Oh, baby, legitimize me…mmmm...that's right…
As many of you may have noted, a few of us ladies out here in the blog-o-sphere were featured in an article in
the Independent a couple of weeks ago. The incredible
Ms Scarlett has already published a rather scathing response to the article, which I suggest you give a
read. With great respect and adoration to Ms Scarlett, I wasn’t angered by the article (although I unequivocally support her right to be critical). That being said, when I read the article I also felt like the salient point about 'us' - the adulterous sluts with laptops - was missed in some way.
I don't think it was missed because the author had bad intentions, I think it was missed because most people don't walk in our shoes and they don't realize who we really are. There is a journey it takes to get to this place - for many of us there was a bottom we had to reach in our relationships that drove us to take such an enormous primal step away from it. Until you hit that moment like a bug on a windshield, you can't really appreciate what it takes to get here or the feelings that are involved. Until you feel this desire, this drive, this desperation that so many of us feel...you can't possibly appreciate what adultery is, what adultery means. The uninitiated, the pure, see our activities through the lens of their own unshattered lives.
This is the quote, that got me thinking: “
At heart, infidelity blogging appears to be an effort to give concrete reality to relationships that often have their roots in unreality; to legitimise something that society mostly denounces. An infidelity blogger might not be able to hold the hand of her lover in public but she can create an online persona around their affair and write in intimate detail about illicit hours spent together.”
You know what, no. Frankly, the last thing I want is concrete reality for my adulterous relationship(s). I have quite enough concrete reality to go around, thank you very much. Affairs are about fantasy - and frankly, if they aren't, you're doing it wrong. I do not seek reality. If this was reality would we post naughty pictures, would we tell you about our blowjobs and pussies (and dildos, oh my!) The short answer? Again, no.
This is a world where we seek escape, we seek a voice, we seek solace from our lives. What the author of this article has missed is that we seek a refuge from our concrete realities - a place outside of ourselves. Our daily lives are far too sharp, far too glaringly bright - fluorescent light in a dressing room bright. I am not trying to make my fantasy life real.
What is missing from the above analysis is what is missing from our lives that makes us look elsewhere in the first place – it is
us. Us. I am not creating an online persona to
talk about my imperfect relationships with yet more imperfect men. My online persona is, arrogantly enough, to talk about me. Remember me? I'm trying to, no one else seems to.
From my point of view infidelity blogging is about having a voice for yourself, a voice that has been lost, been ignored, been rejected. It is about having a self that is
not defined through your relationship with someone else. I am not looking to be wife, mother, daughter, or even lover in this space. I am looking to have an opportunity to exist as myself. I want a venue to express not my forbidden lust, but my forbidden feelings. If anything, that right there is what I seek to have legitimized - those dark feelings that we are not
supposed to have.
The article is right about the search for legitimacy, but it isn't legitimacy for adultery - it is legitimacy for ourselves and our feelings about our lives and our relationships - the troubled lives and relationships of which the adultery is a symptom, not a cause.
It is hard, isn’t it, to say my life isn’t perfect? It is hard to say this relationship does not fulfill me? It is hard to say being a mom isn’t the be all and end all of my existence? That this house, this job, this mini-van, this life - that you just thought there might be more? Those are the feelings for which I seek legitimacy - feelings I would add that all women, not simply the adulterous sex blogging types, need to have legitimized more than almost anything.
Is, as the author argues, writing about our infidelity another betrayal? Maybe. I dispute the notion that "while an affair can be unintentional, or at least unpremeditated, there's nothing unwitting about blogging." To say an affair is unintentional or unpremeditated certainly serves to
legitimize a world view of adulterous sexuality that has us out of control, out of ourselves. And that is what everyone would like to think, isn't it? It is prettier to think that we just fell in a weak moment - we couldn't resist the glorious stranger with the inviting bed. There are different visions of infidelity out there: in this article the suggestion is that you are unfaithful because you slipped, others would argue it is because you are a feminist whore.
These are both convenient ideas, aren't they? If infidelity is accidental then you do not need to look beneath the surface to see what is broken, you don't need to question the structures of our lives, the muck that wives and mothers slog through every day. You don't need to question your own life if it is only the
whoopsies or the whores.
But, really and truly, I think people think more about adultery then they do any other choice. For most of us the act of the adultery was meticulously premeditated - because it represented a step, a departure, a new chapter, a danger - and, each and every time that line is crossed it is a conscious risk. The blogging, it flows, it exists almost effortlessly. It can be done without shaving your legs or making a hotel reservation. Another betrayal, perhaps - but to argue that my blog is somehow deliberate whereas my sex is accidental is a naive vision of the quicksand in which we knowingly trod.
I guess the reality is this: you really and truly can't appreciate what this is, how it feels and what it means until you are on this side of a lover's bed and a wounded marriage. I am not angry about the article, but it did make me appreciate what a long road this has been and how differently I view the world, love, lust and adultery from over here on the other side of faithful...