Guys And Girls

The Roosevelt documentary is compelling in every way; the three members of that famous family featured in this exposé that lasts for hours are all so vital, human, and in each in a different way vulnerable.  We have just been watching the part where Eleanor Roosevelt learns from a stash of love letters written to her husband that he has been having an affair with her former secretary.  It is noted that from all accounts Mrs. Roosevelt never got over the hurt and despair that this revelation caused her.  My immediate reaction, as someone who was grossly unfaithful long ago in heterosexual marriage, was why did Franklin keep those letters?  Who is so arrogant and cruel to imagine that they might might never be discovered?  Someone who just is not alive to the deep sensitivities of possession and fidelity in many spouses, or, as many psychologists suggest, someone who wanted the information somehow or another to be transmitted.  I was reading in the Globe this morning the quoted remarks of a young gay male married to another fellow who remarks that he and his husband have an "open" marriage and tend to use condoms if they are having sex with others.  As a male who has spent years of my life closeted while working with a variety of straight males in different situations involving different classes, I was always struck by the extraordinary amount of sexual energy these fellows evinced while encountering attractive women on the job, and I remember so well the numerous rumors about affairs as well as the late night boozy confessions of many guys of their extra marital exploits.  Before one suggests that "men are just like that," you have to think of Teddy Roosevelt in this same documentary, who I don't believe was unzipping his pants in the same way as his cousin.  So it isn't as though all men were lotharios.  But a lifetime of associating with men makes me believe that conjugal fidelity is not such a big deal as it is with women, and especially I think husbands are prone to stray when their wives are in their most sexually unattractive phase, late pregnancy, early motherhood, and breast feeding.  But the interesting thing that I take away from the gay husband's comments, which by the way I have heard many times over elsewhere, is that a sexual act by one's spouse outside of the relationship is not so threatening.  I think for a lot of males sex is sex, starting from their early teenaged mechanical masturbation to relieve genuine physical tensions and sometimes discomfort.  So sexual intercourse is just sexual intercourse.  Certainly the accounts of soldiers in various armies lining up to be "serviced" by prostitutes suggests that, and somehow from my experience of women, limited as it is, does not suggest to me that there would be the same line of women waiting for male prostitutes.  A corollary thought is my shared anguish of the fantasized male prostitute who has to face a line of hungry women with that very dubious instrument for constant gratification that nature has given him.