Is staying with a cheater anti-feminist?

When Jay-Z dropped his last album, 4:44, his cheating on Beyoncé became a hot topic. While we all knew Jay cheated on Beyoncé from Lemonade, 4:44 provides his perspective and gory new details on the affair.

Finding out Jay participated in a menage e tois and didn’t feel compelled to stop cheating until after Blue Ivy was born necessarily complicated the public’s understanding of the couple’s narrative.

Understanding Jay-Z was deliberately cheating with little remorse has frustrated Beyoncé fans and casual pop-culture followers alike. And while some onlookers still believe Beyoncé sets a good example for putting love above all, others are suggesting the normalization of cheating is harmful.

Cheating is a gendered issue. There’s really no question about it. While women may cheat with the same frequency as men, it’s for different reasons.

According to The Telegraph, anthropologist Helen Fisher found that women tend to cheat due to being unsatisfied with their relationship, while 56 percent of men who cheat consider themselves “happily married” but fulfilling a “need.”

What does this say about male cheaters? They cheat because of entitlement.

Male entitlement to women’s bodies and sex is integral to the patriarchy’s construction of masculinity. Men are told they naturally “think with their little heads,” that the abusive porn is a necessity to control their sexual “needs,” and that they can seek out sex that will “get the job done,” even if it’s from sex workers who are being systematically abused.

Meanwhile, women are told to partake in this system. Women are told to perform sexual favors for their partners to keep them from wandering. Women are told to stay thin, get plastic surgery, and wear makeup to appeal to the sexual appetites of their partners. And importantly for this discussion, women are told to accept it when their partners have sex outside of their monogamous relationship.

In today’s society, staying with cheaters is gendered too. Women stay with cheaters. Men shame them, like Rob Kardashian did to Blac Chyna. Or, they just kill them.

Beyoncé staying with Jay-Z is not a feminist act. Her staying in an abusive relationship does not challenge the status quo of society, as feminist acts do and should. But that doesn’t mean Beyoncé isn’t a feminist. Marriages are complicated. Also, implying that one woman should carry the burden of fighting an entire society’s institutionalized inequality while suffering from said inequality is ridiculous.

However, as Minna Salami at The Guardian mentions, this narrative is “familiar for all the wrong reasons. It’s the same script shared by women such as Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo and Hillary Clinton: powerful, talented women whose partners should be proudly elevating them but instead humiliate them with public affairs.”

Until we as a society tackle to construction of masculinity with sexual entitlement, more Beyoncés will happen. More strong, feminist women will be humiliated by cheating partners – whether they choose to stay with them or not.