Salon.com > cheating

Pat Robertson: Husbands won’t cheat if the wife makes the home “wonderful”

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:09:00 +0000

Pat Robertson argued on a recent episode of "The 700 Club" that if a man cheats on his wife, she should focus on making the home as "wonderful" as possible so that he doesn't "want to wander."

Robertson began by saying the wife should focus on the good about her cheating husband: "Does he provide a home for you to live in? Does he provide food for you to eat? Does he provide clothes for you to wear? Is he nice to the children? ... Is he handsome?"

"Give him honor instead of trying to worry about it," he continued. "But recognize also, like it or not, males have a tendency to wander a little bit and what you want to do is make a home so wonderful that he doesn’t want to wander.”

Watch, via Right Wing Watch:

Bad advice for cheated wives

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:19:00 +0000

It's an irresistible hook: A woman who used to charge cheating husbands for sex starts charging cheated wives for advice on how to prevent their husbands from cheating. It's no surprise that UK tabloid the Sun went for it -- along with a fancy photo shoot of escort-turned-relationship-expert Rebecca Dakin and the splashy headline, "I had sex with 1,000 men as £700-a-time hooker ...now I’m an infidelity counsellor."

Normally it'd be the type of all-sorts-of-exploitative piece I'd barely roll my eyes at before moving along -- but it's the advice she's offering in particular that deserves a second look, if only because it's so pedestrian, and so misguided.

Her teaching? Have lots of sex with your husband.

To Dakin's credit, she acknowledges that there are "obviously other factors" to infidelity, but she argues that, as the Sun paraphrases, it most often "simply comes down to not giving their men enough sex." She also falls back on some classic gender stereotypes: "Men are sexual creatures -- unlike a lot of women, they can separate the act of sex from love," she said. (I will take a moment here to give Dakin the benefit of the doubt: It's hard to know where her advice ends and the Sun's sensationalist editorializing begins; I've contacted her but have yet to hear back.)

Lance Armstrong’s unmoving confession

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:30:00 +0000

Lance Armstrong appeared with Oprah last night, the first part of a two-part confession special, to publicly admit to taking the performance enhancing drugs he has not just denied using, but vehemently, ruthlessly denied using, denigrating and bullying and seeking to destroy the far less powerful people who have told nothing but the truth about his habits. Armstrong picked Oprah to conduct this interview — as opposed to some sports journalist, or Barbara Walters, or Brian Williams or any of the other possible choices — because she alone confers on public screw-ups the sense that just by speaking to her they are beginning the long road back to acceptability. Oprah is a journalist, as she ably demonstrated last night, but she also occupies a particular space, that of celebrity confessor in chief, our national moral proxy, the woman empowered to find her subjects wanting or sufficiently remorseful, the person who accepts tears but not excuses, holds her subjects to the facts and, more important, the feelings. Unfortunately for Lance Armstrong, he does not appear to have enough of those.

Lance Armstrong, most disappointing cancer survivor

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 18:12:00 +0000

On Wednesday, Lance Armstrong announced he was adding a few more titles to his impressive résumé, along with seven-time Tour de France winner, Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year and Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year. You can now refer to him as the former chairman of Livestrong, and Most Disappointing Cancer Survivor of the Week.

The allegations of doping that have dogged Armstrong for most of his career seemed to come to a head in August, when it was announced he would be stripped of his Tour de France wins and banned from future competition. Back then, Armstrong tossed off a fiery response to what he called "an unconstitutional witch hunt," saying he was going to devote himself fully to "serving people and families affected by cancer, especially those in underserved communities." He continued, "This October, my foundation will celebrate 15 years of service to cancer survivors and the milestone of raising nearly $500 million. We have a lot of work to do and I'm looking forward to an end to this pointless distraction."

Accused student: Harvard “out for blood”

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 14:19:00 +0000

It’s a new school year in Cambridge, Mass. Sculls skip across the choppy Charles, coy freshmen size each other up, pretending they belong, and scores of Harvard students and recent graduates are implicated in an academic scandal on a scale that dean of undergraduate education Jay Harris called “unprecedented in anyone’s living memory."

Almost half of the 279 students who took assistant professor Matthew Platt’s Introduction to Congress class in the spring are under investigation for cheating. According to a letter to students from Harris, the charges are “academic dishonesty, ranging from inappropriate collaboration to outright plagiarism, on a take-home final exam.” (The university has not acknowledged the specific class.)

One senior who’s under investigation, and who spoke to Salon only on condition of anonymity, said that the scandal was a crackdown on a course that has a reputation for being easy. The course had a “culture” in which collaboration was “fostered, encouraged, expected.” Students were encouraged to treat exams like “problem sets,” which the student understands to allow collaboration. “The bubble burst this year and we’re being scapegoated."