Lisa Johnson, "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman: Adultery and the (Third-Wave) Feminist Desire for Alternative Heterosexualities" (page 4 of 4)

The End of the [Af]fair

. . . beyond the rather unproductive debate over whether carnivals are politically progressive or conservative . . .
—Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

It can be argued that adultery actually sustains marriage, that, far from disrupting the regime of traditional heterosexuality, adultery allows it to run all the more smoothly, releasing pressure from the husband, who can return to his wife feeling less sexually regulated by her, and releasing pressure from the single woman, who has poached sexual pleasure and companionship from marriage culture and feels perhaps less controlled by and less antagonistic toward it. She has found ways in which it serves her, and therefore need not radically reject it through activism and polemics. In other words, adultery operates as a safety valve for marriage culture, through which errant desires erupt and go limp; the Other Woman's intended disruptive play is actually incorporated by dominant ideologies, her espoused feminist principles co-opted in a project of consolidating the power of marriage culture.[10]

I cannot argue that my role as the Other Woman did not work in exactly these conservative ways, but I can say that in addition to this function, it also worked as a critique of marriage and as an exertion of my will to extricate myself from marriage culture. It was both these things—conservative and progressive, antimarriage and accommodated by marriage. Like most texts, this act of adultery was shot through with contradiction. But I do not want to lose the "contra" part of this contradiction; the against-ness, the critique inherent in it. The affair may not be all euphoria and transformation, but it represents a utopian longing for something other than what we had, or what our culture promoted.[11]

Works Cited

Chancer, Lynn. Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography, and the Future of Feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

Frye, Marilyn. "On Being White: Thinking toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy." In The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1983.

Gallop, Jane. Living with His Camera. Durham: Duke, 2003.

Jenkins, Henry, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, eds. Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Kipnis, Laura. "Adultery." Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998).

Reiner, Rob. When Harry Met Sally . . .. Castlerock Entertainment, 1989.

Richardson, Laurel. The New Other Woman: Contemporary Single Women in Affairs with Married Men. New York: Free Press, 1985.

Segal, Lynne. Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure. London: Virago, 1994.

Sexton, Anne. Love Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

Shrage, Laurie. Moral Dilemmas of Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion. Thinking Gender series, edited by Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Skeggs, Beverly. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage, 1997.

Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Stoltenberg, John. Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. 2nd ed. London: UCL Press, 2000.

VanEvery, Jo. Heterosexual Women Changing the Family: Refusing to be a 'Wife'! Feminist Perspectives on the Past and Present series. London: Taylor and Francis, 1995.

Wilkinson, Sue and Celia Kitzinger. Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader. London: Sage Press, 1993.

Works Cited

1. In rejecting "the obviousness of the impropriety" (33) of this act, I find an ally in Laurie Shrage's Moral Dilemmas in Feminism. Shrage writes, "Because of what it implies about the state of a relationship, an adulterous act can cause third parties (spouses, children, friends, and relatives) a great deal of emotional pain. . . . But within this same context, acts of adultery can imply a need for, as well as the possibility of achieving, greater personal freedom and fulfillment. Which consequences should be given greater weight" (48)? This is an important question. The knee-jerk reaction of indignance on behalf of the wife strikes me as ethically problematic for feminists. Readers inclined to support the wife's position within marriage find themselves in the uncomfortable situation of defending an institution widely criticized by feminists, lending weight to the cultural legitimacy of state-regulated female sexuality (wifehood) and further marginalizing the Other Woman who has not been accorded any equivalent social status. The wife is being victimized only if we accept that the continuation of her marriage should be a communally supported priority. Furthermore, Shrage provides a series of scenarios that illustrate the importance of considering multiple perspectives on the moral dilemma of adultery:

How, for example, might differently situated and positioned agents assess the consequences of adultery? If Carol Gilligan is right and women tend to be concerned with maintaining relationships in resolving moral problems, then women are likely to see the consequences of adultery in terms of its effects on the romantic and familial relationships involved. If men are socialized to take a more atomistic approach to morality, then they may be likely to see the effects of adultery in terms of the personal freedoms and pleasures gained and lost. Those with particular ideals of religious worship may see the effects of adultery in terms of their relationship with God, or in terms of their spiritual development. And persons with a stigmatized minority sexual orientation, and who see the sexual and marital practices of American society as oppressively restrictive, might see mass acts of adultery and casual sex as effecting a destabilization of hegemonic social institutions. And given that these different ways of seeing structure social reality itself, the same activities will not only appear to have, but will actually have different consequences for different agents (50, my emphasis).

While Shrage's "ifs" are big "ifs" (considering widespread criticism of Gilligan's theory as essentialist), her point that the meaning of adultery is contingent on one's position within the social grid and that adultery can in certain contexts be recognized as a politically destabilizing force resonates with my own experience as a single woman, feminist, and adulterer. [Return to text]

2. Feminism can sometimes flatten out the complexity of a situation by insisting on a radical systemic critique instead of noticing the nuanced negotiations of power in women's lives. In the study of popular culture, John Fiske differentiates between radical and progressive politics, asserting that Marxist and feminist cultural critiques too often disregard or denigrate progressive politics but that both forms of oppositional work are necessary to social change. Whereas radicalism focuses on structural critiques in order to change the system that distributes power, progressive politics "is concerned with redistributing power within these structures toward the disempowered; it attempts to enlarge the space within which bottom-up power has to operate" (56). Of particular relevance to my project of respecting the Other Woman as social agent, Fiske warns against heavy-handed applications of radical theory, in which the everyday resistances and negotiations of women with the conditions of their lives are devalued (in favor of positioning women as victims based on structural analysis). Fiske warns against the logical fallacy of equating an absence of radical critique with the presence of reactionary gender politics. In between these poles, much of our lived experience as feminists unfolds. [Return to text]

3. The idea of an alternative heterosexuality diverges from separatist feminist beliefs that all heterosexuality is inherently unequal, asserting instead that there can in fact be heterosexuality without sexism (hierarchies that privilege men over women inside hetero couples) and without heterosexism (hierarchies that position heterosexuality as the cultural norm while marginalizing bi, trans, queer, celibate, and poly communities). See Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger's Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader. While there is of course a range of options besides adultery for creating alternative heterosexualities (open marriages, swinging, sex clubs, etc.), I see no reason to exclude adultery from this list on the basis of moral distinctions between more and less politically correct arrangements. It is perhaps the least radical but also the most immediately available option for many people (especially here in the rural Bible Belt South). [Return to text]

4. Feminist sociologist Laurel Richardson worked in a similar vein nearly 20 years ago in The New Other Woman: "Just as women's sexuality, generally, has been ignored until quite recently, so have the sexual life and experiences of the Other Woman: We know virtually nothing about them" (35). Richardson writes of women who find married men to be comfortable partners because it allows them to build careers and have free time in ways that husbands would not permit. But the interviews with these women show that even when they went into affairs with these desires for some other kind of womanhood, more work-centered and independent, they still became emotionally involved and ended up feeling used, exploited, and mistreated, their time sucked up by waiting for him to call, making themselves available, working around his married life for time together. Sadly, she concludes, "The 'deviant' world of the single woman and the married man is not so deviant after all. Being a part of that world supports, at the personal level, the perpetuation of the social and cultural bulwarks of male privilege" (153). Richardson goes from this point to her conclusion that Other Women are actually supporting the status quo, but she does not consider the ways her data could be used to question marriage as a problematic structure that is not serving husbands or wives well. While Richardson's study makes important headway in understanding the choice to become an Other Woman, I find that her conclusions inadvertently accept the status quo of hegemonic heterosexuality. [Return to text]

5. My own experience as a wife informs this analysis of adultery, possession, stigma, and status. I am working on a longer version of this article, co-authored with Kate Frank, that develops a connection between sexual experimentation and the cultural phenomenon we have called "fear of wifing" (with a nod to Erica Jong). Much of what could be read in this essay as my aggression toward a particular wife is, as the longer article demonstrates, actually directed at the naïve and embarrassed part of myself that once was a wife and might still consider being one, the part of me that has bought into cultural myths of marriage as the epitome of female fulfillment and maturity. [Return to text]

6. This term appears in an outline of the debate over Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque (Stallybrass and White 19). Carnival, as a metaphor of socially disruptive play and excess, the pursuit of pleasure and the resistance to policing, is described "as having a persistent demystifying potential" (18). It is in this sense that wearing the wedding ring struck me as progressive, demystifying much of the marriage mystique it would signify on a wife's hand. It commemorated "a moment when those being moved in accordance to a cultural script were liberated from normative demands" (18). Yet carnival is subject to criticism for "its failure to do away with the official dominant culture, its licensed complicity" (19), a point to which I return in my conclusion. [Return to text]

7. Alice Echols writes, "And, in demanding 'respect,' rather than challenging the terms upon which women are granted 'respect,' cultural feminists reinforce the distinction between the virgin and the whore," and further, "'respect' is merely the flipside of violation" (Vance 64). Beverly Skeggs also makes important connections between the discourse of respectability and the intersection of gender and class in the production of femininity; respectability drapes economic markers (such as the wedding ring in my discussion) in the modest if disingenuous garb of morality. [Return to text]

8. Eve Sedgwick's analysis of homoerotic dynamics underlies this point. [Return to text]

9. In Heterosexual Women Changing the Family: Refusing to be a 'Wife'!, Jo VanEvery interviews a wide range of women practicing alternative forms of heterosexuality, but her study reveals a pattern in which participants often hold "the idea that it is possible to control the meaning and practice of one's own marriage" but soon develop "some recognition, usually gained through experience, that this [control] was limited" because "external factors influenced [the marriage's] meaning and character" (21). [Return to text]

10. The subsection title, "The End of the (Af)fair," connects the adulterous love affair with the history of fairs as sites of social transgression. I am drawing here again on debates in cultural studies over the carnivalesque and the problem of complicity, also picked up in John Fiske's analysis of television culture. Stallybrass and White outline the criticism of carnival as a form of resistance that has no politically transformative effects; the carnival is a "licensed release" that ultimately "serves the interests of that very official culture which it apparently opposes" (13). "The carnival spirit," they quote one historian as arguing, "could therefore be a vehicle for social protest and the method for disciplining that protest" (13). This debate mirrors the structure-agency debate in feminism and has been resolved in much the same way, with a commitment to recognizing that "in some contexts, carnival can work to strengthen the social order, but in others, particularly in times of social tension, its effects can be much more disruptive" (Fiske 100). Fiske writes

[I]t can be argued that progressive practices are panaceas allowed by the system to be flexible and to contain points of opposition within it. By allowing the system to be flexible and to contain points of opposition within it, such progressive practices actually strengthen that to which they are opposed, and thus delay the radical change that is the only one that can bring about a genuine improvement in social conditions. . . . Its problem is that it can so easily lead to a pessimistic reductionism that sees all signs of popular progress or pleasure as totalitarian and resistible only by direct radical or revolutionary action. . . . [T]he theoretical focus needs to shift from the structural process to the socially located practice. The emphasis on incorporation may well be theoretically tenable, but it is politically sterile because, in the current and foreseeable conditions of capitalist societies, it offers no hope of being able to mobilize the popular support necessary for such radical social change. . . . Against this is the argument that what is called 'incorporation' is better understood as a defensive strategy forced upon the powerful by the guerrilla raids of the weak. Incorporation always involves giving up some ground, the concession of space; such a continued erosive process may well provide changes in the system that allow significant improvements in the condition of the subordinate (192).

Fiske has been charged with "substitut[ing] the politically conscious and savvy resister of dominant ideology as the typical user of popular culture" (Shattuc et al. 38); I can imagine a parallel charge against my essay for imagining all Other Women as politically conscious and savvy resisters of marriage culture, but I hope I have refrained from generalizing about Other Women based on my own experience, or even overestimating the savviness of my own actions. [Return to text]

11. I owe this point to Laura Kipnis, who borrows terminology from Marxist theory to analyze adultery as a gesture that represents discontent with the status quo of work (both the work ethic in business and the labor of love in which we work on relationships):

What if adultery . . . were construed as a mode of experimentation? Consider that without a proper place (the home), or institutional sanctions (the marital contract), it too relies on improvisation and invention; poaching from established spaces; haphazardly borrowing, rejecting, or inverting its conventions on an ad hoc basis. Like previous bricoleurs and collage artists, it produces new forms out of detritus and leftovers; a few scraps of time, some unused emotions are stuck together to create a new, unforeseen thing. . . . [A]dultery does, in effect, materially rearrange the most fundamental geometry of social reproduction, the couple form . . ."

Adultery, in her analysis, marks resistance to the ethos of renunciation she sees as central to civilized society: "My point is that what is so ordinary and accepted as to go quite unnoticed in all of this is simply that toxic levels of everyday unhappiness or grinding boredom are the functional norm in many lives and marriages; that adultery, in some fumbling way, seeks to palliate this . . ." Kipnis concludes, "Adultery doesn't necessarily present you with models of utopian worlds; instead the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies . . ." She believes we must harness this utopian longing in the service of material social change. [Return to text]