# When people cheat why is the "other woman" generally seen as the one primarily responsible? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 25, 2016, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-people-cheat-why-is-the-other-woman-generally-seen-as-the-one-primarily-responsible/766829 "2016-09-25T16:26:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![joyfool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/df788c/32.png) [@joyfool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joyfool)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2016, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-people-cheat-why-is-the-other-woman-generally-seen-as-the-one-primarily-responsible/766829/21 "2016-09-26T02:47:36Z")
> [@Biggirl](#): > > How is the wife responsible for the husband’s bad behavior? Sounds a lot like blaming the victim to me. Just going from what actually happened (and not what should have ethically – like getting a divorce before starting a new relationship), I’ll use an example from someone in my own life. I had a family member who was an incredibly toxic woman. Mentally abusive to all her children, a light lush, terrible at wasting the family’s money, controlling, manipulative and just outright hateful. Her husband was basically beaten into submission since the very early days of their relationship because he 1) wasn’t very educated, 2) was easily outmaneuvered on everything and 3) didn’t have much in the way of financial means to get him out of the marriage and support his kids. It was terrible and she was horrific. Continued in next post. ---
**Author:** ![joyfool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/df788c/32.png) [@joyfool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joyfool)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2016, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-people-cheat-why-is-the-other-woman-generally-seen-as-the-one-primarily-responsible/766829/22 "2016-09-26T03:06:17Z")
Sorry. My dog grabbed at the phone and it hit send. I knew I’d never have time to finish during the edit, so I apologize for double-posting. Anyway, let’s call him Bob, finally got to know a woman at his work that was kind to him. They developed a friendship that lasted for years. Nothing ever came of it, until one day when neither could ignore any longer that they’d developed feelings for each other. Sounds just like a million other affairs that happen, doesn’t it? And this one wasn’t special or anything, except that if people had known about it, they’d have felt like Bob at last deserved some happiness. That’s about it. Until Bob’s wife, Maggie, found out. Then there was more hell to pay than he (and everyone else) faced in their lives already. Because, you see, never once did Maggie think, “Hmmmm. Maybe the reason Bob even started looking elsewhere is because I’m a bitch? I’ve withheld sex from him for pretty much the last decade. I treat him like shit and humiliate him in front of all and sundry. I waste money on shoes and clothes and makeup, while his truck won’t even hardly get him to work. I belittle and demean and actively try to grind him into the ground like the worm he is. Maybe there’s something I could’ve done differently to have helped even a smudge?” Do you think Maggie had one iota of self-reflection? Nope. She seized on being the spurned wife like she’d hit the lotto and revised every last bit of shared history between her and Bob. She became the heroine in all aspects of their lives… championing his hopes, believing in his dreams, being the dutiful little woman who lovingly cooked all his meals, starched his undies and put a white glove on to dust test his house. Not a bit was true, but that didn’t matter. SHE had been wronged, it had all been done to HER and she was so completely innocent that this was the biggest travesty known to mankind because she was a frigging ANGEL, dontcha know!!1! But I digress. 😛 So, although Bob screwed the pooch by breaking his vows and cheating on his spouse, there’s no way in the world that his wife shared absolutely zero culpability in helping push that train off the tracks. That’s not victim blaming, that’s common sense. At least in this case I was thinking of. And if that were me in Maggie’s shoes, I’d hope like hell I wouldn’t just want all the “atta girls!” in the world so I could ignore my own behavior (or lack thereof) instead of trying to change it. Hope that explains my thoughts more clearly. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2016, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-people-cheat-why-is-the-other-woman-generally-seen-as-the-one-primarily-responsible/766829/23 "2016-09-26T14:00:15Z")
As a Christian fundamentalist once told me: When a woman spreads her legs, a man can’t control himself. I responded with a quote given to me by a cop, used when arresting rapists who blame the woman: You don’t need a partner if you got a good hand. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2016, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-people-cheat-why-is-the-other-woman-generally-seen-as-the-one-primarily-responsible/766829/24 "2016-09-26T14:37:43Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Basically, sex happens when women want it to (very high correlation of 0.88) and when men want sex to happen has almost no impact on when it actually happens (0.19). “In those modern societies that aren’t just fine with marital rape”, I take it they meant to add. ---
**Author:** ![drewder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/57b2e6/32.png) [@drewder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewder)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2016, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-people-cheat-why-is-the-other-woman-generally-seen-as-the-one-primarily-responsible/766829/25 "2016-09-26T16:54:53Z")
Because men have no choice but to sleep with a willing woman, so women have the responsibility to not be willing. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2016, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-people-cheat-why-is-the-other-woman-generally-seen-as-the-one-primarily-responsible/766829/26 "2016-09-26T18:33:17Z")
My wife, standing waiting for me at the front door with a rolling pin in her hand, never seemed very interested in blaming the other woman. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2016, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-people-cheat-why-is-the-other-woman-generally-seen-as-the-one-primarily-responsible/766829/27 "2016-09-26T18:47:12Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Also like it or not, there is some truth to the idea of women as gatekeepers of procreation. > > From the paper “Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions” > > > [@](#): > > > > If sex is a female resource, then it will ultimately be > > up to the woman to decide when and whether sexual relations > > commence. This view of women as sexual gatekeepers > > was supported by Cohen and Shotland (1996), > > who computed correlations between when people > > thought sex should start in a given relationship and > > when they actually began having sex. For the hapless > > men, the correlation was not even significant (r = .19), > > indicating that their wishes and preferences were essentially > > irrelevant, whereas for women the correlation > > was very high (r = .88), indicating that sex occurred > > when they preferred. This study also found that men > > wanted sex to commence earlier than the women. > > Thus, women decide when sex commences, and the > > man’s role is to invest time, money, attention, commitment, > > and other resources until the woman is sufficiently > > satisfied. > > I cannot find the Cohen and Shotland paper from 1996 though. Basically, sex happens when women want it to (very high correlation of 0.88) and when men want sex to happen has almost no impact on when it actually happens (0.19). > > I feel bad for “Mike’s” wife. If he offered himself to a woman repeatedly, he is also offering himself to endless other women too. Taking your quote at face value it’s simply a tautology. IF we assume it takes one man and one woman to have sex, AND we assume they both have to agree (no coercion), THEN whoever wants it later will be the one controlling the schedule. That’s pretty well baked into the definition of “both”. All the correlation coefficients mean is that on average, women want it later than men. Alert Ted Kopell!! And the strength of the coefficients are exactly mathematically equivalent to the degree of homogeneity of that preference. e.g. If all men wanted it on the second date and half of women wanted it on the first date and half on the third date we’d have a bimodal distribution of preferences and we’d discover that men were in control of half the relationships’ timing whereas women were in control of the other half. The deeper question of \*why \* on average women prefer later than men is left unaddressed. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-people-cheat-why-is-the-other-woman-generally-seen-as-the-one-primarily-responsible/766829.md?page=1)