13th March 2007, 7:37 PM
Women more likely to cheat? I very much doubt that, to say the least. I'm sure that that's an equal thing true evenly to people of both genders... as I said earlier, you just notice it more in women because as a heterosexual man you naturally wouldn't think as much about how men treat women in their relationship as how women in their relationship. That doesn't mean that the percieved imbalance has any validity in fact, though...
Historically, (to go mostly off topic) men have been encouraged to not be faithful to one woman, while the opposite was true for women; from ancient times in most places in the West laws made it very hard for a woman to get a divorce, or for a husband to be punished for cheating; in fact, it was often encouraged (while out on military campaigns or whatever men weren't expected to remain celebate while their wives at home were). On the other hand, women were expected to remain faithful, no matter how long their husbands were gone... think of the Odyssey, where Penelope is faithful for 20 years while Odysseus goes around on his wanderings, at some points sleeping with other women, and both are portrayed as moral. Of course, sometimes the "women are less rational" argument did spill over into "women can't be trusted with anything, including being faithful", but I'd take that as pure mysoginy (hey, as Medieval thought relating to gender, could it be anything else?).
Of course, many Medieval thinkers also justified semi-consentual or nonconsentual sex with lower-class women by saying that peasants couldn't possibly understand romantic love anyway so they wouldn't know the difference between consentual and semiconsental or nonconsentual sex, but that's somewhat unrelated (and besides, even if they did think it was potentially wrong, no lord would ever be prosecuted for anything they did to a peasant...). While things like that have not survived the ages, other stereotypes have...
Of course, things are different now, and laws are equal, because we know better than people did then. Oh, every belief has some basis in truth, in some way or another... men and women are obviously different. Men used the "emotional, unstable" argument to argue for why women shouldn't have political rights for a very long time; now we know, of course, that such things are minor in comparison to the similarities, and now the stereotypes go both ways... is that progress? Erm... I don't know... but it doesn't seem so to me. Of course, since we still don't know exactly what the differences are between the genders are, really, there is plenty of room for people to say "see this difference in understanding emotions or whatever means X Y and Z", but without proof I look at all of it very skeptically. I tend to believe, really, that people are more similar than they think, for the most part...
That doesn't help at all when someone cheats in a relationship of course, but blaming the whole other gender (and, yes, as SJ showed it's just as common in women (blaming men for everything that goes wrong in relationships) as it is in men), while understandable, just isn't true.
Historically, (to go mostly off topic) men have been encouraged to not be faithful to one woman, while the opposite was true for women; from ancient times in most places in the West laws made it very hard for a woman to get a divorce, or for a husband to be punished for cheating; in fact, it was often encouraged (while out on military campaigns or whatever men weren't expected to remain celebate while their wives at home were). On the other hand, women were expected to remain faithful, no matter how long their husbands were gone... think of the Odyssey, where Penelope is faithful for 20 years while Odysseus goes around on his wanderings, at some points sleeping with other women, and both are portrayed as moral. Of course, sometimes the "women are less rational" argument did spill over into "women can't be trusted with anything, including being faithful", but I'd take that as pure mysoginy (hey, as Medieval thought relating to gender, could it be anything else?).
Of course, many Medieval thinkers also justified semi-consentual or nonconsentual sex with lower-class women by saying that peasants couldn't possibly understand romantic love anyway so they wouldn't know the difference between consentual and semiconsental or nonconsentual sex, but that's somewhat unrelated (and besides, even if they did think it was potentially wrong, no lord would ever be prosecuted for anything they did to a peasant...). While things like that have not survived the ages, other stereotypes have...
Of course, things are different now, and laws are equal, because we know better than people did then. Oh, every belief has some basis in truth, in some way or another... men and women are obviously different. Men used the "emotional, unstable" argument to argue for why women shouldn't have political rights for a very long time; now we know, of course, that such things are minor in comparison to the similarities, and now the stereotypes go both ways... is that progress? Erm... I don't know... but it doesn't seem so to me. Of course, since we still don't know exactly what the differences are between the genders are, really, there is plenty of room for people to say "see this difference in understanding emotions or whatever means X Y and Z", but without proof I look at all of it very skeptically. I tend to believe, really, that people are more similar than they think, for the most part...
That doesn't help at all when someone cheats in a relationship of course, but blaming the whole other gender (and, yes, as SJ showed it's just as common in women (blaming men for everything that goes wrong in relationships) as it is in men), while understandable, just isn't true.
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