Tales of Republicans, Bonobos and Adultery

You’d think the family values branch of the Republican Party would have this down pat: Americans disapprove of adultery. They disapprove of it so much that they rank philandering as less morally acceptable than the death penalty, cloning humans or suicide.

A Gallup poll of 1,015 adults nationwide — conducted in May just before we were treated to the saucier details of the lives of South Carolina’s Republican governor and Nevada’s Republican senator — found that 92 percent of Americans think it is morally wrong for a married man or woman to have a fling.

Just as many said it is morally O.K. to condemn criminals to death. And the opprobrium doesn’t merely reflect a fleeting new impulse to protect marriage. In the last decade, adultery’s approval rating has never risen above 9 percent.

Sex between nonmarried straights was considered morally acceptable by 57 percent of those polled. Gay sex had an approval rating of 47 percent. Another poll conducted by the Pew Research Center three years ago found that Americans considered adultery worse than abortion, smoking marijuana or cheating on taxes.

It is hard not to be bemused by the contrast between the straight-and-narrow political persona of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and his messy, steamy circumstances. Still, I am somewhat perplexed by the surprise and the outrage over a transgression that has been around forever.

We all have heard the Kinsey statistics: half of married men reported having an extramarital affair at some time during their marriage; a quarter of married women had an affair by the time they were 40. Even if we account for men’s propensity to brag, there is still a lot of illicit sex going on.

So it is curious how American society arrived at its current moral positions.

It’s been nearly 40 years since the biologist Robert Trivers posited that the evolutionary imperative to maximize offspring would lead to mostly promiscuous males and nonpromiscuous females. Because males only invest a small amount of sperm in reproduction, philandering increases their reproductive success. Females, who invest much more time and energy in each offspring, would prefer one high-quality mate.

But females could be unfaithful, too, if it improved their chances to pass on their genes. Female bonobo chimpanzees have sex with dozens of males to obscure the paternity of offspring and thus stop males from killing infants to get their mothers to stop breastfeeding and become fertile again.

Human strategies have responded to similar considerations of reproductive success. Polygamy stretches back at least thousands of years to the Babylonian empire, not only because powerful men wanted as many women as they could afford and could impose their will on. Even when women had a choice, it could make more sense for them to be the second wife of a rich man than the first wife of a poor one.

The anthropologist Laura Betzig is quoted as saying, “Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy’s third wife than Bozo the Clown’s first?”

Today, studies have found that men still prefer young, healthy women who can produce healthy babies, while women prefer wealthy men who can contribute resources to rear them. But while polygamy is still practiced in parts of Africa and the Middle East, the industrial West is uniformly monogamous. Philandering remains as a vestigial appendage, a counterproductive urge that can end marriages and political careers.

Some suggest the end of polygamy came through the empowerment of women. Others think it was outlawed by Christianity. But the church condoned the practice among the European nobility for centuries. And the women’s movement was too recent. The waning of polygamy did not spell the end of patriarchal societies. A more plausible explanation is the opposition of less fortunate men that were left out of the mating game. It was not about the sex. It was about the inequality.

I’m not sure that fuels the outrage with philandering politicians. I do know that only one behavior came close to the disapproval of adultery in the Gallup poll. Polygamy — deemed wrong by 91 percent of Americans.

Question:

What is the typical profile of a homosexual narcissist?

Answer:

I am a heterosexual and thus deprived of an intimate acquaintance with
certain psychological processes, which allegedly are unique to homosexuals.
I find it hard to believe that there are such processes, to begin with.
Research failed to find any substantive difference between the psychological
make-up of a narcissist who happens to have homosexual preferences – and a
heterosexual narcissist.

Continue to read this article here (click on this link):

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq18.html

Women narcissists

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq34.html

Narcissists are people who fail to maintain a stable sense of self-worth.
Very often somatic narcissists (narcissistic who use their bodies and their
sexuality to secure Narcissistic Supply) tend to get involved in
extra-marital affairs. The new "conquests" sustain their grandiose fantasies
and their distorted and unrealistic self-image.

Continue to read this article here (click on this link):

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq61.html

Question:

Are narcissists mostly hyperactive or hypoactive sexually and to what extent
are they likely to be unfaithful in marriage?

Answer:

Continue to read this article here (click on this link):

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/faq29.html

Narcissists are repulsed and intimidated by intimacy

http://samvak.tripod.com/intimacyabuse.html

http://samvak.tripod.com/journal60.html

http://samvak.tripod.com/abuse14.html

Our sexual behavior expresses not only our psychosexual makeup but also the
entirety of our personality. Sex is the one realm of conduct which involves
the full gamut of emotions, cognitions, socialization, traits, heredity, and
learned and acquired behaviors. By observing one's sexual predilections and
acts, the trained psychotherapist and diagnostician can learn a lot about
the patient.

Inevitably, the sexuality of patients with personality disorders is thwarted
and stunted. In the Paranoid Personality Disorder, sex is depersonalized and
the sexual partner is dehumanized. The paranoid is besieged by persecutory
delusions and equates intimacy with life-threatening vulnerability, a
"breach in the defenses" as it were. the paranoid uses sex to reassure
himself that he is still in control and to quell is anxiety.

Continue to read this article here (click on this link):

http://samvak.tripod.com/personalitydisorders47.html

Narcissists are either cerebral or somatic. In other words, they either
generate their Narcissistic Supply by applying their bodies or by applying
their minds.

Continue to read this article here (click on this link):

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/journal21.html

Most patients with the Histrionic Personality Disorder are women. This
immediately raises the question: Is this a real mental health disorder or a
culture-bound syndrome which reflects the values of a patriarchal and
misogynistic society? A man with similar traits is bound to be admired as a
"macho" or, at worst, labeled a "womanizer".

Continue to read this article here (click on this link):

http://samvak.tripod.com/personalitydisorders17.html

She shifts uneasily in her seat: "I like to flirt. A little flirting never
hurt nobody is what I say."

Continue to read this article here (click on this link):

http://samvak.tripod.com/personalitydisorders52.html