Man against Man
Man against Man
Masculinity, Femininity, and the Vilified Cheating Woman
In this chapter, the author interrogates cultural assumptions and narratives about cheating wives and cuckolded husbands to argue that infidelity has a gender structure. To do so, the author begins by describing an experience of having sex with a lover’s best friend and argues that the narratives we tell about monogamy and infidelity, including those offered by evolutionary anthropologists and infidelity advice websites, reflect and sustain normative expectations for masculinity and femininity and establish the monogamous couple as natural and, in its natural form, restricted to white middle-class women and men. Summarizing anthropological research on polyandry, the author suggests that introducing polyamory to erotic triangulation between two men and a woman opens up the possibility for queering heteromasculinity. To conclude, the author offers a fictional alternative to the original story of having sex with the lover’s best friend to illustrate polyqueer masculinities and femininities.
Keywords: infidelity, evolutionary anthropology, polyandry, polyamory, polyqueer, masculinity, femininity
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