David Berreby, in his Big Think column waxes forgiving (esque) about the fact that Anthony Weiner’s gaze strayed from his pregnant wife’s burgeoning belly and landed on the adoring Twitter feeds of total strangers. Berreby cites statistics indicating that men become less faithful as they face fatherhood, and posits that, even while men can be doting, devoted partners who look forward to raising a child with the woman they love, a wife’s pregnancy “… can also be the moment when the prospective father is most prey to a prickly, eager nostalgia for aspects of life that feel, somehow, incompatible with fatherly gravitas.”
So just when we’re puking and acquiring fat asses and our skin is getting all blotchy and we no longer have an arabesque (although we’re just as wildly happy as Anthony Weiner et al, don’t get us wrong), these people are trying to set up little ego tents in campgrounds in counties where they’ve never even set foot.
That said, I completely agree with (my friend David) Berreby when he says that men can be both devoted husbands/fathers-to-be and twitchy unreliable douchebags. That makes total sense. Because seriously, you don’t think a pregnant woman would rather be having hot sex at the George V with a young Spanish intellectual than rubbing cocoa butter all over her stretch marks?
My question is unrelated to this. What I want to know is what makes men think that women are interested in weird abstract images of penises. Or chests. Specifically their penises or chests. My kid tells me that a central tenet of the Vagina Monologues (which I truthfully never saw) is that men should simply find women’s genitalia beautiful. Alright, so unattached weird vaginas are supposed to be beautiful. No. Ew. I furthermore assert that weird immaterial penises, that are almost surely not going to be, you know, of particular proximity or use, are also kind of icky. Ditto chests. They’re just not that attractive, unless you’re attached to the owner. I’m not sure if this makes me a romantic or a pragmatist, or just a ho. In any case, sending photos of your parts to strange women is just asinine. And it belies an all too familiar testosterone-driven lunacy wherein powerful men think their things are so fucking cool.
I don’t think Weiner should resign because he did anything so egregious. But I do think we are at a point in our country’s history where we say that men in power ought to be stripped of the fantasy that everyone on planet earth is besotted with every part of their being. Because we’re not. They should know that they’re not that big – really, Anthony, seriously – and that their chest has weird bony protrusions. Just like most women know that we are not in every aspect universally attractive.
