But "a husband cannot long pay those attentions with the passion necessary to excite lively emotions, and the heart, accustomed to lively emotions, turns to a new lover, or pines in secret." Women, she declared, are reared for love: the novels they read, the fairy tales they hear, all prepare them for a future of fiery sentiments and gallant attentions. Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, proffered a few as early as the end of the eighteenth century, and her words still resonate today. But surely more-provocative hypotheses might be floated. "The reasons women cheat," she concludes, "are as varied as the women themselves." Fair enough. So why did they do it? Smith herself is remarkably unhelpful on this score. And yet "abuse" played little role in the decisions of Smith's interviewees to risk their unions, most of which sound altogether more docile than violent. Why do women leave? "Verbal, physical or emotional abuse" is the first reason cited in the AARP study by wives who initiated divorces. The greatest adulterers in the Western canon-Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Molly Bloom, Carmen-have, in fact, been adulter esses. It is the lust of a mother (not, say, an uncle) that so tortures Shakespeare's Hamlet ("Frailty, thy name is woman"), a girl's sexual fickleness that takes out the hero in Troilus and Cressida, a queen's love for an ass that brings down the house in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Dante's Inferno the circle of hell for sins of the flesh is populated in great part by women. Nubile young girls can legally be seduced "only after the male adolescent has first applied his resources to the full satisfaction of a bona fide senile female." Ovid expends many lines in his Art of Love warning men against underestimating the ladies' amorous adventurism. Utopia, as described by Aristophanes' Congresswomen, consists of "free fornication," with no grandma left behind. A few hundred years before Jesus Christ, Aristophanes presented women as rowdy and ebullient sexual predators, fighting uninhibitedly over access to handsome boys. It is a peculiarity of our age to portray one sex as nature's safe and law-abiding partner-to cast it as the erotically muted, risk-averse nanny to man. They court risk they court intensity, variety, novelty, and disaster-very much like men. In fact, they often court the square opposite of security, as Diane Shader Smith learned when she began interviewing women for Undressing Infidelity. Women need more than security to thrive, it seems. Only they generally don't, as the books and studies make all too clear. The result? Women have grown dull while men have grown smug, offering their hands (when they do) as one might bestow a winning lottery ticket: "There you go, honey, I guess I've made your life." Having given that, they too often feel they have given all they've done their bit in the kingdom of relationships, and their companions may now live happily ever after. If men whose company we enjoy don't assume we want to be their wives and thus propose in short order, we consider it "an insult" (in the approving words of the sexpert-rabbi Shmuley Boteach) and declare ourselves aggrieved. Women have been told they are helpless and dependent for so long that we have begun to believe it-and to object vociferously when we are not treated as such. They made for an insipid image all along, but everybody seemed to conspire in it, from self-help authors (who assumed that their female readers wanted nothing more than tips on how to "catch" and "tame" a husband) to family counselors, magazine pundits, and, of course, evolutionary psychologists (who say it's all biology: girls are made to sit in the straw and warm their eggs guys are made to fly through the heavens and spread their seed). It puts a great big dent in sexual stereotypes with which we have been too long saddled: the security-besotted, marriage-angling, nest- squatting female and her counterpart, the freedom-loving, wild-oat-sowing male Steppenwolf. This is refreshing news-in some senses, at least. That is also the impression one gleans when contemplating a new spate of books and shows, from ABC's already classic Desperate Housewives to hot spring titles including most notably Undressing Infidelity: Why More Wives Are Unfaithful. That, at least, is what they reported during a major AARP study, released last year. The fact is, women initiate 66 percent of divorces between partners over forty. It's not men who leave their wives for younger, blonder temptresses it's women who leave their husbands for-well, just about anybody. It's official: the conventional wisdom is false.
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