Wendy “Wednesday” Martin is the second wife of New York lawyer Joel Moser, and the author of several popular books. In 2015, she published Primates of Park Avenue, a memoir described as “a well-heeled combination of the Real Housewives and Sex and the City.” Martin, who has a Ph.D. from Yale, did a sort of anthropological study of women like herself — the wives of wealthy men on the ultra-affluent Upper East Side of Manhattan. While any rational observer would view such women as the most fortunate humans on the planet, Martin argues that “these seemingly privileged women are fundamentally powerless” because their lifestyles are “dependent on a husband’s earnings.” Martin contends that this explains, among other things, why these women are obsessed with fitness and fashion, because maintaining their beauty is necessary to prevent their wealthy husbands from dumping them.

Considering that she was herself a replacement for the first Mrs. Moser (a tale told in her 2009 book Stepmonster), Martin seems to have internalized the message of her own status as a replaceable commodity, but rather than questioning the atheistic culture in which marriage vows mean nothing, instead she takes this for granted. She inhabits a world in which there is no god but money, and no meaning to life except the pursuit of pleasure, and evidently cannot imagine any other world. Martin criticizes her peers as afflicted with false consciousness:

These are women who have disempowered themselves relative to their husbands not only by family-prioritizing choice but as a form and marker of achievement. . . .

If you’re a wealthy woman, you feel virtually compelled to stay home with your children. You may think you’re making a choice, but it’s a false choice.

Question: If any mother had the option to stay home with her children — whether because of her husband’s high earnings or any other economic subsidy — why wouldn’t she do so? She might not be able to afford to live like Wednesday Martin, in the poshest Manhattan neighborhood (with a weekend place in the Hamptons), but if a woman could so arrange her life as to avoid the necessity of working outside her home to pay the bills, wouldn’t she prefer this to any other arrangement?

Certainly, my wife would be happier if my career were more lucrative, so that she could count on all the bills being paid without her having to worry about a job, and when our children were younger, we arranged our lives so that this was (almost) possible. There was never a time when my wife didn’t do something to help with the finances — selling baked goods or babysitting other people’s children — and eventually what had begun as a part-time job became a full-time food service career, but if I’d been making really big bucks, I wouldn’t have expected her to do anything more than the (very demanding) job of being a mom.

This devaluing of motherhood, sneering at the woman who is “just a mom,” is what has always offended me most about feminism. Perhaps I am particularly sensitive to this because (a) I so deeply appreciate my wife’s maternal excellence, and (b) my own mother died when I was 16. Unless you have lost your mother, you can’t really understand what a valuable resource a mother’s love is, and being forced to deal with the finality of death has a way of making you appreciate the value of life. One of the benefits of middle-class life in a modern industrial democracy is the tremendous sense of security that makes death a distant thing, something that usually only happens to old people in nursing homes. Prior to the development of such medical advances as antibiotics, death was a much nearer danger, and the proximity of the Grim Reaper instilled in young people a greater sense of gratitude for such small blessings as they had. But I digress . . .

Wednesday Martin’s portrayal of the wealthy wives of Manhattan as “disempowered” — hey, ladies, would you feel “disempowered” if your husband was a multimillionaire? — became a New York Times bestseller, and what did her husband think of this? We don’t know. The men who marry feminists are expected to remain silent, and if Joel Moser ever expressed an opinion about his wife’s feminist ideology, I couldn’t find it. Whatever the royalties on Martin’s books may be, however, they aren’t enough to pay for a $3.7 million co-op apartment, a place in the Hamptons and private schools for their children. In other words, Moser’s wealth is subsidizing his wife’s career as a feminist author, even while she proclaims her enthusiasm for “Smashing the Patriarchy.”

One of the things wealth can buy is the kind of arrogance necessary to think you’re invincible, and Joel Moser might imagine that he can never suffer any real harm from his wife’s anti-male ideology. How else to explain why he keeps paying the bills while she writes stuff like this?

That article, from the September 2018 print edition of Cosmopolitan (which is apparently not available online), begins:

“You should have an affair if you want,” my husband of 17 years said with a yawn, as we were getting ready for bed one night, “for your research.”

He was referring to the work I’d been doing for my book about female infidelity. . . .

I’ve come to believe that all couples should talk more openly about their craving for sex outside the relationship. Why? Well, for starters, despite the fact that the accepted cultural norm is monogamy, our society has a sky-high rate of undisclosed infidelity. . . . If monogamy is so damn hard, why do we keep trying to pull it off?

Thus did Joel Moser’s wife admit she has a “craving for sex outside the relationship” and, in a remarkable feat of psychological projection, asserts that this is a problem of the inclusive “we,” affecting “all couples” in “our society,” contrary to “the accepted cultural norm.” In other words, if you say you’re happy in your marriage and have no interest in cheating, Wednesday Martin is calling you a liar and a hypocrite.

At risk of unnecessarily elongating a post that’s already more than 1,000 words, let me briefly reiterate a point I’ve made before: There is reason some things are called “fantasies,” because if you tried to do them in real life, bad things would happen. Yes, a man might fondly imagine having his own private island populated by nubile sex slaves willing to satisfy his carnal cravings, but even if he had the money to make that fantasy come true, he would be prosecuted on federal sex-trafficking charges and, it should not be necessary to add, Epstein did not kill himself.

Every time I read headlines about some polygamist cult leader — David Koresh, Keith Raniere, various “fundamentalist Mormon” types — I think to myself, yeah, that might be cool, except for such downsides as having to arm yourself with AK-47s and dying in a fire at your cult compound. Besides which, cult leaders are always described as “charismatic,” and I’ve always suffered from a charisma deficiency. Even while acknowledging the appeal of polygamy as a fantasy, you see, objective analysis leads me to consider it impractical in real life, even if I cared nothing about the moral considerations involved.

Joel Moser and his wife evidently have no moral objection to adultery, which is why Wednesday Martin wrote an entire book to justify it, Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free.

The essence of her argument in this book is that women are naturally lustful seekers of sexual adventure, and that marriage is a patriarchal prison, created by men seeking to deprive women of their right to fulfill their their needs. This is just a reiteration of every “pro-sex” feminist argument, dressed up with “New Science” claims. Ever since the 1960s, feminists have been denouncing marriage as a sexist institution that benefits men and oppresses women, and you might think that decades of such argumentation would separate women into two categories:

Women who want husbands and children;

and Feminists, who believe all babies should be aborted.

Alas, there are some women who don’t understand why feminist ideology can never be reconciled with marriage and motherhood, and some men who can’t understand why they should avoid feminists.

All of that, however, is preamble to this:

Christmas is a time for tradition — bringing a tree into the house, midnight mass, giving gifts… and being repeatedly encouraged to cheat on your husband by a respected, small-c conservative national newspaper.

This is a tradition in the sense that 2019 is the second festive season in a row where British broadsheet newspaper the Daily Telegraph — which enjoys a strong legacy reputation as being the standard-bearer for the intelligent, conservative right in the United Kingdom — has bombarded its male social media followers with messages to encourage their wives to cheat on them as a Christmas present.

The December 2018 article Why men should give their wives a cheat pass this Christmas was ridiculed on social media when it was first published over a year ago as being so apparently totally out of character with the newspaper. Essentially an extended advertisement for a book whose author’s quotes on freeing women from their husbands makes up the majority of the copy, the article also cites societal decline as proof of the central thesis of the work. . . .

Perhaps the most mystifying thing about Why men should give their wives a cheat pass this Christmas is the Telegraph’s loyal and dogged promotion of it, apparently out of all proportion for a humble book-plug and of all times, especially around Christmas. Having originally fired this ode to polyamory into the Twittersphere on December 7th 2018, the experiment was repeated again on December 11th of that year.

Apparently not satisfied that London Christmas cocktail parties last year hadn’t descended into unending orgies of other people’s wives, whoever runs the Telegraph social media accounts gave it another swing this year, with Tweets promoting the story with a variety of pro-infidelity messages cropping up on November 2nd 2019, November 7th, November 16th, and finally December 16th.

The article being promoted is an enthusiastic feature interview with Wednesday Martin about her pro-adultery book and the Telegraph was actually paying Twitter for this promotion. Why?

Immoral people always encourage immorality. Perverts are never satisfied with merely having liberty to pursue their perversion. Instead, they seek to normalize their sexual abnormality, which is why Wednesday Martin would have us believe “we” are all complicit in her adulterous desires. The problem is not her, but “our society.” It is wrong, according to Martin, to expect people to keep their marriage vows, because she experiences “craving for sex outside the relationship.” It should be acceptable for her to seek fulfillment for her craving — no one should condemn her adulterous lust — and, therefore, we must make it normal for married people to cheat on their spouses. Everybody should become “swingers,” in order to make Wednesday Martin feel OK.

Are we to believe that Joel Moser is not embarrassed by the obvious implication of his wife’s argument? It would be fair for any intelligent reader to assume that Moser is not exactly Mister Excitement in the bedroom. How else to explain his wife’s sexual dissatisfaction? Contrary to what Wednesday Martin argues at length, any observant person will perceive that, in general, male demand for sex exceeds the female supply. After all, any reasonably attractive young woman can earn hundreds of dollars a day as a prostitute, whereas male prostitution is rare, and the clientele are gay men. If women have such a “craving” for sex, why aren’t they willing to pay for it? What is true in the macroeconomic sense is usually replicated at the level of individual relationships, i.e., husbands generally want sex more often than do their wives, and one entirely predictable challenges of married life is finding some way to reconcile this typical imbalance of desire. Personally, I would suspect a man must have some kind of problem if his wife were complaining she’s not getting enough sex. So what are we to assume about the Moser-Martin marriage?

Does Joel Moser not understand the damage his feminist wife’s writing inflicts on his reputation? Or does he simply not care? It is difficult for me to imagine why any man would endure such insulting treatment, much less pay for it, but kinky is as kinky does, I suppose.







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