Abstract
Eric Anderson, The Monogamy Gap: Men, Love and the Reality of Cheating, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 231 pp.: ISBN 978 0 19 977792 1 (hbk)
The purpose of this book is to argue that ‘open relationships might be a more emotionally and physically healthy form of loving’ than monogamy (p. 18). Slightly further on the same page the author states that he supposes that many feminists might be upset by the arguments of the book, despite the fact that feminist academics have been calling for ‘nonmonogamies’ in human relationships for decades now. I make no claim to universal knowledge but I have seldom come across these particular massed ranks, although many others, feminist and not, have been critical of traditional, and conventional, forms of marriage. Nonmonogamies and marriage, I would suggest, are two rather different things.
So, early in this book there are many questions for the reader to ask, not the least of which is that of whose perspective (male or female, straight or gay) dominates and informs its arguments. Throughout the book – as the title suggests – it is men’s behaviour and men’s needs that are at the forefront of the discussion and this tends to put the other players in the dramas of human existence (notably women and children) at something of a disadvantage. That explicit bias towards men leads the author to such sentences as: ‘The need for sex with others is simply too great for too many men (and may be for women as well)’ (p. 199). This sentence is quite unusual for the 21st-century West since many people (male and female and of whatever sexual orientation) would take the view that the unbridled, uncontrollable model of rampant male sexuality (straight or gay) largely disappeared with the 19th century, and with it the idea that this naturalizing account of sexuality should organize or legitimate human behaviour.
For many people in the 21st-century global north sexual morality and sexual behaviour has become, happily, increasingly a matter of personal choice: it is anyway an aspect of personal behaviour that is very difficult to police and the general rule of doing nothing by coercion or through deceit is probably as good a guide as is possible for many people. So in that sense Professor Anderson is correct in saying that ‘open’ relationships are a positive form of human behaviour, at least in the sense that no one has to lie. But not lying is not the only aspect of the morality of relationships and it is here that the argument about the core value of ‘open’ non-monogamy is problematic. Those ‘open’ relationships, which are so praised by Professor Anderson, may very well be based on all kinds of needs (emotional and otherwise) which are more powerfully expressed by one partner than another. In short, that ‘open’ communication which is at the heart of the workings of ‘open’ relationships depends upon an equality of personhood that is often lacking from the social world. Throughout this book the ideal actor is a male, who is autonomous, apparently well provided for and a healthy individual without dependents.
Individual autonomy is absent from many personal relationships, of which parenthood is one notable (and commonplace) example. Parents may have as much wish to be ‘open’ as anyone else but they have a responsibility to others which is not negotiable. The needs of children are absolute, as are those other needs (for the care of the sick or the frail). In these cases, cases which are relevant to a very high proportion of the population, there is a point at which the needs of others come before those of ourselves: in short we have to care quite as much as to love or to engage in sexual relationships. Since most human being have only 24 hours in every day at their disposal questions arise about priorities, responsibilities and all kinds of burdensome stuff that tend to detract somewhat from the making, and the re-making, of sexual relationships. In these quotidian tasks, and that of acquiring our daily bread, most of us spend much of our time. Within these relationships there is clearly unhappiness (certainly if we regard the high divorce of the UK as evidence of this) but there are also inequalities of power, inequalities that are often related to gender and class. In these inequalities, which allow some greater freedom than others we have to place discussions about sexual and personal morality. The ties that bind are also the ties that may come to sustain us; in many cases those ties are constructed through long term, sustained relationships, which may or may not be sexually faithful. But the question remains, as in all social relationships, of who profits from ‘open’ sexual relations.