Friday, October 9, 2015

"Rotating Polyandry—and its Enforcers"

"She is unruly and defiant, her feet never stay at home" - Proverbs 7:11

"This is the way of an adulterous woman: She eats and wipes her mouth and says, 'I've done nothing wrong.'" - Proverbs 30:20

This is a very long article, closer to being a book, actually. But believe me, it's worth reading.

It's from the site Don't Marry.

I'm only posting part of it here. Follow the above link or the one at the end to read the whole thing.

By the way, men are the truly romantic sex, the morons.


Reviewed by F. Roger Devlin

Michelle Langley’s Women’s Infidelity is probably the first book ever reviewed in The Occidental Quarterly advertised as “shipped in a plain envelope without any mention of the contents on the package.” But even if you are not an adulterous wife yourself, there are good reasons for paying attention to Langley’s documentation of social dissolution. An advanced civilization requires high-investment parenting to maintain itself. The greatest threat to proper parenting in our time is divorce, overwhelmingly initiated by the wife (70-75 percent of the time, according to Langley). Her book’s central thesis is an unpopular one previously set forth in this journal by the present reviewer: women are no more “naturally” monogamous than men.

Biochemical research points to a natural four-year sexual cycle for the human female. This apparently allows enough time after childbirth for the average mother in a state of savagery to regain her ability to survive without male provisioning. In the absence of any system of marriage, a woman’s natural tendency is to “liberate” herself from her mate after that point. When her hormones prompt her to reproduce again, she simply takes a new mate.

Langley cites Helen Fisher’s Anatomy of Love and Burnham and Phelan’s Mean Genes in support of this account. According to the latter, separation and divorce are most likely to occur in the fourth year of marriage “across more than sixty radically different cultures.”

Feral female sexual behavior is governed by a number of chemicals. The euphoria of infatuation is associated with the stimulant pheylethylamine, naturally produced in the body by erotic attraction. As with other drugs, it is addictive, and people gradually build up a tolerance to it, requiring evergreater levels to achieve the same effect. Over time, it loses its power over us, and infatuation is replaced by a calm feeling of attachment to our mates. There are neurochemical factors at work here as well. But the feeling of attachment or bondedness is akin to the effect of a sedative or narcotic rather than a stimulant.

Next there are hormones to consider. The sex drive, in both men and women, is linked to testosterone levels. These are, of course, always higher in men; but the difference is greatest in early adulthood when people have traditionally taken their mates. As men age, their testosterone levels gradually decrease; women’s levels rise. Going into their thirties, women get hairier, their voices deepen, and they behave more assertively. And, in the author’s words, “it’s also quite common for them to experience a dramatic increase in their desire for other men.” (Langley cites Theresa Crenshaw’s The Alchemy of Love and Lust and Michael Liebowitz’s The Chemistry of Love on these matters.) The author is not a professional researcher in any of these fields herself.

She relates that, after four years of happy marriage and shortly after her 27th birthday, she began to feel bored and unhappy for no apparent reason. She turned to a number of books and professionals, all of whom agreed that the fault lay with her husband; she adopted this now conventional view for a time herself. Fortunately—and unlike most women—she kept digging for answers. She met women, at first accidentally, who described similar experiences, and questioned them. Later she began seeking women out for lengthy interviews. She eventually interviewed men as well. It is worth noting that she managed to devote several hours a week to this research without any degree in sociology or taxpayer-funded grants. Gradually, consistent patterns began to emerge from the stories she was hearing. “By the time I stopped counting, I had interviewed 123 women and 72 men…. I found it fascinating that something so prevalent could be kept so secret.”

What, then, did she learn? First, women are more likely than men to confuse sexual attraction with love. The sexes speak differently of the feelings associated with the early stages of a romantic affair:

Most men I have talked to call it infatuation, but most of the women I have talked to call it being in love….Women in particular may believe that, if they find the right person, intense feelings can last. They’ve been taught to believe that they should only want sex with someone they love. So when a woman desires a man, she thinks she is in love, and when the desire fades she thinks she is out of love.

Women often speak of seeking “commitment” from men, but this would seem to imply a preference for marriage-minded men over others. Langley observed the very opposite tendency in her interviewees:

They often form relationships with men who are emotionally inaccessible. Instead of choosing men who are interested in developing a relationship, these women choose men who make them feel insecure. Insecurity can create motivation and excitement. Women who seek excitement in their marriages (and many do) will often forego the possibility of real relationships for the excitement of fantasy relationships…. It’s not uncommon for women to pine for men who shy away from commitment, while they shun the attention given to them by men who are willing and ready to make a commitment.

Much uninformed and superficial commentary on the sexual revolution assumes that “men want sex while women want marriage.” Langley draws a valid distinction: women want to get married, not to be married. They often love not so much their husbands as their bridal-fantasy in which the man serves as a necessary prop.

Females want to wear the dress and have the wedding. Many women have looked forward to that day their whole lives, which ultimately sets them up for a huge crash.

Most women are happiest when focused on fulfilling some part of the get-married-and-live-happily-ever-after fantasy. They are content, even in relatively unfulfilling relationships, as long as some part of the fantasy is left to play out…

When a woman wants to get married, she will usually overlook a lot, and at times allow herself to be treated pretty badly. After she gets married, not only is the excitement of pursuit over, after a few years of marriage the attraction buzz has dissipated too. At that point, many women may find that marriage hasn’t even come close to meeting their expectations. Some women feel stupid for having wanted it so badly in the first place.

Men being pressured for “commitment” sometimes attempt to point this out: “Why is it such a big deal? What is going to be different after we’re married?” The men are right, of course: a wedding ceremony has no magical power to produce lifelong happiness. Unfortunately, this seems to be something women only learn from experience.

One thing that usually does change after the wedding is the woman’s willingness to overlook her man’s faults. Many men will tell you: “when my wife and I were dating, I could do no wrong; now that we are married, I can do no right.” Indeed, says our author, women who have tolerated their men’s shortcomings and tried to please them only in pursuit of their own fantasy often enter marriage carrying a great deal of repressed anger, which usually emerges in time. The husband, for his part, feels like the victim of a “bait and switch” sales tactic. One wonders what would become of the human race if women told their boyfriends flat out: “you must marry me so I can stop pretending to love you as you are, and start complaining about all the ways you disappoint me.”

Langley distinguishes, based upon her interviews, four typical stages in marital breakdown.

1) The wives begin to feel vaguely that “something is missing in their lives.” Then they experience a loss of interest in sexual relations with their husbands. The author is clear that her interviewees were not being “abused” or mistreated in any way. Nevertheless, in some cases “the women claimed that when their husbands touched them, they felt violated; they said their bodies would freeze up and they would feel tightness in their chest and/or a sick feeling in their stomach.”

2) After a certain interval, they experience an unexpected reawakening of sexual desire—but not, alas, for their lawful husbands. In many cases, the women did not act upon their new desires quickly. Usually they would go through a period of feeling guilty, and sometimes try to assuage these feelings by increased attentiveness toward their husbands.

Women, says Langley, enter marriage assuming they are naturally monogamous. “Trying to be faithful doesn’t seem natural to them.” They recite the wedding vow in much the same spirit as they wear “something borrowed, something blue”—it is simply what one does at a wedding. Of course, a vow is no very serious undertaking to one who assumes she will never feel any temptation to break it.

Accordingly, over time, most women begin to rationalize their extramarital erotic interests. If women simply want to be married and are not naturally inclined to be attracted to other men, “any unhappiness or infidelity on the part of the women is assumed to be due to the men they married.” This seems to me a critically important and easily overlooked finding: the widely propagated notion that women are naturally monogamous is helping to nourish the contemporary “blame the man for everything” mentality. Hence, odd as this sounds, in order to reestablish the actual practice of monogamy, it may be necessary to discredit the notion that woman are naturally inclined to it. Once women start believing their wayward desires can be blamed upon their husbands’ failures, they become “negative and sarcastic when speaking about their husbands and their marriages.” It is then usually just a matter of time and opportunity before the wives proceed to actual adultery.

3) Women involved in extramarital affairs speak of “feelings unlike anything they’d experienced before. They felt ‘alive’ again.” This euphoria was, however, combined with pain and guilt. Often before a tryst, they would vow that ‘this would be the last time,’ but were unable to keep their resolutions. The author interprets this as addictive behavior related to the brain chemistry of erotic attachment. She conjectures that the “high” produced by adultery is more intense than that of lawful courtship because of its association with shame, guilt and secrecy: a plausible hypothesis, and possible topic for future research.

Usually the women did not act decisively to end their marriages, which gave them a sense of security in spite of everything. Divorce produces separation anxiety, which is a sort of chemical withdrawal. Habitual attachments produce a safe, comfortable feeling, like a sedative; and loss of a person to whom we are bonded produces a panicky feeling like that of a child lost in a department store, Langley writes. So these women often lived in a “state of limbo” for years, unable to decide whether to remain married or seek a divorce. Most expected they would eventually achieve clarity about their own desires, but this seldom happened. The author’s hypothesis is that “clarity never comes, because what they are really trying to do is avoid pain. They are hoping that one day it won’t hurt to leave their spouse, or that one day they’ll no longer desire to be with someone else and will want to return to their spouse.” (She neglects to mention that it may “hurt” many women to renounce their husbands’ financial support as well.)

Sometimes the paramour breaks off relations with the adulterous wife, for any number of reasons. In these cases, the women “experienced extreme grief, became deeply depressed and expressed tremendous anger toward their husbands” (my emphasis). In fact, according to Langley’s hypothesis, they were experiencing another form of withdrawal—they were stimulant addicts forced to go “cold turkey.” These women “placed the utmost importance on finding a relationship that gave them the feeling they experienced in their affairs. In the meantime, “some women resumed sporadic sexual relations with their husbands in an effort to safeguard the marriage.” Though no longer attracted to their husbands, “desire was temporarily rekindled when they suspected their husbands were unfaithful [or] showed signs of moving on.” In other words, even wives who have been unfaithful for years want to keep their husbands hanging on—they do not want him to leave them.

4) Finally some women do reach a sort of resolution. This may mean divorce or a decision to remain married and continue their affairs indefinitely. Langley does not mention a single case in which an adulterous wife returned to her husband unreservedly and sincerely. Those who divorced and remarried sometimes expressed “regret for having hurt their children and ex-spouses only to find themselves experiencing similar feelings in the new relationship.” In other words, they had reached the end of a second feral sexual cycle, and boredom had returned. The “natural” female sex drive results in rotating polyandry.

Langley even entitles one chapter “The Commitment Game: Female Version of Pursue and Discard.” One can hardly avoid the thought that these women might have saved everyone a lot of trouble by simply keeping their original marriage vow.

Like other observers of the contemporary scene, the author notes the pervasiveness of female anger. “It’s impossible…to understand anything about women in this country today, unless you understand that a) they’re angry, and b) their anger is directed at men. Women today aren’t seeking equality. They want retribution—revenge.”

Much of this is due to feminist indoctrination. An ideological regime (and feminism may now, I think, legitimately be called a regime) paints the past in the darkest colors possible in order to camouflage its own failures. According to official “herstory,” women’s lives were a virtual hell on earth before the glorious dawn of feminism. They were beaten and brutalized, burned as witches, forcibly prevented from acquiring the education for which they were supposedly thirsting. Theologians allegedly taught that they had no souls.

Unfortunately, Langley appears to accept at least some of this balderdash: “When women decide to leave their husbands, all the pain from their past together with all the pain women have suffered at the hands of men throughout history is unleashed on their husbands in the form of anger, regardless of whether or not their husbands have treated them badly” (my emphasis).

Langley is on firmer ground when she suggests women actually enjoy being angry because it gives them a kind of power: “Angry people not only spur those around them to walk on eggshells, they motivate them to do exactly what the angry person wants them to do. Some women stay angry long after divorcing their husbands because, as long as they’re angry and their ex-husbands feel guilty, they’ve got power over them.”

A third factor is the unrealistic expectations women now have about marriage: “their not getting the expected payoff [of] continued excitement over getting and being married.”

It should also be pointed out that the very terms “retribution” and “revenge” imply that husbands have wronged their wives somehow. If this is not the case, and Langley admits that today it mostly is not, the proper terms for the women’s behavior would be “wanton cruelty” or “sadism.” This supposition is strengthened by some of the author’s own observations: “I’ve noticed that once a woman reaches a certain point, not only does her anger persist, she wants to continually punish and inflict pain on whomever has angered her…. The men that I talked to often used the word evil to describe the behavior of their wives.”

Let us consider the author’s male interviewees and their reactions to these patterns of female behavior. Langley lists three obstacles to male recognition of the reality of female infidelity: 1) a kind of high-minded attitude that “my wife simply isn’t ‘that kind’ of woman,” which usually amounts to wishful thinking; 2) an invalid inference from the wife’s lack of interest in sexual relations with them to a lack of sexual interests generally; and 3) a failure to discuss and compare notes on marital problems with other men, as women routinely do with one another.

The author emphasizes the gullibility of the men she interviewed. One man’s wife had walked out on him and rented an apartment; three years later, he still had no suspicions that she might be with another man. Often the wives who took advantage of their husbands’ credulousness were highly jealous themselves: “Some of the husbands learned to look down in restaurants and other public places, because they feared their wife would accuse them of looking at another woman. Some claimed that their wife didn’t want them to watch certain television programs.” Psychologists call this projection: the automatic attribution of one’s own thoughts and motivations to others. Thus, dishonorable women tend to be suspicious; faithful husbands are trusting. In the author’s experience, however, men do not get much credit with their wives for placing so much trust in them:

Some of the women resented their husbands’ lack of suspicion…. Although females never give males any indication that they are anything less than 100 percent faithful, [they] seem to think men are stupid for believing them. Females just think males should know that when they say “I would never cheat on you,” what they really mean is “I would never cheat on you…as long as you make me happy and I don’t get bored.”

Of course, if men did know this it is unlikely many of them would want to get married.

Women may want men to make them happy, but they do not say, and probably do not know themselves, how this might be accomplished. “Women want men to read their minds—or, more accurately, their emotions—because it’s what they do, easily…. Females want males to anticipate their needs and desires.” (Obeying their every command is not enough.) Women do in fact have a greater ability to perceive the needs and feelings of others without verbal communication, an evolved adaptation to the requirements of successfully nurturing infants. When they expect their husbands to have this same ability, they are in effect upset that their husbands are not women.

(Click HERE to read the rest.)

11 comments:

Anonymous said...


Here is another one:

"The Cultural Devastation of American Women: The Strange and Frightening Decline of the American Female (and her dreadful timing) " by Nancy Levant:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1424133904?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage

Mindstorm said...

This is how I see the male-female relationships (and I am reading this article for the first time in my life). If that were common knowledge, MGTOW would be the most frequently assumed philosophy of man's life.

Anonymous said...

I have read a few of Devlin's articles on gender relations and was impressed enough that I followed up reading of this review with getting a copy of Langley's book(s) -
she actually wrote two volumes, 'Women's Infidelity - Living in Limbo' and 'Women's Infidelity 2 - Breaking out of Limbo'. From having read both, it appeared to me that she had gone through a process that allowed her to see through the feminist nonsense she spouts in her first volume, and it is insightful to read both to see this maturation process. They are a bit expensive, but one might find downloadable copies...

Rusty Shackleford said...

Francis of Assisi wrote that whenever he questioned his calling, he would imagine himself with a fat, angry wife and hungry kids all of whom he was responsible for feeding and clothing. And that made him glad to be a monk again.

It's nice that they have a theory about hormones and 4 year cycles in women, but they're only offering a biological explanation for what everyone knows. This is common knowledge available in sayings like "the honeymoon is over." The difference in former times is that the culture enforced standards that dampened dumb hormonal urges and encouraged stable families. Now the entitlement of American women is so inflated and the former, traditional culture so ignored and degraded that every urge, hormonal surge and mood swing is treated as a moral absolute. We've raised an entire generation of Red Queens. I've lost track of the number of men that I've known who thought that they were getting married like their father or grandfathers, but who ended up only renting a wife for a few years and then paying for it for the rest of their lives.

Unknown said...

I actually know a HS alumni who did the following, which has been quoted from page 15 of the linked PDF file in this blog post:

"Teenage boys statutorily raped by adult women may be held liable for
child support paid to those women. "

She was fucking around with a 15 year old boy when she was 26 and then got pregnant by him. And when he turned 18 he was sent to jail for not paying child support. And she didn't go to jail at all. Again if the sexes were reversed . . . .

Interested people can more about it at my blog.

https://thedamagedealingmeatshield.wordpress.com/2015/07/29/a-real-life-account-of-two-broken-whores/


Although I'm not finished reading this document, it makes me ask what is the purpose of relationships? If American women are this vile, why would any self respecting sane man want anything to do with them? I've even asked women how relationships benefit men and they with reasons that benefit women. But I then point out that their reasons only benefit them, not the men. And then they go mute on the subject.

Mindstorm said...

It makes me wonder who are the enablers of 'rotating' polyandry (a nice expression, BTW) mentioned in the title.

Bob, do you recognize the husband/paramour dichotomy in the article (or more generally, guardian/lover), the manifestation usually shortened in these circles as BB/AF? Is it delusional to discuss it?

Unknown said...

"It's nice that they have a theory about hormones and 4 year cycles in women,"

It's generally called the Seven Year Itch and there is even an old movie by that name.

Unknown said...

"Bob, do you recognize the husband/paramour dichotomy in the article (or more generally, guardian/lover), the manifestation usually shortened in these circles as BB/AF? Is it delusional to discuss it?"

The Manosphere gets this wrong by thinking all women are like this, rather than the screwy ones. I've known people married for almost 60 years.

Mindstorm said...

In accord with their hormonal urges, or perhaps despite their hormonal urges? :)

Rusty Shackleford said...

"The Manosphere gets this wrong by thinking all women are like this, rather than the screwy ones. I've known people married for almost 60 years."

They're all pretty much hormone addled, crazy flakes. It used to be just a simple question of finding one who was sane enough for enough of the time to make a life with. Changes in the culture and law have made them so much worse and the whole marriage proposition so much harder. The numbers that I hear all the time are about the 50% divorce rate of which 85% are initiated by women. From a gender wide view that's probably bad enough to stamp the current generation of females as damaged and certifiably batshit wacko.

I think it's fair to say that we've created an environment that enables and amplifies all the worst female tendencies and inclinations. There are women who in a different time and culture might have made acceptable wives and mother, but who now, under the present circumstances, are only capable of bringing disaster and misery to any man that might marry them.

Omega Man said...

'tis better to have never loved,
than to have loved and lost it all in a frivolous divorce!