I was working on a post about relationships that begin with infidelity the other day when I found myself at a loss.
Unless I’m sharing my personal story, I try to write from as much as a gender-neutral perspective as possible. I typed the phrase, “Mistress or …” waiting for the masculine version of the word to pop into my head.
And I drew a blank. My trusty thesaurus wasn’t any better and even Twitter couldn’t find a male-gendered term that means an affair partner.
As I reworked the sentence to include a gender-neutral poor substitute (paramour), I found my mind actively chewing on this suddenly-realized vacancy in our language. After all, women cheat (the studies are notoriously inaccurate, but the rates aren’t usually much below men) and I would wager (again, going with statistical evidence) that the majority of those women are cheating with men.
So what are those men called?
It gets even more interesting.
We have a gendered name for the betrayed husband – cuckhold – a term that originally meant a deceived man who ended up caring for a child born from another man. And in fact, adultery has historically (and in many cultures) been considered much more heinous when it is between a married woman and another man than when the man is the one straying from the marital bed. Which makes sense from a purely economical standpoint; a wayward wife may mean a man’s resources are going to help perpetuate another’s genes.
Yet even without the biological concern of a woman unknowingly raising another woman’s child, there are certainly plenty of men who procreate outside of marriage.
So what do we call their deceived wives?
When a mistress is reviled (such as by the wife), she is referred to as the “homewrecker.”
I’ve never heard of a man referred to by that term, even though it is not exclusively feminine.
The woman is also more likely to be called terms that shame her for her sexuality, whereas the man is more likely to be called out for his duplicity.
The words used extend to within a marriage. How often do we hear about a “frigid” wife being the cause of a sexless marriage? Yet Google implies that men are equally likely to be the frigid ones. Except we don’t call them that.
The language seems to favor the fooled husband on the marital side and the kept and wanton woman on the outside of the marriage. Even though those roles are easily interchangeable and are more about character and circumstance than about gender.
And what does that reveal about our assumptions?
Interesting to think about.
Have any known words to add?
Any words you would like to create?
What is the female term for emasculate? If a woman does something better than a man he feels emasculated (for example beats him at chess, or cuts down more trees than him), if a man does something better than a woman there is no term, we aren’t ‘defeminised’. When I had a higher sex drive than my husband, he felt emasculated (I suppose the other way around I would have been frigid).
Good one!
All very true. To do my part to remedy this, I’ve honestly just taken to using the word “asshole” to apply to both males and females who lie, break promises, and just generally fail to be compassionate. I will even own up to myself as an asshole from time to time.
So many gender stereotypes that you’ve raised…very well said. I made the mistake of perusing some of the “betrayed wife” websites and they routinely refer to the “other woman” as whores. But the vitriol is mostly reserved for the other women, not the other men.
It’s conversations like these that really make us stop and think about the assumptions we do make. I also found it when I made the decision to have surgery to prevent my ability to have children anymore (which was only partially due to medical reasons)… SO many people had reactions that I guarantee were different from hearing a man saying he was having a vascetomy.