Book summary “Untrue”: summary

Introduction

You live under a cultural script that assumes female monogamy is natural and female infidelity is an aberration. When you struggle with long-term sexual boredom or desire variety, you likely blame your own psychology rather than a flawed social model. Wednesday Martin argues in Untrue that women possess deep evolutionary and biological drives for sexual novelty that are actively suppressed by centuries of cultural mythmaking.

You will discover an interdisciplinary framework combining anthropology, primatology, and modern psychology to explain why psychosexual ennui occurs in domestic routines. The book reveals how women are closing the infidelity gap and exploring consensual non-monogamy.

• Why do long-term relationships extinguish female desire?
• How did historical shifts in property ownership control female sexuality?
• What can primates and indigenous cultures teach you about human mating strategies?

1. Free Your Mind and the Dyad

Lifelong monogamous coupling requires surrendering complete sexual autonomy and self-determination in exchange for stability and child-rearing support. You extinguish your lust for others to gain the security of a dyad. This trade-off is often presumed to be a natural developmental imperative. Society assumes it comes much easier to women than to men.

Lifelong monogamy requires surrendering complete sexual autonomy, yet consensual non-monogamy offers alternative relationship structures.

Wednesday Martin paid a $190 fee to attend a consensual non-monogamy workshop for mental health professionals and citizens. She reflected on her own cramped closet and the compromises people make to maintain compulsory monogamy.

Female infidelity and the refusal of sexual exclusivity still provoke intense outrage. Social conservatives view female infidelity as a symptom of societal decline. Progressives and even self-described feminists often denounce women who step out as damaged, whorish, or bad mothers. A self-described traditionalist media personality emailed the author after a published piece, calling her decadent and pathetic, and asking why the West is in decline. This reaction reveals deep-seated triggers regarding female sexual autonomy and non-consensual monogamy.

The Trade-Off of Monogamy

Consensual non-monogamy encompasses three distinct tribes:

• open relationships;
• swinging;
• polyamory.

Open relationships involve agreeing to see others without necessarily discussing it. Swingers commit to having sex with others individually or as a couple while maintaining a clear home base hierarchy. Polyamorous people pursue multiple emotional and romantic connections simultaneously, often rejecting strict relationship hierarchies. Practitioners experience phenomena known as compersion, NRE (new relationship energy), and limerence.

Tribes of Non-Monogamy

Traditional culture operates on a scarcity model of love where feelings deplete like water in a well. Polyamorous practitioners embrace a bounty model where love and connection are plentiful and grow expansively. Mischa Lin, a polyamory activist and educator, questioned whether people would ever claim they have no room in their heart for a second child due to limited space.

Elisabeth Sheff identifies the historical waves of consensual non-monogamy:

1. The first wave comprised intentional communities like Brook Farm, Oneida, and Nashoba. Brook Farm was founded as a free-love community by a former Unitarian minister with Nathaniel Hawthorne's help.
2. The second wave comprised the 1970s free love and swinging movements.
3. The third wave reflects modern mainstream cultural interest, media representation, and rising search trends.

The monogamy-industrial complex maintains cultural norms despite shifting realities. In 1970, the United States had 3,000 family and marital therapists compared to nearly 43,000 by May 2017. Over 20 percent of US adults have practiced consensual non-monogamy at some point, according to a recent study.

2. Women Who Love Sex Too Much

Recent survey data show that women are cheating on their husbands at significantly higher rates than in the past, closing the infidelity gap between genders. Data from the General Social Survey and other studies reveal that women under forty-five are nearly neck-and-neck with men in infidelity. Young women participate in group sex and sex parties at high rates, challenging assumptions that men are naturally more adventurous.

Women experience sexual listlessness in long-term domestic routines and increasingly use affairs as practical strategies for sexual satisfaction.

A 2013 GSS finding showed women were roughly 40 percent more likely to cheat than in 1990, while husbands' infidelity rates remained steady. In a 1993 British academic study showing nearly even infidelity ratios, researchers removed outliers with twenty or more sexual partners. An eighteen to twenty-nine age group of American women in a 1992 survey reported even more affairs than male peers. In a 2017 study, the twenty-five to twenty-nine age group showed women's threesome experience equaled men's, and women were nearly twice as likely to have gone to a sex party.

Closing the Infidelity Gap

Laboratory experiments demonstrate that women's bodies respond physically to a wide variety of sexual stimuli regardless of their reported sexual orientation. Biopsychologist Meredith Chivers uses plethysmographs to measure blood flow in participants watching explicit films. Self-described heterosexual women show physical arousal to diverse stimuli including male-male sex, female-female sex, and even bonobos, acting as sexual anarchists whose libidos ignore traditional categories.

Meredith Chivers directed Queen's University's Sexuality and Gender Laboratory where study participants hooked up to plethysmographs while watching explicit photos and movies. A 2014 study showed men and women reported essentially identical degrees of desire after watching sexy films. The familiarity and institutionalization of roles in long-term relationships disproportionately dampen female sexual desire.

Marta Meana's clinical and qualitative research shows that the overfamiliarization of a spouse strips them of credibility as an object of lust. While men may be satisfied by regular sex within a routine, women experience sexual listlessness when the transgressive thrill of novelty is removed. Marta Meana studied nineteen women in satisfying long-term partnerships who suffered from low desire due to domestic roles and overfamiliarity. An 11,000 British men and women aged sixteen to seventy-four included in a 2017 study showed women living with a partner were twice as likely to lose interest in sex as cohabiting men.

Erotic Self-Focus

Women's sexual arousal is frequently driven by an erotic relationship with themselves and seeing themselves as sexy. Marta Meana's research on female erotic self-focus indicates that feeling desired and viewing their own bodies in situations like looking in a mirror serves as a primary turn-on for women, revealing an independent aspect of female sexuality. Meana asked study participants whether they would want to sleep with themselves, to which many women answered yes while men were confused by the question.

Many women commit infidelity not to escape their marriages or seek emotional connection, but as a pragmatic strategy to obtain sexual satisfaction while remaining married. Alicia Walker's study of female users of the Ashley Madison website reveals that women systematically vet outside partners purely for sexual gratification and physical utility. These affairs allow them to stay in otherwise good primary partnerships without enduring the complications and costs of divorce.

Alicia Walker studied forty-six female users of the Ashley Madison website before its 2015 hack. The twenty-four to sixty-five age range of Walker's study participants navigated concurrent relationships with outside partners. When you vet candidates for an infidelity workaround, you can use specific practical guidelines:

• Ask for penis size, availability, associations sought, and preferred sex acts in the first communication.
• Avoid emotionally needy men or those seeking relationships instead of simple liaisons.

3. Ploughs, Property, and Propriety

The transition to agriculture and ox-drawn ploughs transformed female independence into systemic dependence and strict control over sexuality.

The Agricultural Revolution

Starting 10 to 12 thousand years ago in the Jordan Valley of the Fertile Crescent, a momentous change began in female fortune. Early humans evolved as cooperative breeders within matrilocal groups where women enjoyed high levels of autonomy, social support, and sexual self-determination. Anthropological consensus shows early Homo life history featured loose bands raising young collectively and mating with multiple partners. Before the plough, matrilocal living meant females stayed with kin who protected their interests and helped provision offspring.

European explorers were shocked by the sexual and social freedom of indigenous women when they encountered them centuries later. In 1623, Brother Gabriel Sagard spent time among the Wyandot and witnessed the endakwandet healing ceremony where young women chose male partners to sleep with at a sick woman's couch as a form of potent medicine. Captain Samuel Wallis traveled to Tahiti in 1767 and James Cook visited in 1769, both encountering societies where female sexual freedom was celebrated.

The Plough and Patriarchy

The transition from foraging to agriculture deteriorated human health and fundamentally reorganized social relations into hierarchical and stratified lines. While agriculture increased food storage and population, it introduced a carbohydrate-intensive diet, new diseases from close proximity to farm animals, and competition for resources. This led to three linked beliefs:

• A woman is a man's property.
• A woman belongs in the home.
• A woman should be naturally monogamous.

The specific type of agricultural tool determined women's social status. Hoe and paddy agriculture allowed women to work outdoors as primary producers, giving them clout and property rights. Conversely, the heavy plough required upper body grip strength and involved dangerous draft animals, making farming incompatible with childcare and relegating women to secondary domestic production. Today, 70 percent of agricultural and post-agricultural societies are patrilocal.

The invention of the plough made female monogamy a high-stakes necessity for men to ensure that wealth, land, and power were bequeathed only to biological heirs. Mesopotamians may have used oxen-powered ploughs in the 6th millennium BC. When societies transitioned to private property and patrilineal inheritance, female sexual autonomy threatened the certainty of paternity. Consequently, female chastity was rigorously policed through physical confinement, ornamentation, dowries, virginity obsession, and severe legal punishments for adultery.

Roman Emperor Augustus exiled his daughter Julia to a remote island and called her a disease in his flesh after her open affairs threatened dynastic stability during the transition of Rome into an empire. Julia died of malnutrition at age fifty-three in AD 14.

Harvard and UCLA economists published a comprehensive analysis in 2013 proving that historical reliance on the plough continues to predict modern gender-biased attitudes. Using databases like the Ethnographic Atlas containing 1,256 ethnic groups and the World Values Survey, researchers found that descendants of plough-using cultures—even generations later and thousands of miles away—overwhelmingly agree that men deserve jobs and political leadership over women. A study on mate preferences published in Personality and Individual Differences surveyed 27,600 straight Americans to demonstrate how deeply these gender-biased attitudes persist.

4. Being Himba and Primate Insights

Primate observations and pastoralist societies demonstrate that female promiscuity and extra-pair mating serve adaptive socio-economic functions.

Primate Strategies

Charles Darwin argued that sexual selection operates through female intersexual choice and male intra-sexual competition, casting females as elusive selectors. Angus Bateman later reinforced this in 1948 using fruit fly experiments, claiming male fertility scales linearly with copulations while female reproductive success plateaus after one mating. This framework has long been used to justify rigid gender roles and the notion of universal sex differences.

Angus Bateman assembled equal numbers of male and female Drosophila melanogaster in bottles, observed their free mating, and later classified the offspring by genotype to argue that male reproductive success is more variable than female success. The foundational Darwin-Bateman paradigm asserts that females are naturally coy, passive, and monogamous because eggs are metabolically expensive, whereas males are ardent and driven to multiple mating because sperm is cheap. The work cited 1871 for the publication year of Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, 1848 for the year Angus Bateman published his paper on fruit flies, and noted 96 percent of females reproduced compared to 79 percent of males in Bateman's study.

Challenging the view of passive females, primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy observed that incoming male Hanuman langurs frequently attack and kill infants to force mothers to resume ovulation. In response, mothers preemptively mate with multiple invading males so that potential killers cannot be certain they are not the biological fathers, thereby preventing them from attacking the offspring.

During her doctoral fieldwork at Mount Abu in Rajasthan, India, Sarah Hrdy observed Hanuman langur males attacking infants and noted that mothers of the dead infants subsequently mated with the killers. Primate observations and pastoralist societies demonstrate that female promiscuity and extra-pair mating serve adaptive socio-economic functions. The research brought forward 1977 for the publication year of Sarah Hrdy's book The Langurs of Abu and 1981 for the publication of The Woman That Never Evolved.

The Himba Culture

Among the semi-nomadic Himba of Namibia, female infidelity is socially accepted, widely practiced, and associated with a specific cultural term for children born outside of wedlock. There are 30,000 to 50,000 Himba remaining in Northern Namibia and Angola.

Himba women frequently remain at the main camp while husbands travel to distant cattle posts, leading to long-term physical separation. Spouses openly discuss affairs, and women who conceive children through extramarital affairs categorize them using a specific term related to trysts, achieving high rates of extra-pair paternity without facing heavy social censure.

Anthropologist Brooke Scelza discovered through demographic interviews in the Omuhonga Basin that nearly 32 percent of Himba women had at least one omoka child, yielding an extra-pair paternity rate of nearly 18 percent across all marital births. Scelza studied 23 Himba compounds in the Omuhonga Basin, including 110 women and 421 births in her analysis, with 18 percent of all marital births classified as omoka.

For Himba women in arranged marriages, taking lovers and bearing omoka children serves as an adaptive counterstrategy that improves their reproductive success and support networks. Scelza found that no omoka children were born to women in love matches, whereas they occurred frequently in arranged marriages.

Brooke Scelza documented that Himba women in arranged marriages who took lovers and had omoka children had more children who survived to age five compared to women who married the men they chose themselves. Because Himba men have low investment in children and few heritable resources, they tolerate paternity uncertainty, while women gain access to a larger circle of helpers, food, and resources during droughts or absences. The study recorded 79 women interviewed who chose their own husbands with zero omoka children born to them, and five years old as the survival milestone measured for children.

5. Loving the Woman Who’s Untrue

Alternative arrangements like open marriages and the cuckold lifestyle rely on clear boundaries, autonomy, and mutual respect rather than possessiveness.

Tim and his wife Lily established an open relationship from the outset of their marriage. They agreed that neither viewed the other as property and that their marriage remained the primary commitment.

Over more than twenty-five years of marriage for Tim and Lily, they adapted rules to manage outside relationships safely:

• Ensure no secrets are kept from the primary partner.
• Prohibit siphoning time, energy, or money from each other and the children.
• Restrict outside partners to those without young children to avoid unnecessary complexity.

Tim shared how Lily eventually fell in love with a man named Rick. Rick later became a live-in chef and family friend for nearly a decade and a half for Lily's relationship with Rick, while Tim maintained outside relationships under mutually understood rules.

The Hotwife Lifestyle

Philosophy professor Carrie Jenkins analyzes romantic love and argues that love is frequently neither exclusionary nor exclusive. Her public writing and book about being polyamorous with a husband and a boyfriend drew severe online harassment and misogynistic abuse. This backlash reflected deep-seated cultural views of women as male reproductive property that must be controlled. Carrie Jenkins, a tenured professor at the University of British Columbia, faced severe online abuse after publishing her 2017 book What Love Is: And What It Could Be, following her 2008 publication Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge.

A nonprofit leader named Michelle engaged in a passionate but highly secretive affair with a married woman named Delia. Michelle described waiting in parking garages and meeting in parks for clandestine encounters with Delia before the relationship ultimately collapsed under the weight of secrecy and marital fallout. Over a year since their breakup when Michelle discussed her experience, the illicit nature of the relationship left Michelle feeling shunted aside and emotionally adrift under a shroud of secrecy.

Research by psychologist David Ley and internet observations show that many heterosexual men experience strong sexual arousal from watching, hearing about, or facilitating their wives having sex with other men. Justin Lehmiller's survey of four thousand men found that 58 percent of men surveyed had fantasies about sharing their partner or being cucked. A former Army man named Kurt and his wife Christina used classified platforms to find bulls like Claudio, with Kurt deriving pleasure from feeling submissive and watching his wife engage with larger men to clean up. Successful couples in this hotwife and cuckold lifestyle often exhibit exceptional communication, mutual respect, and high levels of marital satisfaction compared to conventional unions.

10 Key Ideas

1. Lifelong monogamous coupling requires surrendering complete sexual autonomy, yet consensual non-monogamy offers alternative relationship structures.
2. Women experience sexual listlessness in long-term domestic routines and increasingly use affairs as practical strategies for sexual satisfaction.
3. Women's sexual arousal is frequently driven by an erotic relationship with themselves and seeing themselves as sexy.
4. The transition to agriculture and ox-drawn ploughs transformed female independence into systemic dependence and strict control over sexuality.
5. The invention of the plough made female monogamy a high-stakes necessity for men to ensure that wealth, land, and power were bequeathed only to biological heirs.
6. Charles Darwin argued that sexual selection operates through female intersexual choice and male intra-sexual competition, casting females as elusive selectors.
7. Primate observations and pastoralist societies demonstrate that female promiscuity and extra-pair mating serve adaptive socio-economic functions.
8. For Himba women in arranged marriages, taking lovers and bearing omoka children serves as an adaptive counterstrategy that improves their reproductive success and support networks.
9. Alternative arrangements like open marriages and the cuckold lifestyle rely on clear boundaries, autonomy, and mutual respect rather than possessiveness.
10. Successful couples in this hotwife and cuckold lifestyle often exhibit exceptional communication, mutual respect, and high levels of marital satisfaction compared to conventional unions.