BRAD C. writes:

You might have already come across this column in The Telegraph, but I thought I would pass it along.

The author, Catherine Hakim, is a prominent British sociologist, and she argues that allowing open extramarital affairs is the way to happiness. That an academic sociologist would argue for this conclusion is not surprising. What I found surprising about this column was the way it was written: the author’s flippant tone, the seeming obviousness of her conclusions, the moral equivalency between eating meals in the home as opposed to at a restaurant and having sex in the home as opposed to with an extramarital partner, the reliance on economists’ quantification of frequency of sex into units of economic utility . . . 

When I read this article, I felt like Satan was speaking directly to me.

P.S. If you choose to post any of this e-mail, please attribute it to “Brad C.” Sadly, I could get in trouble for being associated with your “controversial” views, whereas Ms. Hakim will suffer no repercussions for advocating unrepentant infidelity in a major newspaper.

 Laura writes:

Here are two of the many comments following the piece:

“People will do anything to sell a book nowadays except write something original.”

and,

“So the article states,

Affairs are about excitement, being alive, seduction, flirtation, love, affection, sexual bliss, lust, caution, eroticism, fantasy, danger, adventure, exploration and the determined refusal to grow old gracefully.

The author forgot about: jealousy, revenge, trust, break-up of the family and the heat of passion murder when one of them finds out about the affair. I doubt this author is married.”

Hakim, a feminist who has written some critical things about affirmative action for women and has also written that despite feminism most women prefer rich men, is an attention-seeking academic whore. If you read the piece all the way through, she advocates quasi-prostitution with young women charging older men for sexual affairs.  What is most amazing is that she considers this idea breathtakingly new and a form of women’s liberation.

Yet it is the most puritanical nations, including Britain and America, that have traditionally resisted the notion of adultery most rigorously. Here, couples endure the challenges of child care, work pressures, mid‑life crisis and dwindling marital sex against a backdrop of repressive Anglo-Saxon hang‑ups about infidelity, seen always in pejorative terms such as “cheating”.

And they do so at a cost. Statistics confirm that British and American divorce rates are among the highest in the world. Around half of American first marriages end in divorce, closely followed by a third of first British marriages, floundering under unrealistic pressures, often celibate marital beds and drastic overreactions to infidelities.

So Hakim believes more adultery will lead to less divorce. She simply reinvents human nature. The powerful (young women and older men with money) deceive the relatively powerless (kind and decent ordinary men and older women) — and fun!

 She writes:

Sex has become a major leisure activity of our time, accessible to everyone, married or not, rich and poor.

Lying and cheating are mere sport too.

—– Comments —–

James H. writes:

Let me run this by my wife and see if I can get her on board! Oh, wait! Not a chance in hell – oh, well.

Family, property, faith. These are the targets that must be destroyed in order to establish the New World Order. And everything that promotes their destruction, regardless of how utterly puerile and ridiculous, will be heralded as “scientific,” “rational” and “progressive.” And, where will it end? Of course the march towards utopia cannot fail but destroy every last vestige of our civilization. The old traditional Catholic order must be destroyed.

Laura writes:

Hakim does say — either in this piece or in another one of the thousands of journalistic hack jobs now appearing around the globe about her views — that spouses should keep their affairs secret from each other. Oh, really? Gee, what a great idea. That’ll work.

Interestingly, no journalist has asked this academic huckster if she is married.

Dierdre writes:

I can tell you first hand that infidelity in marriage does NOT lead to happiness of any kind. I was married to a man who was a serial cheater. It led to the destruction of our family. It was heartbreaking in ways that words cannot express. Especially, since I struggled with all my heart to create a functional marriage anyway.

Nothing I did mattered because I was married to someone who didn’t see anything wrong with cheating, lying, manipulating, pornography, and adultery. I should have chosen better. He had many other good qualities….but the good qualities were not enough to counter act the evil that he brought into our marriage. Reading that article made me so angry. It is one thing to forgive adultery if it is a true mistake and the offender changes his/her ways. It’s impossible to partner your life with someone who thinks it’s perfectly fine to lie and cheat on you…especially if you think of that person as your best friend. This makes me so angry…because we lived through the hurt and devastation. Hurt beyond words….I still feel humiliated and destroyed by it all.

Andy writes:

From The Telegraph article:

“Around half of American first marriages end in divorce, closely followed by a third of first British marriages, floundering under unrealistic pressures, often celibate marital beds and drastic overreactions to infidelities.”

Not true. Around 35 percent of Americans who have ever been married are now divorced. The 50 percent figure comes from conflating people who have been divorced and remarried 2, 3, and more times. The divorce phenomena is most pronounced in the south among Protestants. In the north, and among Jews, Catholics, and surprisingly atheists, the percent of people who have ever been married and are now divorced is around 20 percent.

These statistics are readily available online, so it is disappointing to see the 50 percent figure constantly thrown about, but not surprising, as it serves the agenda of denigrating marriage and our traditions regarding it.

Eric writes:

I am reminded once again of the tragi-farcical faux “marriage” of Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. It brought misery to them both, especially her.

 Laura writes:

Sylvia Plath wasn’t too enthused about adultery either.

Forta leza writes:

For 90 percent of women, having sex with a man who is not her husband spells the end of her relationship with her husband. (The end of her love for him, if not her marriage). Because deep down, she can’t respect her husband after betraying him. Most men are capable of loving their wives after having sex with other women, but it is still destructive (and counterproductive like Internet porn.) In either case, infidelity carries the risk of bringing diseases into the relationship and inflaming the other spouse’s jealousy. Adultery as the term is used in the Bible means sex between a married woman and a man who is not her husband. I’m not trying to argue that male infidelity is a-okay — it’s not. But the reality is that it is different in moral content from female infidelity. The two should not be morally equated in my opinion.

Laura writes:

Since physical intimacy is more emotionally meaningful to a woman, infidelity is more meaningful as well.

Hakim is also speaking to single women and telling them it’s enlightened and no serious threat to marriage or compromise for themselves to sell their services to married men. Here we have an independent, successful female sociologist who believes in feminist progress advising women to participate in one of the most ancient forms of female dependence and lovelessness.

The idea that single women who do not have mercenary motives will simply have affairs with married men, without seeking an end to their marriages, flies in the face of the most basic facts of female psychology.

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