SO LET me get this straight. If I have an affair, I’m just a horny bastard who can’t keep his penis in his pants.
On the other hand, if my partner sleeps with somebody else, not only is it not her fault, but she will have been driven to it — virtually against her will — by my neglect, by the modern-day pressures of holding down a job while raising children, by the evil influence of modern communication systems, such as the internet and mobile phones, and by the (cynical, male) office smoothie who takes advantage of all this by telling her how hard she works, how beautiful she looks and how much she deserves the reward of a drink after work. With him.
By almost anything, in fact, other than her own sexual appetite.
How convenient to be able to suspend temporarily one’s modern, feminist sensibilities in favour of the essentially sexist stance that if a woman strays sexually she does so against her will and as a victim — of another’s neglect or bad behaviour.
Without wishing to moralise (which, as anyone who knows me well would agree, would be a bit rich), it all boils down to free will, determinism and (brace yourself: shocking concept follows) moral responsibility, as philosophers from Aristotle onwards have been pointing out for years.
Advertisement
If, when you next take off your newly purchased Agent Provocateur knickers in room 712, you are acting freely (where, as the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it neatly, “acting freely entails the ability to have done otherwise at the time of action”), then you will have nobody to blame for the ensuing adulterous shagfest but yourself. No matter how much football your pot-bellied pig of a husband watches on television.
What really surprises me is the suggestion that more women than ever before are having (sorry, are being driven into) affairs. I’ve had enough experience over the years (on both sides of the sheets) to conclude that almost anyone — man or woman — is rarely more than one glance and a well-chosen compliment away from adultery.
As for the suggestion that working life has presented women with more opportunities (sorry: excuses), I can say only that I have spent some very pleasant afternoons indeed being entertained in other men’s castles (and, talking of castles, may I note that presumably the chastity belt wasn’t introduced during the Crusades only to make peeing difficult).
To say that an adulteress isn’t really looking for raw sex, passion and mind-blowing orgasms — oh, dear, no: all she really wants is to be “appreciated”, perhaps have a bit of a cuddle — is to subscribe to the myth that a woman’s sexuality is just a pale imitation of a man’s.
I’ve slept with a number of partnered women (and I take full Aristotelian responsibility for that, of course) and what has always impressed me has been the self-honesty and ruthlessness with which they cheated on their husbands. Yes, they wanted to be “appreciated” (up to three or four times in one session, if possible), but I never once heard a woman whine: “My husband doesn’t understand me.”
Advertisement
The reality — which I thought that all grown-ups had recognised by now — is that women hunger for sex just as much as men do, and that sometimes the excitement of the forbidden proves irresistible.
As the American actress Cornelia Otis Skinner said: “Women’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.”
That’s life. That’s humans. If you don’t like it, marry a swan.