husband. And then she comes home and learns that not only has she failed to get a rise out of Stewart, but that he’s into it: he finds the idea of her with other men a turn- on. They renegotiate the terms of their mar- riage such that both are allowed to have outside sexual partners, and, eventually, additional long-term romantic relationships.
the kids—the dinners, the bedtimes, the dishes, the loneliness of doing it all by my- self.” She writes that she “love[s] being a mother,” but why must she do everything? She wonders this. I wonder this. The why is addressed, in a sense. Winter and her husband eventually uncover, in couples’ therapy, that the reason she had done all the childcare when the kids were little—which he doesn’t dispute—is that she was a control freak and he had worried he’d get it wrong. This is presented as a therapeutically brilliant revelation about her perfectionist tendencies, rather than the sort of psychobabble a man might come up with to retroactively explain why he had saddled his wife with all domestic responsibilities. You’d think Betty Friedan never existed, let alone the many waves of feminism since. The heterosexual land- scape she inhabits seems at least 50 years out of date. Somehow, despite More ’s many orifices and contortions, the result is less Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City than Edith Bunker from All in the Family . P rowling for strange men offers Winter not so much liberation as a distraction from life as a doormat—or maybe just an opportunity to serve as a doormat for a wider pool of men. She meets some real charmers, like one man with questionable integrity regarding condom usage, and an- other who turns out to be playing the long game to get her into bed with his girlfriend. (Winter is not bisexual but acquiesces.) These liaisons generally take place after she has done her kids’ dinner, bedtime, and clean-up. She waits for her husband to get home from work or ‘work’ or wherever he is, so she can head out. This is time she should be sleeping. (“‘I did not sleep very much,’” Winter confirmed to the New York Times in an interview .) She writes about working with her therapist to sort out why she keeps getting migraines, anticipating some existential revelation, when—if I may armchair diagnose—it seems more likely to be a sleep deficit. My head hurts just thinking about it. That polyamory might not always be the most woman-friendly arrangement becomes obvious if you think about why plural marriage came to be stigmatized, even outlawed, on liberal grounds. (The Wikipedia entry for polygamy has a clari- fication note up top: “Not to be confused with Polyamory or Polysexuality.” I am
to be romantic, I guess, that she looked past what she interpreted as his distinctly Jewish brand of unpleasantness. All this anecdote accomplished was to make me think that these people—she with her cas- ual anti-Jewish quip, he with his reluctance to lift a bottle of dish detergent—might just deserve each other.
The subsequent story of how Winter’s marriage opened up is neither titillating nor empowering. Stewart has come home late from work, again, leaving her with all the childcare and housework, as usual. She storms out of the house in a huff and ends up going out for drinks with a female friend. At the bar, she flirts with a man, imagining that she is somehow getting revenge on her
All of this might sound modern, but the home life she describes with her husband, who remains her primary partner, strikes me—and her!—as bleak and archaic. They have two young sons, but he comes home after they’ve gone to bed and works on weekends, even once she’s returned to paid employment herself. She thinks “about all the years I’ve spent my nights alone with
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