Since the days of Plymouth Colony, a double standard about infidelity has prevailed in the United States. Married women who stepped out were guilty of adultery, while married men who had sex with unmarried women were prosecuted for the lesser crime of fornication. In 1639, Mary Mendame of Plymouth Colony was convicted of adultery and “whipped at the cart’s tail” while walking through the streets. (Army Stock Photo)
Simple plough design. Ploughing set in motion a gendered division of labor, lower social status for women, and anxieties about female infidelity. (Shutterstock)
Christian missionaries and other Europeans were often scandalized by the high status and sexual autonomy of Wyandot and other Native American women. As these women were primary producers and often lived matrilocally, they had equal say in social and political matters, and their sexualities were relatively unconstrained. This illustration depicts Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf ministering to a Wyandot tribe. (Getty Images)
Public outrage ensued when the US and British governments encouraged farms to hire female farmhands during World War I and World War II. To appease angry male farmers, the women were encouraged to wear dresses and skirts.
“Farmer’s daughter” jokes, now dated, have an overarching “punch line”: that women are inherently promiscuous, thereby justifying all the constraints and containments to which they have been subjected in plough agriculture settings. (Illustration by Pat Dorian)
In this nineteenth-century painting by John Byam Liston Shaw, Jezebel’s supposed “high self-regard” is literalized as she gazes into a mirror. Jezebel came from Phoenicia, where women were often high priestesses in the Baal religion. This put her on a collision course with the prophets of Yahweh, who believed in one male God and often used tropes of female infidelity to denounce worship of other gods. (Jezebel, 1896, Shaw, John Byam Liston [1872–1919] / Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, UK / Bridgeman Images)
Without Jezebel, there could be no Kim Kardashian. This wax version of Kim at Madame Tussauds in London borrows heavily from the iconography of the Jezebel painting, just as Kim’s reputation—a wealthy, powerful woman who is allegedly shallow, hungry for renown, and sexually appetitive—mirrors Jezebel’s. The differences are slight: Kim’s attendants are her social-media followers and fans—and in this instance the museumgoers. Her phone is her mirror. (Shutterstock)
In this contemporary representation, Jezebel has the unrealistic waist-hip ratio that is a preference specific to plough-based or formerly plough-based ecologies. Note the serpents, barely disguised vagina dentata, at Jezebel’s feet. Jezebel’s name came to be associated not with political power and religious pluralism but with false prophecy, prostitution, and, later, a brazen woman who enjoyed sex and was in every sense “untrue.” (Saúl Shavanas)
The first patented steam-powered vibrator in the United States, “The Manipulator” was the size of a dining-room table. Married female patients of the era passively “received” orgasms from medical professionals, a situation that neatly conformed to the late-nineteenth-century notion that healthy women didn’t desire or actively seek out sex. (Rachel P. Maines, The Technology
of Orgasm, public domain)
The Himba, seminomadic pastoralists who live in Namibia and Angola, have the highest rate of extra-pair paternity ever reported in a small-scale human population. Anthropologist Brooke Scelza, pictured here taking notes while sitting with a Himba woman and her baby, has written about how female “infidelity,” a fact of life among the Himba, benefits women and children. (Peter Hauser)
Primatologist Amy Parish explains that Loretta the bonobo’s “Shrek-like baldness” is proof of her dominance: everyone wants to groom her, and grooming removes hair. Parish, who studied female-on-male violence among bonobos, told the world that they are a female-dominant species. (Amy Parish)
Billed as a “play party” that “empowers women from the bedroom to the boardroom” by founder Geneviève LeJeune, Skirt Club is a constraint-free environment where mostly “heteroflexible” women gather. Not unlike female bonobos who prefer having sex with one another, these women use sex to cement social bonds, build coalitions, and find pleasure. (Victoria Dawe; photo courtesy of Skirt Club)
Beyoncé’s ballads of self-determination literally interrogate asymmetrical male sexual privilege, as in Lemonade, which is framed by the central question “Are you cheating on me?” Against a backdrop of enduring cultural hypocrisy about female desire, Beyoncé asserts that some of us experience nearly unquenchable bacchanalian lust, as in “Drunk in Love.” Performing at the 2017 Grammys as a pregnant queen, she invoked various goddesses—Oshun, the Black Madonna, and the Virgin Mary among them—who derived their awesome power from sex and reproduction. (Getty Images)
Issa Rae’s series Insecure, with its rich plotline about a “nice girl” cheating on her boyfriend, set social media aflame. (Shutterstock)
June Dobbs Butts, a hidden figure of American sex research, was the first African American trained at the Masters and Johnson Institute. Her articles on sexuality for Ebony and Essence reached thousands of black readers. (Louie Favorite, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Dr. Gail E. Wyatt, a clinical psychologist and sex therapist, was the first African American woman to be licensed as a psychologist in the state of California and the first African American woman PhD to reach full professor in a school of medicine. Wyatt published an ambitious update to Alfred Kinsey’s work in 1988. (UCLA)
When married Hollywood superstar Ingrid Bergman had an affair with Roberto Rossellini and became pregnant in 1950, she was savaged by the press and even denounced on the floor of the US Senate as
a “powerful influence for evil.” (Gordon Parks, The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images)
Kristen Stewart experienced comparable blowback in 2012 when she had an affair with a married director while in a relationship with Robert Pattinson. Stewart here wears an updated version of Bergman’s all-white ensemble. She also mirrors Bergman’s sidelong gaze, a photographic framing that gives them both a haunted look while also seeming to suggest that women who step outside monogamy are “shifty,” indirect, or dishonest. (Backgrid USA)
Bucking the script of masculine possession, the man married to a “hotwife” embraces her infidelities, often encouraging her by setting up her dates and paying witness to and otherwise reveling in her being untrue.
