The XX Factor: What women really think.

Bad Mommies? What About Bad Wives?

Hanna, you brought up the Gosselin affair. According to every tabloid in town, Jon Gosselin, costar of Jon & Kate Plus 8, has been cheating on his wife, Kate. The rumors, accusations, and carefully-worded statements are flying fast and furious. Today, Kate defended her husband on the Today Show, where Meredith Vieira read a written denial by a no-show Jon, and now one of the supposed mistress's exes has launched a website featuring stills from a sex tape that he claims to have made of himself with the Hester Prynne of the moment.

It's all sort of ugly—the mudslinging, the sleazy screencaps, the angry recriminations. Kate: "Jon's poor judgment and irresponsible behavior has also without a doubt caused some added tension and stress between the two of us." I'll bet. As if twins and sextuplets weren't enough. Now, this.

But the fact of the matter is that anyone who has spent any time watching the show knows its subplot is their marriage, and the majority of that relationship seems to consist of Kate treating her husband like something that got stuck on the bottom of her shoe, the property of which she cannot quite identify, eliciting a nonstop look of thinly-veiled disgust and disappointment. In fact, it's hard to think of moments in which this housewife is not humiliating, degrading, and emasculating her husband. On camera, no less. In one episode, she actually chastised him for breathing too loudly. There she is in the supermarket ripping him a new one for being a lousy spouse. There she is at the pumpkin patch shouting at him for being a substandard father. There she is telling him to stop mumbling like a fool. There she is explaining to the camera that she doesn't care what anyone else thinks.

As of late, much as been made of "naughty mommies." Why, they've even got their own twitter feed! (Sample question: "What is the Worst Thing You Have Ever Told Your Child ..." Sample answer: "I told my six year old that if he picked his nose one more time his brains would fall out, shame that he then immediately had a nose bleed, much panic in my house then.") It's all so cool. Bad mommies rule! That their fearless leader Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong, earns a purported $40,000 a month in the role of uber-naughty mommy only inspires the rest to be the baddest mommy in the blogosphere.

But what of their husbands? Those men who are regularly depicted by the same bad mommies as fools, as incompetents, as co-failing parents? Well, I guess Jon Gosselin has answered that question. When bad mommies, bolstered by their online sisters, become bad wives, it sucks, doesn't it?

Does She Want Us To Talk About Her?

What Would Claire Booth Luce Have Thought of Elizabeth Edwards and Rielle Hunter?

Hanna, I hear what you say about moxie. What interests me about Edwards is that she doesn't fit any clear mold. She seems at once very strong and very vulnerable. One almost feels that in the very fact that she has lived with advanced cancer for such an extraordinary length of time. On the other hand, Susannah's close reading of the passage about Rielle Hunter is spot-on, to my ear. In this description of how the affair began, Edwards uses language that implicitly depicts Rielle as a fierce, amoral hunter (her last name, after all), and John as little more than biological silly putty; if Elizabeth doesn't quite make John out to be an innocent pup, she does suggests he is merely too pliable. The agency is all the Huntress's.

I suppose that's natural; most of would be angry at the other woman, especially if she's as touchy-feely as Rielle sounds. Do any of you remember this Newsweek piece by Jonathan Darman about his encounters with her?  If I were Elizabeth, I'd be both threatened by Rielle's brand of sinuous femininity and put off by it. If you buy the portrait painted in the Darman piece, Rielle seems to possess a brand of sexual wile that I can’t help feeling is somehow more deeply associated with womanhood, to this day, than almost any other quality. When I read about these women, with their New Age sensitivity, their way of leaning in close at the bar and asking “What sign are you?” I often find myself thinking they're the true "XX" and I'm, say, X and a 1/2.

What's interesting to me about the passage Susannah posts is how you can see that Edwards sort of feels that too, otherwise she would never use words like “target.” The Rielle that Edwards writes about is just a new version of Crystal Edwards from The Women. She sees something she wants and doesn't hesitate to wreck a marriage to get it. These days, though, Crystal Allen doesn’t sell perfume at the perfume counter; she is into astrology and cleanses and freelance video work. In this reading, Elizabeth, of course, is the wholesome wife (Mrs. Stephen Haines) played by Norma Shearer; only the movie doesn't end with her reconciliation with her husband. It ends with her on a talk show, sharpening her nails a bit. And who could blame her?

Elizabeth Edwards' Mistake

John Edwards, Sex Victim

Meghan, I think Maureen Dowd's column on the Edwards debacle now chronicled in Elizabeth's new book, Resilience, is spot-on to call the media spectacle the book has spawned a wife's public flogging of her errant husband. What I find off about Elizabeth's take on the matter is her seemingly recurrent positioning of her husband as a victim of a wanton woman. After John revealed his affair to her, she called for him to “protect our family from this woman."

"It didn’t occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work,” Elizabeth writes in her book, “he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line ‘You are so hot’ and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.”

Targeted? Rielle lying in wait? Give me a break. When it comes to adultery, women too often posit the other woman as the enemy, their husband as the victim, the affair the two had some kind of sordid transgression that never would have happened were he not coerced by this Jezebel. Too bad that in her attempt to share the truth, Elizabeth got mired in the quagmire of not vilifying her husband for his misdeeds enough.

Rule Britannia

According to an article published in the London Times today, we Brits are now the most promiscuous nation in the world (of the western industrial nations, that is). In terms of one-night stands, total number of partners, and our "relaxed" attitude to casual sex, we beat Australia, the United States, Italy, and France. France! Where having extra-marital affairs is a favorite national pastime! If nothing else, at least now we might lose our reputation for being frigid and repressed.

In all seriousness though, Britain has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe as well as the highest teen STD infection rate in Europe (although both are significantly lower than here in the United States, where abstinence-only sex education doesn't seem to be helping much). Premature sex education in British schools (it can be taught to children as young as 4) has long been blamed for the epidemic, along with the inappropriate sexualization of children by toy manufacturers and the media. But here's a thought. In Britain, we also drink more than any other country in Europe (apart from Ireland and Finland, bizarrely), and our alcohol-related death rate has doubled since 1991. We've also, according to this reasonably insulting story in the New York Times, been causing havoc on summer vacations with our abhorrent, booze-soaked behavior. Could there be a correlation somewhere between the beer goggles and the newfound sluttiness?

Cover-Up Accounting

I agree with Rachael and think that unequal hush installments were not only sexist, the distributions were too small. Don't you think $15,000 and $20,000 a month seems measley for the sacrifice Hunter and Young's family were making in their personal lives? 

Were the payments to go on indefinitely, one wonders, or simply until Hunter would be eligible to become the second Mrs. de Winter?

Well, That's Sexist

Rielle Hunter had to spend nine months pregnant and an unreported number of hours in labor before she could milk John Edwards' supporters for $15,000 a month (allegedly).

If the New York Post is to be believed (and why not, at this point?), all Andrew Young had to do before he could milk John Edwards' supporters was claim he fathered little Frances Quinn. And he's getting $20,000 (allegedly).

Ladies, what do we have to do to break the political-scandal glass ceiling?

(hat tip: InstaPundit)

Riellity TV

Meghan, I couldn’t agree more about how depressing the “I’m suffering!” political apology has become. Elizabeth Edwards has terminal cancer; John Edwards has terminal narcissism. Let’s call it a tie? But the more we pick at the threads of rampant narcissism here, the sadder the whole story gets. Melinda points to the weird Newsweek account by Jonathan Darman in which Rielle Hunter emerges as a patchwork of reality show clichés: part actress, part “spiritual adviser,” “New York party girl,” screenwriter, part married, and part divorced.

Her “webisodes,” in which John Edwards drones on and on about John Edwards, manage to be all about Rielle.

The most astonishing part of the Darman piece is Hunter’s disclosure that “she and novelist Jay McInerney were working on a ‘genius' idea for a television show about women who help men get out of failing marriages by having affairs with them.” She apparently “wanted to pitch this idea to Darren Star, creator of ‘Melrose Place’ and ‘Sex and the City.’ ” Betcha $15,000 it’s in production by September.

Chat With Melinda Henneberger

XX Factor blogger Melinda Henneberger will be chatting online at Washingtonpost.com today at 2 p.m. Send her a question. We'll post a link to the transcript here when she's done.

Melinda wrote about the Edwardses' marriage for Slate back in December, in advance of the primaries. (Also the Obamas, the Huckabees, and, yep, the Clintons.) She's a frequent contributor here at the XX Factor, and you can read a previous chat transcript here.

Paging Henry Cisneros ...

John Edwards is reminding me more and more of poor Henry Cisneros, who was on his way to becoming the Latino Obama before he cheated on his saintly wife, Mary Alice, while she was pregnant with their third child, a son born with no spleen and a malformed heart and stomach. Bill Clinton asked Cisneros to serve as his housing secretary anyway, a few years later, and by then, the affair was such old news that it never even came up during his confirmation hearings. Yet in the course of his background check for the cabinet post, Cisneros lied to the FBI—not about whether he was supporting his former mistress, but about the amount he paid her—and as a result, was subjected to a four-year investigation by a special prosecutor, a probe that cost taxpayers $9 million. Heck of a public servant, Henry, so big-hearted and capable; watching him work a crowd in San Antonio back in the day, you'd have sworn you were looking at the future. But at some point after he stopped paying Linda Medlar, she started taping their phone calls, and triggered the investigation. When the judge who presided over his trial finally asked Cisneros why he'd lied in the first place, he explained that while he wasn't positive himself about the amount he'd paid Medlar, he was positive he didn't want his wife to know how high that figure was. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor, and when he left public life, we all lost out. So, what's the relevance?

First, it's that scary as we wives can be, federal investigators are scarier, and if any of the $15,000 a month that's being paid to Edwards' ex-girlfriend came from campaign funds, I cannot overemphasize how seldom fudging the facts with the Feds works out. Second, what do Monica Lewinsky, Linda Medlar, and Rielle Hunter have in common? All were employees, and world-class blabbermouths. (You never really hear about the guys who get involved with the quiet types, do you?) It's silly to say we don't care if politicians fool around as long as they don't lie about it; how is that supposed to work? (Though if we replaced those one-minute morning speeches they give in Congress with a daily adultery roll call, CSPAN would definitely do some box office.) And until we figure it out, we're stuck pretending these people are perfect and then, when we find out otherwise, pretending we're surprised.

As it is, we're so perplexed about how to treat this stuff I can't even tell what this first-person Newsweek piece is trying to say. In it, reporter Jonathan Darman tells about his own adventures with Rielle Hunter, a woman so fascinating that after meeting her on a trip to Iowa with Edwards in 2006, Darman spends weeks trying to track her down and months getting to know her. After concluding she's an unreliable source, he keeps in touch anyway: "I continued to see her. ... I liked Rielle'' and "let her do my astrological chart.''  From the way he describes their boozy first lunch, I can't tell if he suspected she and Edwards were carrying on or not: Is the tone confessional because he missed the story, because he had the story and sat on it, or because he fell for the "I can tell you're an old soul'' hoodoo himself? (The last guy I knew who talked like that wound up blowing town with the life savings of several women who each thought they were going to marry him and start an ashram.) Hunter told Darman that in this incarnation, she wanted to help Edwards become a transformational figure on a par with Gandhi or MLK; better luck next time? 

Wait, *Why* Should I Care About Edwards' Affair??

I am incredibly annoyed that we have to waste any air, print, or pixel time on this. Why do I care about some dude's marriage and marital problems—unless he did something that in any way abuses public power? Comstockery, as I wrote in CJR once upon a time. Celebtainment and domestic voyeurism disguised as politics.

I just don't care what politicians do with their zippers, so long as their policies and votes are in order. By nature, national politicians are people who want power and want to be admired, even adored, to an absurd degree. (Not my fabulous mom, the township trustee and former Beavercreek, Ohio, mayor! But small-town politics—zoning, sewage, 32,000 citizens—is quite different from national politics.) Really, what emotionally healthy person would run for president of the United States? You have to have some ego issues to even imagine it might be possible.

Some large proportion of them will mess around. I. Do. Not. Care.

Was there any abuse of power—sexual harassment, assault, coercion? Did anyone get pinned up against the wall and groped against her or his will? Any abuse of public funds? Any manipulation to get a lover or family member a public job? Any payment to use someone else's body, which I find more and more appalling the more I learn about the sex trade? Then I have the emotional energy to be outraged.

But private dalliances, seductions, and oversize sexual appetites? Eh. Not my problem. Leave the poor family alone.

Just a Couple More Questions for John Edwards

Just a couple of questions are clouding my understanding of all this, counselor, and stuff I'd still like to know includes:

Was all this going on when you renewed your wedding vows last summer at that intimate backyard ceremony where you wrote your own vows and there was not a dry eye in the house? (The one your wife of 30 years lost weight for, because she wanted to look pretty for you and fit into her wedding dress?)

Is this why you keep losing your wedding ring?

When Elizabeth waited to tell you that she had a lump in her breast the size of a golf ball because she swore to God after Wade died she'd never give you any bad news ever again ... your way of repaying her was with the news you'd betrayed her, Cate, Wade's memory, and the babies she gladly took dangerous hormones to conceive? Got it.

Oh, and just one more: Remember all those holier-than-Bill Clinton remarks? So do I. If you think anyone in the universe believes your beyond Clinton-esque "I was standing on one foot when we did it so it doesn't count'' nonsense, or cares whether you used the L-word, or trusts for a single segundo that you're not the baby daddy? I think you're about to find out how cold it can get in summer, senator.

And as for you, Miss Hunter? Even if all your dreams one day come true, life as the second Mrs. de Winter is going to look pleasant by comparison.

P.S. post interview: So sue me—anybody know a good lawyer?—but I can't help feeling just a little bit sorry for the whole human race when I see just one more ninny who threw it all away for five minutes with an 80s coke—nope, not gonna fall into that blame-the-woman trap. I don't know why Edwards kept repeating, "This is my fault and no one else's.' (Duh.) Nerves, I guess. 

The most unbelievable part of the interview was when he said his buddy Fred Baron, formerly of Baron & Budd, had been paying his former mistress $15,000 a month behind his back; dude, you can lie better than that! Baron is a big Dallas lawyer who made his $$ suing people for asbestos exposure, even when there were no damages. I was in his house once a million years ago, for a party he threw when a friend of mine married one of his law partners, and asbestos has been very good to him, even if I do recall my fellow working stiffs from the paper standing around the pool making fun of his ugly art; that's what happens when you invite a bunch of reporters into chi-chi Preston Hollow. A little while back, Baron even sued his own law firm, so the idea that this total shark would lay out 15 large a month just for grins and all on his own is the lamest load of hooey I've heard outside a campaign ad.  

But—yes, Mickey, this is the moment you've been waiting for—there is also no getting around the fact that Elizabeth was flat wrong, too, after she found out about the affair, not to tell him in no uncertain terms that he would not be running in '08 after all, for the good of the party if nothing else. I'm sure they convinced themselves that what he had to offer the country was worth the risk, but it wasn't, and that is some major enabling she was involved in; the Democrats are darn lucky they got No Drama Obama instead.  

 Melinda Henneberger will be chatting on Washingtonpost.com about the Edwards affair at 2 p.m. today. Send her a question!

(Political) Husbands and Wives: Not Like You and Me

OK, here's a question: Years before the sex-scandal press conference or the chunky pearls, do political wives see their husbands differently than the rest of us see the mere mortals we promised to love, honor and so on? Obviously, there's no one model for a marriage in the public eye, any more than there is for a marriage only the neighbors care about—and even then, not that much as long as you keep the noise down. But I do wonder whether some of these spouses don't end up extra disillusioned because they're required to put their mates on the kind of pedestal that Mr. Ellen Tien has never set foot on. (No, that most certainly does not mean that whatever happens is on them, especially since idealizing these politicians is such a big part of their job description.) And yes, I am thinking all this because of the current John Edwards scandal, and because to say that Elizabeth believes in John is like saying that Washington is on the warm side this time of year, or Middlemarch is not a bad book.

But most mates of the contenders seem to feel that way—or maybe it only looks like that because when they don't appear to believe their men were born in a manger, we totally freak out, like how dare Teresa Heinz mention her deceased husband, the father of her children, and how unheard of for Michelle Obama to remark upon even the most minute and mundane of her husband's flaws. I keep thinking about Cindy McCain, when her husband was running the first time, telling me that she found her husband "a real inspiration'' -- and then stopping herself, quite charmingly, and adding, "I guess anyone would say that about their husband.'' No, they wouldn't; in fact, outside the bubble, I've never heard any woman say, suggest, hint, or infer any such thing, no matter how nice her husband or contented her marriage. So, without letting any of these guys off the hook, I guess my question is, isn't the public's demand for a mythic narrative that no actual person can ever live up to part of the problem?

My Challenge to Emily and Mickey: Bag a Philanderer and Then Get Back to Me

Here's the thing: I just do not see you chasing anybody into the men's room in the middle of the night, Emily B. Or you either, Mickey. And believe me, I mean this as a compliment. So, if you wouldn't want all-night stakeout duty outside the hotel where the National Enquirer seems to have cornered John Edwards and his "love child''—sorry, but I can't hear that phrase without imagining Diana Ross breaking into song—why are you so enthusiastic about having someone else do the dirty work?

Isn't cheering and leering from the comfort of the cheap seats on something like this (yeah, you go out and get that sleazo story that I personally would consider beneath my dignity) the journo equivalent of being a Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld-style chickenhawk? And isn't there a journalistic equivalent of the fruit of the poison tree? I mean, this is how sex scandals become news: Either the stories burble up from the tabloids, like toxic sludge at a superfund site, or the former lover steps to the microphone, a la Gennifer Flowers. (I used to think the reason we had so many more Democratic than Republican sex scandals was that the conservatives were rather more liberal in taking care of their former close personal friends—a theory developed after some or other supposed mistress was busted for failing to pay duty on several fur coats she was bringing into the country. But this is an outdated assumption on several levels.)

Anyway, the relevant question isn't whether every time a fire breaks out in somebody's pants it's news; if people want to know about it—and oh, we do, and me as much as anybody—then of course it meets that low bar. To me, the question is whether this is how we in the news business want to spend our time, energy, and ever-shrinking resources. Mickey quite fairly accuses me of failing to get totally "inside the marriage'' of John and Elizabeth Edwards and I don't disagree; that is an awfully big claim. (That he saw my piece on them as a PR release in defense of their big ol' house, however, just shows that the reader brings at least as much to the story as the writer does; I'd be willing to bet good money—euros, in other words—that Elizabeth didn't see it that way.) In any case, there is a difference between "inside the marriage" and inside the pants! We can learn plenty that's legit and pertinent about a candidate by looking at his or her spouse and their relationship without necessarily providing a detailed sexual history.

And if you think stories like that are no problem to double rivet even if you wanted to, just look at the debacle of the NYT piece on John McCain and Vicki Iseman; four top reporters were on the case for months and netted only hearsay that struck readers across the political spectrum as cheap and beneath the paper's usual standards. Not that I'm looking down my nose at their efforts, because the exact point at which the public interest outweighs privacy concerns is not always so easy to pin down, either. On the contrary, it's because I've been sent out on so many stories like that—located out there somewhere in the vast expanse of moral gray area—that privacy issues are not theoretical for me.

Grieving relatives? I've knocked on their doors at daybreak and approached them coming out of church. Politicians and their personal lives? I've asked questions that made even me wince lots of times, and written a handful of stories that were true but broke my own heart to see in print. On one memorable occasion, I was ordered to "dress up like a delivery girl if you have to'' to get the scoop on Donald Trump's first divorce. (No, it didn't come to that, but I did come back with the story and made my editor's day.) So I'm not pure, pretending to be pure, or acting like these aren't ever hard calls. And if you've never toiled in these particular vineyards, then how much easier it must be to declare, as Emily did at this week's "Gabfest," that love affairs involving public figures are always news and that proof of philandering is automatically disqualifying. (Can I possibly have heard you right? You really couldn't bear having an AG who had fooled around? After all we've been through with this crew of perhaps perfect husbands who happened to be lousy public servants?)

So here's my invitation to Emily and Mickey: If you are so high on stories like this, if they seem to you such a cinch to nail down and such a no-brainer to run with, then what's stopping you? It's not like all the good ones are taken, just because the Edwards story is already in print and available at your local supermarket. No, there's a wide selection of rumored philanderers out there—gay and straight, old and young, R and D—just waiting to be bagged. And once you have done that, then you can get back to me on whether that experience has altered your opinion at all, about either the righteousness or the relative value of these stories.

Meanwhile, the bottom line for me looking at the Slate site back when we started this conversation was wow, here we have this great, well-reported story on how a bunch of top Bush officials may have committed war crimes they will in all likelihood never be prosecuted for—but a luv child, now that's a clear career-ender? Sometimes, I just think that when it comes to sex, our whole country needs some kind of therapeutic intervention.

John Edwards' Third Act

Melinda, I don't mean to sound calloused and insensitive on top of my stated willingness to invade personal privacy, but, notwithstanding how plucky and determined she is, Elizabeth Edwards has inoperable metastasized cancer. Cancer grows, that's its job (though, to be sure, effective treatment can slow it way down and seems to be doing so for Edwards). Of course, one hopes for a miraculous survivor story, but a practical conversation about the other woman who might someday be raising her children is, though unimaginably difficult, not inappropriate.

I had breast cancer in 1995 and share Melinda's post-surgical hopefulness. If I'd had a less positive outlook, however, I would certainly have wanted my husband to remarry someone who could be a mother to my then-minor child. (I would, however, expect him to sequence the two events more traditionally than John Edwards has.) Now that Edwards must, as Emily Y. points out, inevitably exit political life, the next order of business should be the welfare of all his young children.

But Would You Want the Byline?

Mickey's Dream Has Been Rielle-ized

And guess what? I still don't want to know. If this story about John Edwards is true—and yes, I still say if—I might have to snatch him bald-headed myself. But you know what would be worse? Chasing a man who is out of politics up and down the back stairs of a hotel in the middle of the night for the purpose of ... what? Making his family suffer more than they already have? Bad juju, people.

Click here to read more from XX Factor on the John Edwards scandal.

Why Don't Women Cheat More?

Somebody please stop me, but I'm afraid I have more to say on the subject that Tim Noah challenged us to: "What makes married women want to have affairs?"

I ran into Meghan in the ladies' room, and we both scoffed at the notion that "You don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex."

I will agree with you on one point. Yeah, you don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. (In the same way they don't call and don't tell you they want to break up—they just disappear—or so the stereotype goes.) You do, or at least I do, hear stories from women about how their husbands have stopped having sex with them. For years.

Here's just one example that I found quickly. OK, the guy is depressed; maybe he is atypical. But, as a woman with female friends and relatives, I hear many stories like this.

I don't think the apt question is why do women want to cheat? I think the question is, why don't women cheat more?

And at the risk of embarrassing myself yet again, I will venture an answer with no research to back it up whatsoever except for my own little opinions and anecdotes.

First, a caveat. I sort of hate to talk about this stuff in this way. I hate to get into the gross generalizations of "all men always do this" and "all women always do that." So could we just stipulate that when I say "men" I mean "some men, sometimes" and ditto for "women"?

A male acquaintance once said to me, "I want to have sex with every woman I see." This sentence troubled me for a long time. Did he really want to have sex with every woman he saw?

I decided that the problematic word wasn't every. It was see. I assumed he simply didn't see women he didn't find attractive. That was upsetting in its own way, but at least that meant he didn't want to have sex with every woman in his purview.

I told him I'd heard that men think about sex something like 10 times a day. He told me that figure was way too low. It was more like 50 or 100 times a day ("or 1,000 or 1,000,000," other men chimed in—if this is true, how do men get anything done?). We hear statistics like that a lot; turns out they are all bunk. Nonetheless, it got me wondering: How many times a day did I think about sex? How many men did I see that I wanted to have sex with?

I decided to do some observation and experimentation. Turns out the amount of time I think about sex is quite variable. Sometimes it can be a lot in one day. Sometimes it can be not for days or even weeks.

As for the experiment, I played a little game with myself: I decided that when I was on the subway I would ask myself, "If I had to have sex with someone in this car, who would it be?"

Granted, I don't often ride the subway at the height of rush hour when there are a lot more people to choose from, and that fluorescent lighting is pretty harsh, but I have to tell you, some days it was pretty hard to find anyone at all (of course choosing someone solely based on appearance is not the only way to become interested in someone). The conclusion: It's pretty rare that I see a man I want to have sex with. (In real life, anyway, on movie and television screens is a different story.) So rare, in fact, that when I do find myself attracted to someone it is a very powerful feeling.

Now, I am happily married, so perhaps that partially explains this rarity. (Though when I think back to before I was married, I think I was always a one-crush-at-a-time kind of girl. Or, wait, maybe two. Or three. Or four. Well, maybe five at the most. But there was always a reason, albeit shallow, that I liked someone—I thought he was cute or I liked his voice or something he had said or his personality, or the way he played guitar turned me on. It wasn't solely because he had the right equipment between his legs.)

Perhaps women are just more picky. While men are looking for quantity, maybe women are looking for quality.

On the other hand, guys, maybe you need to do something about the way you look. Clooney it up a little bit, for god's sake. Do some push-ups every day at the very least.

(True, I am no Angelina Jolie, but I am not actually on the prowl, either.)

And, now, an even touchier subject. Why do some women stop having sex with their husbands?

This may sting a little. I have no delicate way to put it. Once again, it's a question of quality.

Bad sex. Obviously, sexless marriage is a deeper issue that involves more relationship conflicts than just the physical. But, speaking as a woman, all I can tell you is that if she knew she was going to have a good time, she would want to do it. Often.

As for men, I think it was Jerry Seinfeld who said, "Sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's pretty good."

Not so for women.

Best-case scenario, bad sex is like being stuck in a traffic jam when you have a million other things you'd rather be doing, places you'd rather be.

Worst-case scenario, well, ask the Austrian woman whose father locked her in a basement for 24 years, raping and impregnating her repeatedly.

Now, it's not all you. It takes two to tango, and both parties need to "bring it" (or, in the case of the incestuous Austrian rapist, "leave it"), but all I can say is, guys, it wouldn't hurt for you to work on your skills.

Taking the Marital Fidelity Quiz

Great answers in "The Fray" to Timothy Noah's question about why women cheat:

Desire takes many forms.

Laura Kipnis’ Against Love answered Tim’s question!

It’s about body image.

My “open marriage” was really a lousy marriage in disguise.

Why I cheat.

Why women cheat with women.

I’m a man, and I don’t fantasize about having an affair.