Wife swapping is so-so-yesterday.
New York magazine has a piece on what it dubs the new monogamy-i.e., “The New Monogamy. Until death do us part-except every Friday.”
The new thing, in other words, is cheatin’ and tellin’-telling on your self: “I was totally confused, because I’d assumed that once I found ‘the one,’ I would be done with [being attracted to others],’ says [new monogamy wife] Claire.” Claire’s interest in another man was upsetting at first: “But when her husband subsequently got a crush of his own, she was more prepared. ‘Now that it was his turn, I was in a position to understand,’ explains Claire. ‘So I told him, if he wanted to kiss her, that was okay-but I wanted to know about it, and I wanted that to be as far as things went without him talking to me first.'”
Sure, I’d call them plain old degenerates, but the new monogamy [and I doubt that it’s as widespread as the magazine makes it appear] rests on a debased notion of what marriage means. As the magazine notes:
“The idea of jimmying the lock on monogamy is not new, of course. Even before marriage made the leap from an institution designed to protect property to something a bit more intimate (and in recent decades, with the changes wrought by feminism, to a freely chosen option for women), early American communes like the Oneida Community, founded in 1848, advocated nonpossessive love and ‘complex’ (i.e., nonexclusive) marriage. In the fifties, Kinsey’s researchers swapped spouses. And by the seventies, the more daring members of the divorce-slash-therapy generation were experimenting with the form: key parties, organized swinger communities, and-inspired by the 1972 book Open Marriage, by George and Nena O’Neill-sanctioned slutting around.
“It never quite caught on, though, in part because the prospects of extramarital relationships (or even temptations) were so heavily skewed toward men, who had all the freedoms and fewer erotic prohibitions. These days, however, a woman is as likely as a man to attend a sales conference in Des Moines. E-mail, text messaging, and online porn and personals provide both men and women with privacy and virtual intimacy. Both sexes stay single longer, and variety is built into the way they think of their sex lives. The increasingly open gay community has dramatized the fact that there isn’t just one way to be two. Even evolutionary psychologists, once stalwarts of the men-cheat-women-cling school, are questioning whether females are innately monogamous. Perhaps this time around, seventies-style swinging and slutting will actually be feasible-and fair.”
The New Monogamy-yet another benefit conferred by radical feminism.