WHAT'S FIDELITY GOT TO DO WITH IT? Paul Nathanson

Fidelity, no matter how you define that, has always been important in marriage and not in gay relationships. That's partly because infidelity threatens the stability required for children, true, but also because it threatens the political interests represented by marriage (at least among the elite)--that is, family or clan alliances. Gay relationships, as such, involve neither of these factors. Sexually transmitted disease, of course, is another factor. Many gay (and straight) people believe that they can get around that by means of "safer sex." Maybe.

Having said that, I must point out that Eve's discussion is historically anachronistic in connection with sexual fidelity--which has not always been enforced or even idealized. (I'll refer here to Western societies, although what I say applies to many other societies as well.) The most obvious example of not enforcing sexual fidelity, even of encouraging it, is the medieval institution of courtly love. (Polygamy is another discussion. I'll just add here that polygamous fidelity is a more direct analogy than monogamy to maternal fidelity.)

But I suspect that some degree of sexual infidelity has always been tolerated in circumstances defined by factors such as class, property, religion, and so on. By the eighteenth century, both husbands and wives were having extramarital liaisons more or less openly (see Hogarth's series of paintings called Marriage a la Mode); the resulting children--especially those resulting from the sexual infidelity of wives--were aborted, killed as infants, or left at churches as foundlings. These folks hardly ever divorced, even though some might have had legal grounds for doing so. Clearly, their marriages were based on something other than, or at least in addition to, the expectation of sexual or even emotional gratification.

And I'm not sure that the (surviving) children were always severely disadvantaged. What harms children so severely now is the intense hostility generated by the sexual infidelity of one parent or both (and stats show that women, by the way, are quickly closing the gender gap in this respect). But that hostility is a result of two very recent developments: supremacy of the middle-class (with its insistence on respectability and gradual rejection of what came to be understood as upper-class hypocrisy) and the glorification of sentiment (what I associate with neo-romanticism).

Well, that's a start.
posted by maggie at 12:50 AM | link

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