“I’m not his girlfriend and he’s a grown-up. What he does is on him.”
“Look, clearly what he’s doing sucks—”
She scowled.
“What I don’t understand is how you can recognize that and admit that it sucks but not see yourself as participating in it.”
“Fine,” she said and her nostrils flared, “is that what you want? You want me to admit that I’m doing something bad? Fine. But why not blame him? He’s the one who’s actually cheating on his girlfriend.”
“Well . . . but you’re both doing something wrong.”
“You know what? I don’t even know why the fuck I came in here. So you could judge me? I was being honest with you. It took a lot to come in here and admit that.”
Admit what, exactly, I don’t think she was sure, considering her refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing and also claiming she’d put a stop to something that had been stopped for her. The “I was being honest” defense is always the last refuge of shitty people.
She stood abruptly and added, “I put myself out there and you just knocked me down to feel better about yourself,” before storming out of my office.
It was in that moment something pretty critical dawned on me: if she were a sociopath, she’d be nicer. She’d also probably be smarter, because it’s my understanding that sociopaths are gregarious and enterprising and can convince you of things and other stuff I’d probably know if I wasn’t intellectually lazy and attempted to understand my accusations before making them.
This was all very important because it led to my second realization: if my coworker was not a sociopath, she might actually be normal. Her bizarre line of reasoning and refusal to identify any kind of culpability of her own might be a common human thing. That because she enjoyed having sex with our coworker, she was going to continue to do so. She knew full well that he had a girlfriend he’d been living with for a few years and did it anyway. It was like she was on some kind of Seesaw of Immorality, with his girlfriend on the Sucker’s Side and her on the fun No-Accountability Orgasm Side, which is basically what The Art of War is about.
Of course, for the one being cheated on, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
—
It happened a little over a year into living in New York. Cecil had been distant since we moved to the city. I didn’t think much of it because he’d also been depressed: he hated his succession of temp jobs, hated that he had to work for the year before law school, which he especially hated because the school—due to his unremarkable LSAT performance—was third tier. Still, despite his gathering bigotry and other grating personality traits that began to reveal themselves post-college, I had at least pegged him for a loyal person.
One night, he left his phone on my desk and I noticed an undeniably suggestive text flash across the screen. The sender had a girl’s name, one he’d never mentioned. I picked up his phone and read through an extensive back-and-forth between him and a woman named Leah, a coworker, I learned, who wanted to know his email address so she could send him pictures of her sexy Halloween costume. She had gone as Liza Minnelli’s burlesque performer from Caberet and was “sad” she hadn’t gotten to “show it to [him].” He replied by giving her an email address I didn’t know he had.
I called him into our bedroom and asked him if he had any email addresses I didn’t know about. I wanted to see the extent of his untruth. He told me he didn’t and looked at me like I was crazy. I told him I knew he was lying. He stuttered, affecting sudden clarity, and told me he kept another account for his online poker persona. I told him he was going to open the account in front of me.
This was one of the strangest moments of my life: he sat down beside me, opened his laptop, and—just like in the movies—Cecil began to sweat. His forehead beaded immediately with it. I had always thought this physical response to being caught was the device of lazy writers. Turns out, it happens. His hands, also, shook as he typed in the user name and password.
The inbox revealed a pretty staggering trove of deceit: not only provocative emails between him and the coworker (in her sexy Halloween costume, garter belt and all) but also dozens of emails from “adult” social networking sites. He swore up and down he hadn’t met with any of the strangers from online—that he’d only video chatted with some, received a few explicit pictures and posted his own explicit pictures that he took in our bedroom. If you’re ever curious what feebleness is, by the way, it’s a series of images of a grown man tugging on his penis over dirty white briefs while conspicuously grappling with his laptop’s webcam to capture the most alluring angle. I’m still incapable of understanding how one takes oneself seriously while adding a sepia filter.
Not only were there pictures, but the email exchanges were similarly shocking. They’d all begin with a sparkling physical description of himself (height, weight, eye and hair color) and then they’d launch into desperately sad self-promotion. How he enjoyed reading philosophy, how his favorite authors were Hemingway and Fitzgerald, how the music he was currently into was all meticulously sourced, as if he’d gone straight to some online arbiter of cool and listed all the bands reviewed favorably that week. He name-checked half a dozen, just as many authors, all the television shows he liked that were “important” in a cultural sense. In a monumental lack of irony, he listed Plato’s Republic as one of his favorite books. If I hadn’t been so furious, I would have been heartbroken for him: Cecil, distant and anguished by his own feelings of inadequacy wasn’t just scavenging the Internet for sex . . . he was also looking for someone to be impressed by him, to find him interesting.
Though fury did come first, my second response was a bizarrely lucid relief that we finally had a legitimate reason to end our foundering relationship. My third was shame—that I could never tell my friends or parents because they’d think less of him and, in turn, think less of me for being with a bad, weak man. Next there was the panic that I’d driven him to cheat on me and it was my fault. He filled a duffel bag and went to stay at a friend’s house.
Unfortunately, we were both poor and neither of us could afford to move without the other, much less swallow the penalty of breaking our lease. We were forced to live out the rest of the year (a crushing six months) in our cramped apartment—I in the bedroom and him on the couch. The next half-year was bewildering and isolating: sometimes I missed the way things had been and wanted to forgive him, mostly the sight of him just made me sick. Our closest friends knew what had happened, but we largely masqueraded as a couple in public because the situation was so horrifying that adding a social dimension—pity, even—seemed unbearable.
On the day we moved out of the apartment, I sat on our stoop and watched him walk the long length of the street, ambling into the sunshine with his arms full of boxes. The first few years we were together, we always parted ways with a sweetly embarrassing series of pauses and waves and glances back. This time he didn’t look back and I wondered if it was intentionally symbolic or he was just ashamed.
Adjusting to life without him took exactly one week of suffocating depression, insomnia and loss of appetite. Then it was over. It was as if I sweated him out in a fever while unable to sleep at four in the morning and on the eighth day I got up and didn’t cry about it ever again. Even though we’d spent (by then) almost four years together, the relationship had died a long time before.
It’s impossible to say that I felt any one way about being cheated on. It was all a kind of nausea, moods and sorrows sloshing together: self-loathing, sanctimony, anguish, outrage, relief and a bizarre satisfaction in the confirming of my suspicion he was so flawed. There were also the more literal but no less troubling realizations: that people you love can turn out to be radically different than you thought; that people will lie if it suits them; that they can justify their behaviors even if they know they’re awful. But perhaps what hurts the most is that he had to go and do it all with the sort of woman who wears a sexy Halloween c
ostume. Not even a good one, like Sexy Heidegger.
—
As for Maude, she should hope that two people never have the same dreadful convenience of morality when it comes to her. Our exchange in the office predated my own experience with infidelity, so I’m glad my instincts were on point. If anything, I only gained a more acute understanding of why behavior like this is bad: if you want to ransack someone’s self-worth and make that person feel betrayed in one of the most savagely intimate ways, cheat. Or, if you’re unhappy in your relationship, end it. In neither scenario exists a place for terminally serious vanity shots of you squeezing your own dick.
I wish there was a better way to say why cheating is bad; that it hurts people is neither a good argument nor a compelling weak one. However, when resorting to deceit and secrecy to satisfy selfish desires at a discernible cost to the well-being of others, it’s hard to claim what we’re doing is any good. We do something bad, generally, whenever we have to silence the part of us that can instinctively distinguish it from good (unless we are sociopaths, informally diagnosed or otherwise). Honesty is not a virtue in and of itself—as I learned from my effusively direct first boyfriend—and perhaps that’s the case because honesty is nothing more than a requirement. Like good hair. And hating Aerosmith.
I’m reminded again of that original anecdote, of my friend saying that human sexuality exists outside the bounds of morality (which also reminds me of how quick I was to dismiss that anecdote as irrelevant to this story, so I guess that was pretty premature). I don’t have the authority to decide if things are ultimately moral or not, which may have been where he was going. But I can try to operate from a basic moral premise: that having sex in a “good” way means sex without duplicity, without treachery and especially without sepia-toned peen. Though the ultimately self-serving allusions to Plato can stay.
A FEW THINGS THAT ARE BAD ABOUT SEX
Sometimes I think the world would be better off if we were all just forced to wear signs advertising what we want or are curious about and then we wouldn’t have to shit all over other people to get what we’re after. For example, if an edgy-looking girl at the bar with tattoos of cassette tapes and scissors and other indie insignia wore a sign that said GIVES HEAD LIKE A BOA CONSTRICTOR BUT FUCKS LIKE A MIME, guys with corresponding interests could simply line up and present their own signs like INTO WEIRD STUFF BUT I’LL CALL YOU AGAIN; TWO MINUTES OF SPORT FUCKING, THEN I GET ANNOYED WITH YOU; WANT TO DRESS UP LIKE A BABY BECAUSE IT’S THE ONLY TIME I FEEL WHOLE and so on. This would save everyone lots of time and energy and potentially debilitating complexes.
No, instead we have to advertise and smell nice and say the right things and try to demonstrate in myriad ways that we’re worth fucking. Unsurprisingly, this can make people really neurotic and self-loathing because they don’t believe they’re good enough and don’t believe anyone will love them. Or want to have sex with them. Even worse, when everyone’s neurotic and self-loathing, people tend not to be very hospitable to each other.
We’ve all been convinced from birth we’re not good enough, unless we were overencouraged as children which is arguably worse (seriously—do you want the person performing open heart surgery on you to have gotten a medical degree because he tried his best?) and, in response, we urgently attempt to look better and make everyone else look worse. Sometimes this comes from insecurity, sometimes it’s a learned behavior, sometimes people are just dicks. The fact of the matter is it’s stressing everyone out.
A lot of times, people want to make others feel bad because they feel bad about their own sexual proclivities. As much as politicians would like us to believe that the only kind of sex they have is plodding sober missionary with their spouses while the lights are off, few people are actually so vanilla. If, for example, you like something as pedestrian as a thumb in your ass while receiving oral sex but you’re ashamed to ask for that, you might lash out at people who are a little more forthright with their own interests and desires.
Cruel forms of competition are the downside to having a huge dating pool (which is to say, humanity) because people are all too happy to disparage others to make themselves look better in the name of finding a partner. The way we compete is often informed by our sense of shame, our own baggage: throughout my life I have heard countless women describe other women as sluts and whores, while as many men I’ve heard describe other men as pussies and faggots. Decent, thoughtful people don’t talk this way, possibly because they’re decent and thoughtful, possibly because they’re not afraid to ask for a thumb in their ass and don’t go around resenting other people because they’re just really satisfied all the time.
Think about all the hours in your life you’ve wasted dieting or matching your socks or thinking your nose isn’t straight enough or worried people will notice that blue vein on your leg or concerned your vagina tastes like old movie nachos. We adorn ourselves with interesting clothing, we accessorize, we take showers and try to have good posture and listen to the right records and say perceptive things about the movies we’re supposed to like. We remove our pubic hair or we don’t or we discuss it in extremely cryptic noncommittal ways without ever really confirming whether we have it or not because using humor and Jurassic Park to obfuscate unease brings us back to what I’m talking about: shame, insecurity and self-loathing as they often manifest in shitting on other people and making the world worse.
—
Men and women compete in very different ways. Well, actually, both men and women are pretty quick to say awful things about perceived rivals, real or straw. Men and women also have similar sets of insecurities, toxic body image and terrible tattoo decision-making abilities. It’s the actual physical manifestation of those insecurities that’s different. Well, no. Mostly men just go to the gym and women eat salad or they eat steak and brag about it.
Men have it really rough. They’ve been conditioned to believe they all have to be cowboys and lone wolves and construction workers and should be ashamed if they become flight attendants or nurses or actuaries. They’re told they need to have these triangle-shaped torsos and square jaws and spend all day in the gym or chopping wood until they develop thighs that can crush two-liter soda bottles (it’s nebulous how, though) and, more than anything, they have to be really potent. I mean semen-wise.
This is the most critically important aspect of the “what it takes to be a man” rubric: potency. No woman wants a guy who’s shooting blanks because the secret of masculinity exists in ribbons of seminal fluid somewhere deep within and if semen doesn’t have masculinity inside then it’s no different from the slime trails that snails leave and if humans aren’t more noble than snails, then what of art? What’s especially sad about this ideal of the hyperpotent male is that it’s totally true and nonnegotiable. I think it’s because there’s no hiding one’s impotency? You can always tell when a sterile man comes inside you. It’s like a dog whistle.
Women have it even more rough because they get old and become invisible the second they can’t pass for “just turned eighteen like a month ago” anymore. If you’re a woman, you have a pretty short shelf life and then you have to start spewing out babies so people will know you’re not brittle. You also can’t go too far with being attractive, otherwise you invite rape and everyone will think you’re shallow. Moreover, as terrifying as it sounds that people might think you’re shallow if you wear lipstick, rape is a serious problem. It actually makes it quite hard for chaste women to live in big cities. I mean, obviously, it’s not a huge problem for promiscuous women, but for women who care about their honor and don’t wear makeup, rape is a constant fear. I’m personally not afraid of being raped because, in addition to my solitary nature, every time I go into a scary neighborhood at night I just put my hair up in a really unflattering ponytail.
Competition naturally makes people a little more aggressive and self-serving, but when it’s compounded by shame or insecurity, it gets vicious. This manif
ests in unintelligent people as, for example, women calling other women fat, men calling other men pussies, homophobes hating gays or the transgendered or anything but the aforementioned sober missionary sex with the lights off. Because as far as the deeply stupid are concerned, the worst thing you can be as a woman is not thin and the worst thing you can be as a man is feminine and they all agree that the worst thing you can be is anything other than very straight (and toned and wealthy, etc.). All that vileness and hate comes from deep fears of inadequacy and if that isn’t confirmation of an almost primordial lack of intellect, then you’re a fat pussy faggot. Luckily, we are not chiefly concerned with the wants of the deeply stupid.
Unluckily, many more problems result from the pride and obliviousness of the half-smart, like myself. So I would like to explain how shame and insecurity and subsequent ruthless competitiveness made me really shitty as a person: I spent a lot of my life sensitive to this idea that being a woman is terrible.
As a young girl, you’re bombarded by ideas and images that are supposed to make you feel bad about yourself (so you’ll buy this expensive horseshit that promises to plump your lips or that useless strip of tape that supposedly removes skin “impurities”). I internalized it all and then decided I was different and that this kind of stuff was targeted at other women, women who “nagged,” women who squealed at spiders, women who counted every calorie, women who had little yappy dogs they carried around in purses with stupid designer logos splashed across the side. All that was for them. Not me. I was different.
Which was just as well, because I never saw myself fitting into girl culture and I regarded its products—those magazines, chick flicks, books with lipstick kisses on the cover—as grim totems from another world. I also became a tomboy very naturally, through a combination of my towering height (always in the back of every class photo) and proximity (all the kids on my block were boys). From the moment, at age ten, when I first wrapped a clod of grass into an empty crayon wrapper and taped it shut and tried to smoke it to impress my male next-door neighbor, I was effectively edged out of the world of pretty princesses and into cool unisex shit like vandalism and alchemy. Years of baggy rock T-shirts and ill-fitting men’s jeans followed.
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