Keep your man by letting him stray? So, according to CNN, advises Australian memoirist Holly Hill, who writes, “One of the main things that I have learned is that a woman that negotiates infidelity with her partner is far more powerful than a woman who is sitting home wondering why he’s late from the office Christmas party,” she says. Most powerful of all, BG would submit, is the woman who chooses a guy who doesn’t cheat.

Of course, in Hill’s insultingly dim view of the opposite sex, fellas like that are few and far between. (“Men are hard-wired to betray women on the long-term.”) Look, I know cheating is depressingly common. And if a couple makes “an arrangement” that works for them, then geh gezunt a heit. But — yes — monogamy is a choice. So when a couple makes that choice, I’d call that negotiated fidelity. That’s a much better place to start.

From the “Crap Science” files over at Jezebel:

On the heels of The Re-education of the Female, which suggests [in 2008] that women keep their men by doing chores in sexy outfits, comes a study implying that male fidelity may have more to do with genetics than wifely subservience. According to scientists at the Karolinska Institute (sounds like a ballet studio, actually a Swedish medical school), two in five men carry a gene variant that makes them less likely to commit to women.

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Men with the gene, which, as the Washington Post notes, regulates the hormone vasopressin, are more likely to live with women without marrying them; if they are married, these men are more likely to fight with their spouses and consider divorce. Their female partners (the study only looked at heterosexual couples) also “reported lower levels of satisfaction, affection, cohesion and consensus in the relationship” than partners of men without the variant.

/snip/

…This study looks at first glance like another great way to reduce human relationships to biological imperatives. As if comparisons between men and male animals weren’t popular enough, the Post cites an earlier study in which the same gene variant was found in mountain voles, who are apparently more caddish than their prairie cousins…

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The most interesting research, however, has yet to be done. The Institute plans to study whether oxytocin, another hormone, affects women’s ability to commit. This study might take some of the annoying stereotypical sting out of sex research. Thus far, much of it has been about why men “can’t commit,” with the assumption that women want them to. Corresponding research into women’s predispositions might underscore the fact that we’re not all sad little lady voles who sit around waiting for our man vole to come home. Nor are we slaves to biology. Some men and some women want to commit, and some don’t, and our goal should be to avoid a mismatch of the two, not to pore over our genes for predictors of our happiness.

Word.

I just got an e-mail with the subject line: “Who’s sleeping with your husband?” But before I could say, “That bee-yotch!”, or remember that I don’t have a husband, I realized it was just a press release — a really depressing press release — for a Web site called MomLogic. Witness:

The other woman wants you to know–your husband is cheating and she’s loving it. Find out why. (more…)