not, in principle, be in question.
On the other hand, if a woman had two male lovers, and if
each one knew about the other, then her child’s paternity would always be in question.
This might lead to her being alone and her child being fatherless.
I am not saying that women have never cheated or that men have not been tricked into thinking that a child is their own when he or she is not. I am saying that once the fact becomes public knowledge, the situation will severely disfavor the woman.
Obviously, modern science has made removed some of the risk,
but the human genome has evolved over millennia. The existence of contraception
or paternity tests has not repealed human nature.
And then there is male pride. Since a married woman’s lover
is clearly not the man who is supporting her, protecting her or providing for
her, bearing a title that designates his failure to do so would deprive a man of his pride.
Few men are proud of being kept by a woman. Gigolos and
boy-toys know that their status is lower than that of a husband. Normally, they
do not want to advertise the fact.
If a man is supported financially by a woman that suggests
that he has not been successful competing against other men in the marketplace
or the arena.
If he is not proud of himself, then being publicly labeled
as a married woman’s lover, even in a semi-official way, might force him to
break off the relationship in order to save face.
5 comments:
Here I go again. This article just shows how idiotic feminist thinkers are. Is this stuff really bothering them so much? They act like Victorian women, fainting dead away at some imagined impropriety. They cannot live life without trying to clean out every impure thought that does not conform with their ideology. "Oh my, there is a difference between the sexes? How crude! Lets change the language and make it go away!"
I am rough on them after being overexposed to feminists when I was a teen, trying to navigate the post hippie era of the 70's.
I would like to think they don't matter but their influence is felt because of their insistence that the 'State" control people's thought and speech.
My first question is, "Why should I care?" It does not add anything of real value to my life. The best I can see is that this adds little of value for women's lives and does nothing to improve life for the culture as a whole. It is meaningless twaddle.
Kath,
It is the fact that today's feminists are the handmaidens of the state. They desire to control others lives will doing what they desire and having everyone else pay for it. Little do they extrapolate where all this power gathered by the state eventually leads. It makes slaves of them and the rest of us. As a great man once said, "A government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take it away." Power always wants more power and the control that comes with it. How cheaply they sell themselves and us by extension.
By the way, Darwin is alive and well. We are all experiments who have the choice of not accomplishing the basics of what it is to be human. The fittest will survive because they breed where others do not.
Catherine the Great, as I understand it, had many lovers. She could and did have her pick, and could easily dispose of them when she was tired of them.
Check out the movie, "Female".
If a woman has a man on the side--how does that work? Could be rich by inheritance, or have become CEO of a large company, and be in a "marriage of convenience".
Stuart, I fear this post of yours is unusually ahistorical. Until the advent of surefire contraception, or shortly before, (i.e., the 20th century), young, unmarried women of good family did not, as a rule, become sexually involved with older men, or anyone else. Virginity was the key to marriage, for reasons of status, sexual jealousy, and the paternity issue you raise. Did sex before marriage for women happen occasionally? Of course. But rarely. Too many people, including the young woman and her father, had too much at stake. We are speaking here of the upper classes, and the bourgeois.
So extramarital sex was the province of the married. French novels were particularly known for their depictions of these relationships. In traditional, religious societies, as a rule, married men cheated with married women. The word 'lover' sufficed perfectly well for the man's place in the relationship.
Of course married men also screwed the chambermaids, barmaids, local peasants or slaves, etc. Call it what you will == droit du seigneur, rape, whatever. No term needed for the male status. And the woman in such cases was neither a mistress nor a lover. She was a roll in hay, among the nicer epithets.
For the record, a "mistress" traditionally was an unmarried woman who was supported, set up in a home, etc by a marrried man. It was a relatively permanent relationship. While married women could cheat, they rarely had the control of money needed to set up their lovers.
In other matters, Belkin has clearly been promoted beyond her level of competence.
Actually, we agree, DL. I didn't go through the history because I have said a few things about it elsewhere and for this post I just wanted to look at the usage.
The key historical fact is that cultures that practiced arranged marriage often accepted extramarital relationships as semi-official-- like Venetian courtesan's the French King's favorites.
Once women gained a free choice, adultery became stigmatized and the relationship lost its semi-official status.
The only practice where married women had affairs with younger men was courtly love, beginning in southern europe in the early middle ages. These young men did not have any official status, and did not have any designation. They were called troubadours, if they were called anything.
Of course, the premise of the courtly love affair was that the couple never consummated it. So, officially, the man was an emotional lover but not a real one.
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