Time's Belinda Luscombe says, "The cheated-upon spouses of the world have a new hero and her name is Jenny Sanford."

The Washington Post's Philip Rucker says,

Sanford's reaction to her husband's infidelity purposefully did not follow the post-disclosure postures of Hillary Clinton, Silda Spitzer or Elizabeth Edwards. She emerged as a standard-bearer in the year when CBS debuted "The Good Wife," a prime-time drama about a cheating politician's spouse who rebounds professionally, rising after his downfall. Sanford blazed a path for an aggrieved spouse of a philandering politician and made herself an unlikely heroine — a role model, albeit in unwelcome circumstances.

Barbara Walters says,

"She was a new kind of woman and, as it turns out, she struck a chord. We have had a year of wives standing tight-lipped and unhappy next to their husbands. . . . A lot of women related to her, and she behaved in a very different way. She wasn't a victim. She was independent and true to herself."

Vogue says, "Petite, clear-eyed, strong-willed, pious without being smug, smart without being caustic, Jenny Sanford became an unlikely heroine by telling the simple truth."

The Daily Beast's Phoebe Connelly says,

The news that Sanford is leaving her national punchline of a husband, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, is no reason to hail her as a feminist icon. Being cheated on does not grant a woman an all-access pass to the feminist club. Nor does it do feminism much credit to claim heroines based on how they handle their husband's infidelities....It's troubling to think that in a year when we have seen feminist issues like reproductive rights take center stage in Congress, had a self-identified feminist appointed secretary of State, and watched women lead the resistance movement in Iran, we'd pick a feminist icon for the simple fact that she left a bad marriage. Lots of women do that.

We say: Sadly, both are true: Sanford can behave with basic self-respect, and do something women do everyday, and still elevate the image of the much-maligned political wife. Let's just not let this - composure, dignity and business acumen while we're at it - be the heights to which all others will aspire - but the basic baseline.

Jenny Sanford Is Not A Feminist Icon [Daily Beast]

Jenny Sanford, Hiking The High Road [Washington Post]
The Longest Year [Washington Post]
Notes On A Scandal [Vogue]
Jenny Sanford: The Savviest Spurned Wife In History [Time]

Matt Lauer says stay-at-home mom Cori Rist decided to appear on Today "to set the record straight," and Rist echoes this sentiment when she says, "I felt like I needed to defend myself." She does emphasize that Tiger Woods never paid her for sex, that she's not "a hooker or a prostitute," and that members of his entourage knew about their affair, but she doesn't really add all that much to "the record." Rist says she needs to "set an example" for her seven-year-old son, and perhaps her appearance is an effort to, as she says, "take responsibility for the things I've done." But while she publicly apologizes to Elin Nordegren, the apology is unlikely to be all that comforting, and there doesn't seem to be much need for Rist to "take responsibility" on television. In fact, at this point it's hard not to suspect some of Woods's mistresses of self-promotion.

As Givhan pointed out yesterday, the act of speaking publicly as a former Woods mistress does have costs. The media and viewers alike disparage them, viewing them not only as morally loose but as "interchangeable commodities." Givhan writes,

Whatever might have occurred between Woods and all these women might never be fully known, and frankly, that's the way it should be. But for all the careful parsing of Woods's character, the attempts to reconcile his public persona with what might have been going on in the shadows, the women are being lumped into broad categories. They are being stereotyped as usual suspects for this sort of behavior.

It's a fair point, especially when people are joking of Tiger that, "If all his mistresses look the same, why didn't he just choose one?" Just because they looks similar doesn't make them the same, and even if Woods pursued them because they fit a certain physical type, that doesn't mean blondness is all they have to offer anyone. It's also true that their occupations — some are cocktail waitresses or former models — don't say anything about their intelligence or morals (a mistake we've been accused of making). But their jobs do make them a lot less famous than Tiger — meaning that, in some ways, they have less to lose.

Rist and other women in her position face some public censure and mockery. Even Givhan's not immune, saying of Woods's porn-star entanglements, "It seems fair to say that if you have chosen porn as your life's work, you are content with being judged as slimy, stereotyped as skeevy and maligned as sleazy." But unlike Woods, they don't have lucrative endorsement deals with Accenture to lose. And they may have something to gain — especially since famous other-woman Ashley Dupre now has a newspaper column. Rist says that unlike Woods's other mistresses, "I wasn't looking to get anything out of the relationship," and that may be true — when she broke down on Today, it felt genuine. But the Today show and other media outlets are certainly looking to get ratings out of Tiger Woods's relationships, and women who until now lived in relative obscurity may find the exposure tempting.

The Tiger Woods Scandal Is A Tale Of Sex — And Sexism [Washington Post]
Big Risk In A One-Man Brand Like Tiger Woods [NYT]

The day after a South Carolina legislative panel decided to consider a formal rebuke against him (as opposed to the more severe impeachment) Sanford spoke to reporters about his marriage. Although he and his wife have actually been separated, he says he still wants to make a marriage work. He wouldn't say whether he was still in contact with the Argentinian woman he visited over Father's Day weekend, but he did say, "I'm not going back to June. We've had all those conversations." He added that he had visited his wife and children at the beach house where they're now living: "I mean, you may have missed it, but I mean I was down there last night and dropped by and saw the kids."

While Mark Sanford struggles to rehabilitate his reputation, his wife's star is rising. She appeared on ABC as one of Barbara Walters 10 Most Fascinating People of 2009, where she had the good and bad fortune to be able to make even more public statements about her husband's infidelity. Jenny Sanford seemed a little stiff, but she was candid, saying she was "obviously not" her husband's soul mate. However, she didn't rule out repairing the marriage, saying only, "I think the hurdles are significant."

Walters says she chose Sanford as a counterexample to the "long-suffering wife [...] saying, 'I'm standing by my husband'" and because "she has lived now with dignity and integrity." Jenny Sanford does seem to have some serious backbone — of her husband's infidelity, she tells Walters, "certainly his actions hurt me, and they caused consequences for me, but they don't in any way take away my own self-esteem." She also says the title of her upcoming book, Staying True, reflects her commitment "to myself, to my faith, to the things that are important to me." It's refreshing to see a woman who once devoted her life to her husband's political campaign now making a public expression of strength and self-sufficiency, and Sanford's independence sends an important message that women need not be destroyed by their husbands' indiscretions. Sanford says she has forgiven, but not forgotten her husband's affair, and she provides a very public model for women (and men) who feel that cheating isn't something they have to tolerate.

At the same time, is separation the only way she could have "lived with dignity and integrity?" Is standing by your husband always an undignified act? Sanford deserved praise for offering a new path for the publicly "wronged wife," but by implicitly denigrating the old path, we just heap more shame on these wives. Whether or not she'd chosen to stay with her husband, Jenny Sanford's integrity was never at issue — and maybe one of the biggest problems for wives of famous philanderers is that we continue to find their marriages "fascinating."

Update: Guess those "hurdles" were a little too high — Jenny Sanford is filing for divorce.

South Carolina Gov. Sanford Still Wants To Reconcile With Wife, But Jenny Sanford Is Not Willing [New York Daily News]
Jenny Sanford Talks About Heartbreak After... [ABC News]
Jenny Sanford On Barbara Walters' 10 Most Fascinating People [YouTube]

Sheidlower writes,

We don't know much for certain about Tiger Woods' extramarital relations. But the term mistress generally connotes a level of commitment to one's side dish(es) that does not seem to be present here. A woman who has sex with a man once-or even repeatedly- but without any real devotion is not really his mistress.

A mistress, Sheidlower continues, is "exclusively devoted to one man." Their relationship is "relatively serious and stable," and the man may support her financially. And it's not just the name that sounds archaic — according to Sheidlower, the whole concept has fallen out of vogue:

If the type of romantic partnership that mistress evokes seems a little quaint, that points to the very problem with the word in current use: It refers to a social role for women that is increasingly rare, because it is increasingly unnecessary, in modern-day America. A man who is devoted to another woman can divorce his wife without the same social stigma that would once have applied; if his needs are purely recreational, he can engage in casual affairs without doling out serious amounts of cash. Conversely, women no longer need sugar daddies for support. Modern women, for the most part, have access to financial-and sexual-opportunities that make subservience to a married man distinctly less appealing.

It's good that women now have enough economic and sexual independence that they don't need to be "kept," and it's hard to feel much affection for a term that stood for a pretty unequal relationship (though Steidlower's claim that a mistress was always a one-man woman seems a bit naive). At the same time, as the number of Tiger Woods's alleged paramours (lovers? Hookups? As Sheidlower points out, all the terms suck.) approaches a dozen, I find myself a little nostalgic for a slightly more romantic form of infidelity. Various Freudian analyses notwithstanding, we don't really know why Tiger Woods cheated. But the sheer volume of indiscretion now piling up in tabloids and newspapers feels pretty sordid, less like the star-crossed love of "Meryl and Clint in the Bridges of Madison County" (The Daily Beast's example) and more like a guy scratching an itch. And scratching and scratching and scratching.

Yes, the word "mistress" hearkens back to a time when women had much less sexual freedom than men (although you could argue they still do). And yes, to privilege it over "one-night stand" or "hookup" implies a certain prudishness and discomfort with modern sexual practices — practices which may not really be so different from those of yore. Mistresses aside, the one-night stand is ancient, and even the "random hookup" is far from a twenty-first century invention. Still, I have to confess that when I received an email to my work address reading "become my sexual mistress, Lady," I was a little bit charmed. The "sexual" part notwithstanding, the request sounded so quaint, almost chivalrous. I could imagine it inscribed on a card, accompanied by a white rose. Then I noticed he'd sent the message to everyone on the staff.

Tiger Woods Does Not Have 11 "Mistresses" [Slate]
Why Men Cheat [Daily Beast]

Okay, first odd thing about Melanie Berliet's "experiment." She claims her journalistic - sociological? - anthropological? goal is "to explore a few thorny questions: What kind of men seek out illicit relationships online? Can adultery be a healthy way to fulfill one's needs without alienating one's partner? Is cheating really as bad as society makes it out to be?" But the thing is, she opens the piece with an account of her two-year affair with a married man. So, um, hasn't she already done the leg-work?

Then there's her actual process, which feels...well, like nothing you'd learn in J-School. She devises the profile of a young, restless matron and engages with three guys. She's into two of them, who seem unconflicted about their cheating and have "arrangements" - tacit or otherwise - with their wives. And they seem on the level. "I, too, was everything I'd claimed-a Georgetown graduate and bond trader turned writer who likes to read and ride her bike-save for one crucial detail: I was actually unmarried and unattached." And, you know, a reporter.

Third odd thing: the writing.

"Why me?," I asked. "What are the other women on Ashley Madison like?"

"Well, for one thing, your skin is the color of purity," he said, as if admitting his darkest secret. "It gets me thinking about the irony of finding you on some filthy cheater's Web site. It doesn't match."

"So I embody a contradiction," I said, aware of my starring role in some hard-core porno playing in the back of his mind.

"Yes. I love it."

She doesn't think this particular guy is really unconflicted about the cheating.

For the sake of my experiment, though, I obliged Jackson by conjuring up several explicit "visuals" via e-mail while he was away. I also participated in a few rounds of real-time cyber-sex, despite confusion over the whole typing-while-touching thing. The transcripts of those e-mails and conversations make me laugh, cringe, blush, and feel aroused all at once, but they're way too graphic to print.

Moving on! So. What does she conclude from her "research?" Well, that different people cheat for different reasons. And, oh yeah:

If and when I find a life companion, I can't say with certainty that I'll be 100 percent faithful-not because I don't want to be, but because it seems presumptuous to assume that strict monogamy is my fate when the majority of people who attempt it fail...Maybe I'm jaded. Maybe, as some social scientists would say, I'm a sex addict incapable of achieving healthy intimacy. Or maybe, as Dr. David Barash suggests in his provocative book The Myth of Monogamy, when it comes to marriage we ought to apply Churchill's maxim about democracy: among lifestyle choices, it's the worst possible option except when you consider the alternatives.

Or...maybe you're doing your "research" amidst a self-selecting population of creepy assholes who've paid money to be on a site whose motto is 'Life is short. Have an affair' and sounds like Nora Roberts named it. Just a thought. But despite the, ahem, depth of this writer's journalistic commitment to the truth, I think I'll happily draw uninformed, judgmental conclusions about most of these dudes - and not feel I'm missing much.

The Cheaters' Club [Vanity Fair]

The funny thing is, that in spite of their presentation, when you get past the lurid headlines, sometimes these first-person accounts contain a sort of raw truth that one rarely sees. Far from being "unrepentant," the narrator is actually fairly insightful about her motivations. For one thing, when she first takes up with a married man, she's only 18. His marriage, she says

in fact, it made him more desirable. It was more of a challenge to ‘catch' him, and I was flattered that such an attractive man who already had a wife would want to flirt with me. I was very young and naïve, and I felt no responsibility for the fact that he was married. If he wasn't worried, why should I be?

This begins a pattern in which she only dates married men - each of whom ultimately returns to his wife. When she has her "one and only relationship with a single man," he confirms her feeling that they "can't be trusted" by leaving her alone and pregnant. (The married guys leaving her for their wives is, I guess, a sign of their steadfastness?)

She says,

Looking back, I think that a lot of my interest in married men stemmed from a feeling of insecurity. Married men were 'safe': they represented security and perhaps even a father figure to me. Also, there was the thrill of the chase, the illicit nature of our clandestine meetings and a feeling of romance and danger about the affair. It was a heady mixture to a girl who didn't feel very confident about herself or her looks...In turn, I think the married men were attracted to me because I presented an image of vulnerability and innocence. I made myself into who they wanted me to be. Or, more realistically, all the things they felt their wives were not.

She's forced to consider that there's another person involved when she calls one of her boyfriends at home. "Suddenly, it all came home to me. This was a real person, a young woman like me, with a child." However, she ultimately ends up with another married guy, stays with him for five years during which they have two kids and he leads a double-life, and now, they're together and planning to marry. "I don't regret a thing," she - or the editor - finishes defiantly, despite having said exactly the opposite in the body of the piece.

If this is supposed to give some kind of insight into the mind of the predatory husband-snatcher, I guess it does, but more than anything it seems like a window into the life of a very disturbed young woman drawn to horrible men. That she perceives a man who's unfaithful to his wife as automatically attractive is not normal "mistress" behavior but, by piece's end, a kind of pathology. And the guys range, to judge by this, from predatory to loathesome, taking advantage of her insecurities and playing fast and loose with their families' lives.

In a crazy kind of way, this put me in mind of that memoir Perfection, the betrayed wife's confession. Both, in a sense, seem to position the issue as a stark conflict between the betrayed wife and the mistress - both, in a sense, defiant victims. What I mean, I guess, is that's how the media seems determine to position both, reducing these issues to a cultural catfight. And the glee with which the study results have been reported - madonnas! whores! boys will be boys! - plays into the most obvious of misogynistic cliches. Maybe that's inevitable: at the end of the day, maybe these issues are too basic and too fraught and too ancient to transcend such normative rhetoric. But it's the "shocking" lack of repentance I find worrisome.

Why I Steal Other Women's Husbands... A Shockingly Unrepentant Woman Explains Herself [Daily Mail]

Do Single Women Seek Attached Men? [NY Times]
Related: Sex & The Single Homewrecker: Caitlin Flanagan Slams Rielle Hunter, Helen Gurley BrownWoman Confronts Husband's Mistresses: Modern Closure, Or Old-School Drama?

Says Reuters, "Every time British businessman Robert Charlton cheated on his wife, he bought her some extravagant jewelry to try to make amends. After 26 years of marriage, long-suffering Elizabeth Charlton had more than 40 glittering pieces" of antique jewelry worth some 300,000 pounds, including a 54-diamond "riviere necklace" that fetched a lot when the couple's daughter auctioned off the guilt stash.

According to the TImes of London, Charlton was the owner of an underwear packing business and two nightclubs, and apparently his philandering was "an open secret" to family and friends - indeed, it's his daughter who explained the collection's provenance to the auction house. But did he talk openly about it? Were the gifts apologies, or more like notifications of the affairs? Did everyone know? Did she wear them? Did the caliber of gift vary with the philandering? And was his largesse motivated by guilt, or a sense of decorum? Did it start as one and become some kind of deal with the devil? Lots of people cheated, not everyone ended up with the Crown Jewels.

In any event, this seems like the final humiliation. In case you're wondering, the Daily Mail trumpeted, "Cuckolded-wife-amassed-300-000-guilty-conscience-jewellery!" But what's so odd about the story is not the "cuckolding" (if that even makes sense) but the open pragmatism of the relationship - and the extent to which destigmatized divorce has altered the dynamic. It's interesting too to think of the fact that the extravagant jewels - a traditional symbol of patriarchal buying-and-selling, the traditional badge of both gold-digger and wronged wife, didn't find any takers amongst the couples's descendants: apparently they unanimously decided to sell. Cash may not be forever, but for good and ill, "forever" isn't really a requirement any more.

£6,000 A Fling: Philanderer Robert Charlton's 'Guilt Diamonds' Sold At Auction [TimesUK]
Diamonds: A Girl's Best Compensation For Infidelity [Reuters]

£300,000 Guilt Trip: The 43 Jewels Of Wife Who Received One Each Time Her Husband Strayed [Daily Mail]

One thing is clear from the piece: Sanford is smart. Discussing why her governor husband was willing to risk his career and his children's welfare for an affair, she says,

Politicians become disconnected from the way everyone else lives in the world. I saw that from the very beginning. They'll say they need something, and ten people want to give it to them. It's an ego boost, and it's easy to drink your own Kool-Aid.

She seems to have a clear-eyed view of her husband's sense of entitlement, and of the constant drive for bigger and better things that left him feeling dissatisfied with his life. Elsewhere, though, her analysis of his problems sounds less credible. She tells Johnson,

Over the course of both pastoral and marriage counseling, it became clear to me that he was just obsessed with going to see this woman. I have learned that these affairs are almost like an addiction to alcohol or pornography. They just can't break away from them.

This seems perilously close to the language typically used by celebrities when they blame "sex addiction" for their infidelity. It may be helpful to Sanford to think of her husband's affair in terms of substance abuse, and indeed the two may have some parallels, but Sanford's hardly breaking new ground here when she chalks up her husband's dalliances to an affliction beyond his control. Her comments about aging and gender, though, are more upsetting. She says,

Midlife aging is different for men than for women. Mark is worried about what his next job is. He worries about making money, running for office again, his legacy. I know my legacy is my children. I don't worry about that.

Johnson mentions Sanford's devotion to her children several times in the piece, at one point linking her "unlikely heroism" to the fact that "her children were the most important thing in the world to her." Of course the Sanfords' children have likely suffered as a result of their father's very public affair, and it's good that their mother is looking out for them. On the other hand, the idea that men have midlife crises because they can't get validation from family life, but that children inoculate women against these problems, is a damaging one. Jenny Sanford certainly didn't invent the stereotype that men live for work and women live for kids, but this "old-fashioned woman," as she calls herself, is certainly perpetuating it — and Johnson (unsurprisingly, since this is Vogue) doesn't interrogate the notion at all. Instead, she writes,

Mixing work and love as the Sanfords did in their campaigns, first for Congress and then for the governorship, might be practical-Sanford likes to joke that he hired his wife because "the price was right"-but it can be lethal to a marriage. Eroticism is fueled by mystery, and it can be hard to feel that about a person who is overseeing the latest returns from the fifteenth precinct.

Working with a spouse can certainly be tough, and it may have been difficult to share campaign duties when Jenny Sanford was ambivalent on her husband's political rise, but does Johnson need to channel pop-relationship self-help books with the phrase, "eroticism is fueled by mystery?" Does Sanford's story really need to be a story about men, women, and relationships in general — or even about "wronged political wives?"

In her statement acknowledging her husband's affair, Jenny Sanford wrote,

I personally believe that the greatest legacy I will leave behind in this world is not the job I held on Wall Street, or the campaigns I managed for Mark, or the work I have done as First Lady or even the philanthropic activities in which I have been routinely engaged. Instead, the greatest legacy I will leave in this world is the character of the children I, or we, leave behind. It is for that reason that I deeply regret the recent actions of my husband Mark, and their potential damage to our children.

Note the first three words — "I personally believe." Not "I believe, on behalf of all women." Jenny Sanford is a woman with a deep, personal commitment to her family, and her husband is a man who failed in his commitment to his. But that doesn't mean that loving your children — or even considering them your legacy — will keep you from cheating. Nor does it mean that men can't derive a sense of purpose or satisfaction from their kids. Rather, it means that Mark Sanford, perhaps because he was "worried about his legacy," perhaps because of an addictive relationship to another woman, or perhaps for a host of other reasons, chose to behave in a way he had previously called "reprehensible." His wife has handled a painful situation with grace, but she is not a template for all women, nor is her husband (thank God) a template for all men. Pretending that they are does wives and husbands, political and otherwise — not to mention their children, who shouldn't be set up as a bulwark against infidelity — a grave disservice.

Notes On A Scandal [Vogue]

This is because, in part, a lot of the answers rely on stereotypes about why men cheat, and why women either don't want to...or wouldn't. Let's start with former Congressman Pat Schroeder:

"I guess men in power are terribly attractive to some women, but I don't think that women in power are attractive to some men," said former Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.), who was co-chairwoman of Gary Hart's scandal-plagued presidential campaign in 1988.

I think any domme would disagree with that statement rather forcefully, to start — as would any number of powerful women and the men attracted to them. Are there a bunch of 19-year-old college interns trying to throw themselves at Hillary Clinton (other than this guy) the way that some young women are undoubtedly pursuing Congressman Aaron Schock? Probably not, but that doesn't mean that Clinton couldn't have her opportunities either, or that they would come from a man attracted to power.

Relationship "expert" Suzie Johnson (does that mean she dates a lot?) has a different perspective.

"Most of these politicians were the high school boys that couldn't get the cheerleader," said Johnson, whose website GoAskSuzie.com specializes in issues of infidelity. "Now the situation is reversed."

Um, I don't know which politicians she's been checking out, but politicians are, more often than not, guys who won popularity contests then and now. Plus, opportunity is not remotely the biggest factor why people (and men) cheat: I mean, Sanford undoubtedly could have boned someone in Columbia rather then Argentina.

Then there's the explanation of women's lack of opportunity:

As Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) points out, "Who has the time? I don't have enough time in the day to take care of the responsibilities I have between work and family."

Women tend to be able to juggle a lot, but with so many pressures, throwing an extra romance in the mix may feel like just another item to have to multitask. "In a certain way, it's a privilege, and it still belongs predominantly to men," said [associate professor of women's studies at UCLA Juliet ] Williams, who is herself a mother.

And former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino agrees:

No woman I know has the time for such trysts, nor do I know any who say the desire one. They're too busy trying to keep all the plates spinning at home, at work, and at the gym to make sure none fall and break.

Although this assumes that male politicians have less on their plates are are less committed to active parenting than female politicians (which might be true, but undoubtedly isn't in all cases), this does ring somewhat true to me. Who among us hasn't been too snowed under with personal and professional responsibilities that dating and romance was the furthest thing from our minds?

The best explanation, though, is the higher level of scrutiny female politicians face than their male counterparts. Mason explains:

Being so outnumbered in the political realm can also lead to greater media scrutiny for politicians - think, for example, of the brouhaha over Hillary Clinton's V-neck blouse that sparked a lengthy discussion on the appropriate amount of cleavage a female politician should reveal.

"Women are more conscious and aware that they are being held to an even higher standard," [director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University Debbie] Walsh said. "Therefore, they're even more cautious."

Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy agrees:

For Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), the issue is one of privacy. "Before I got to Congress, I could go out to a bar and have drinks with a friend. Now I wouldn't do it, even if it were with my brother, because I know it would make news."

Whereas many male politicians extracurricular activities never see the light of day barring their own stupidity (DUI, firing the woman, jetting off to South America), female politicians expect to get caught and — even for those not in the national spotlight — to be outed.

There's also the nuture and nature explanations, in which female politicians' behavior fits into an expected overarching pattern of female behavior:

"The tendency or willingness to transgress sexual boundaries in general is much more likely in men than in women," said Paul Abramson, author of the forthcoming book "Sex Appeal: Six Ethical Principles for the 21st Century."

Abramson, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, added that "women are socialized to be much more cautious about sexuality due to the fact that they can get pregnant. Having an affair is a sexual risk, and women are much less inclined to do that."

Well, it's a risk if, unlike many prominent national female politicians, women are young enough to be at risk for pregnancy. That, of course, doesn't mean a fidelity preference doesn't carry over past menopause, but one would have to consider whether it did before making a broad assumption.

In point of fact, plenty of women are unfaithful spouses — studies estimated anywhere from twenty to sixty percent of women are unfaithful at some point. If political women aren't different than other women, it's entirely likely that female politicians have cheated — but, with one exception (Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenowith), they haven't yet been caught. So maybe the question isn't why women don't cheat, it's why they tend to be less blindingly stupid when they do.

Why So Few Women In Infidelity Club? [Politico]
Re: Sanford [National Review]

Related: "I Got a Crush...On Hillary" [YouTube]
Aaron Schock, "Hottest Freshman," Talks Doogie Howser And Dating On "Today Show" [Huffington Post]
Many Cheat For A Thrill, More Stay True For Love [MSNBC]
When Women Cheat [CBS]

Her husband, Gordon Lee Churchwell 3rd, was a handsome bon vivant who first asked her out in front of his girlfriend. In his memoir of his experience of her pregnancy, he wrote, "While the party line is that Julie remains ‘my beautiful partner to whom I am devoted,' to Mr. Weenie, she is beginning to look like Danny DeVito in ‘Batman Returns'. ..."

After he died, friends found emails to other women, including one in which he discussed "the mediocre sex he'd had with his wife." Evidence piled up - including that which pointed to a close family friend. Says the Times,

In an act of extraordinary cheating chutzpah (this friend) arranged for Ms. Metz and her husband to seek marriage counseling with her very own therapist. The women's 6-year-old daughters were also best friends. The morning Ms. Metz learned of the affair, her daughter was staying over at Cathy's house.

As a young woman, Ms. Metz had a brief affair with a married man. "When the man's wife, whom she knew slightly, learned of the affair, she sent Ms. Metz a Valentine's Day card with dead cockroaches. Ms. Metz kept it for many years," says the Times. Clearly, this made an impression, vis a vis the code of conduct towards Other Women. What she learned from the experience, she says, is that "you will pay for it if you harm someone else." And that, apparently, when you're scorned, anything goes? In her case, Metz called and confronted all the women. "What did you think you were doing, getting involved with a married man with a kid? You weren't really thinking about me, were you? How would you feel if some woman did this to you?"

Now, normally, we wonder, what about the husband? He's the one who had five known affairs, did so with your best friend, and seems to have been an asshole to boot? Of course, because he's dead, she "couldn't ask him." But what's interesting is, even when the husband is very much on the scene, this is how the thinking often goes: the Other Woman gets blamed. It becomes about an act of betrayal of female solidarity, a far worse crime than a man's peccadilloes. Ms. Metz's book, Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal, has become a bestseller. I wonder if part of what appeals to people is the removal of the ambiguity: here's a case where it's appropriate to totally blame the other woman - because there's no alternative! And as a result, it places the blame squarely on their shoulders. Maybe in a world of chastened political wives standing dutifully on the podium, their faces masks of pain, readers get a vicarious thrill out of seeing a wife assert herself. But is there a more anachronistic kind of appeal for people, too?

None of this is to say that Metz's isn't a genuinely compelling narrative - or that the women shouldn't have been confronted. Nor is it purely an eye-for-an-eye story: Metz says she accepted all the women's apologies, is friends with one, has moved on and is happy in a new life, in a new town, free of bitterness and incidentally living with a new partner. But clearly people are drawn to the lurid. Take some of the reporter's very gendered language: Metz is "a tranquil and composed slip of a thing." When she confronts the women, she "tore their little hearts out." The "act of extraordinary cheating chutzpah" is recounted with incredulous relish. Plenty of people may gravitate to this as a story of strength, betrayal, and closure. But if this is any indication, no one can resist an old-fashioned girl-on-girl throwdown.

Update: Comments turned off. No one needs this drama.

One Dead Husband And 5 Other Women [NY Times]

Sometimes, they are accompanied by their wives; other times, the cheese stands alone. Here are the 10 best recent press conferences featuring adulterous politicians, and why they were awesome.


1. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford
He cried, he apologized to his kids, his wife, the state, his best friend and his in-laws. He then proceeded to give a play-by-play of the entire romance, including when he started sleeping with her.

Bonus points: In an effort to avoid using his mistress's name, Sanford went for much of the press conference without using a gender specific pronoun, causing many people to speculate that he was gay.


2. New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey
"I am a Gay American." What more can you say?

Bonus points: For doping his hysterical wife up so she smiled the entire time.


3. Idaho Senator Larry Craig
After having pled guilty to soliciting a man for foot-tapping bathroom sex, Larry Craig pulled a Shaggy at his press conference.

Bonus points: Even his wife gave him the "WTF?" look during his press conference.


4. Louisiana Senator David Vitter
David Vitter totally didn't pay a prostitute to change his diapers, yo.

Bonus points: He did let his wife take over the press conference that he called to respond to allegations that he'd utilized an escort service.


5. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer
Eliot Spitzer called a press conference to admit that while prosecuting escort services, he wasn't working for his constituents as much as helping eliminate the competition to his escort service of choice. He did have the good sense to resign, though.

Bonus points: No one knows if his balls survived intact long after he and his wife left the podium. From her look, we're guessing not so much.


6. Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards
Appearing alone in a TV interview, Edwards attempted to flirt with interviewer Bob Woodruff, smiled and seemed less than entirely shameful about his conduct, which is the whole point of holding one of these.


7. President Bill Clinton
He totally did have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky. And he totally did look like a little kid caught red-handed.


8. New York Governor David Paterson
Paterson confessed to mutual marital infidelity, earning him his look from his wife. He also admitted to conducting it in a Quality Inn.


9. Nevada Senator John Ensign
For all that Ensign's affair involves a campaign staffer married to one of Ensign's own Senate staffers while Ensign was separated and allegations of blackmail, his actual confession was a snore-fest.


10: Speaker-Elect and Louisiana Congressman Bob Livingston
Having spent months inveighing against Bill Clinton's infidelities and how they made him unfit for office, Livingston confessed to all House Republicans that he, too, was a cheat. He was then replaced by notorious philanderer, Newt Gingrich. But it's no fun until someone cries.

According to Utne, there's a raft of pro-adultery literature cropping up on the Wild, Wild Web. They cite a piece on Briarpatch that dismisses marriage as a tyranny in which"your intimacy is governed by scarcity, threats, and programmed prohibitions, and protected ideologically by assurances that there are no viable alternatives"; and an irreverent post on Jewcy about the (apparent) Jewish infidelity movement. (I choose not to view yesterday's Daily Mail tell-all by an "utterly shameless serial mistress" as evident of any philosophical trend.)

Now, as we all know, the internet is rivaled only by the Good Book in its ability to provide evidence for any argument, and that quality is rivaled only perhaps by its capacity to help anyone rationalize anything. Does the internet facilitate cheating? Sure. Does it cause it? Doubtful. And anyone agitating for extra-marital shenanigans is surely more than matched by an equal body of pro-fam literature.

Reading the "pro-cheating" manifestos, one can't help thinking, "so...why get married?" And, once married, there's no terribly compelling rationale given for why the miserable parties involved must stay chained to their nuptial servitude, save a vague "societal" dictate that seems rooted in the first half of the 20th Century. Certainly, it seems unlikely that anybody who embraces the philosophy of infidelity as a weapon against "capitalist oppression" (as Utne would have it) would be tethered by such notions of traditional domesticity or any other traditional rationale for staying in a marriage.

Every generalization about the institution of marriage in this day and age is problematic, for it's become an intensely individual decision. It's funny; the wedding business has boomed even as cynicism has made it impossible to enter into marriage with unembarrassed idealism - even if, at heart, that's what marriage demands. We all know the divorce rates, the difficulties, the many unhappy endings. Some will always claim we are not, by nature, monogamous (although, as an inherently monogamous person? I've always found the suggestion that I don't exist to be somewhat confusing.) And yet people still do it. Sure, not everyone's cut out for monogamy; it's also true that in free-love communities like Oneida and Johnstown, some would rebel and flee in order to pursue one-on-one relationships with people they were in love with. There are a lot of reasons a major portion of this country's been agitating for the right to marry that has nothing to do with taxes and hospital visits, and no one can look at the pictures of a couple of thirty years allowed to finally make it legal without feeling pretty sure that, whatever either Focus on the Family and various hoary revolutionaries might suggest, the institution's probably not going anywhere.

Defending Adultery [Utne]

Related:
Adultery And Other Half Revolutions: Towards A Post-Scarcity Economy Of Love [Briarpatch]
Cheating Is For Winners: Meet Shaindy.Com [Jewcy]
A Mistress Confesses: Why I Want To Sleep With Your Husband... And Why HE Wants To Sleep With Me! [Daily Mail]

While no one is shocked by reports of caddish buffoonery from Silvio Berlusconi, the Fellini-esque media-magnate-turned-self-described-world's-most-popular-leader, his latest reported antics have - once again - elicited a dramatic response from the long-suffering Verionica Lario. The signora was, apparently, angered by reports that her husband's list of potential parliamentarians consisted of a Big Brother housemate, a ballerina, a former Miss Italy contestant, and a couple of other young beauties conspicuously lacking in political experience. Lario - who has said in the past that public shaming is the only way to get the PM's attention - dashed off a furious missive to the news agencies, stating,

"What's happening today behind a front of bodily curves and female beauty is grave...Someone wrote that all this is to sustain the enjoyment of the Emperor. I agree with this - what has emerged is shameful trash, all in the name of power. I want to make it clear that I and my children are victims and not accomplices in this situation. We must endure it and it causes us pain.

She was also not pleased to learn of his attendance at the 18th birthday party of a "friend's daughter" best known for posing nearly-nude. Quoth the tart-tongued Lario, "This surprised me, because he never attended the 18th birthday parties of his children, even if he was invited."

This is not the first such incident: Two years ago, Lario alerted the media after Berlusconi named TV presented Mara Carfagna a government minister with the words, "Take a look at her! I'd marry her if I weren't married already." The first letter called her husband's behavior an insult to "my dignity as a woman", explaining that she was standing up for herself because "the example of a woman capable of defending her dignity ... takes on significant importance." She received a public apology.

While some feel Lario should pipe down, especially given her own history with Berlusconi (after he saw her performing in The Magnificent Cuckold (!) she was his mistress for years before he left his first wife) and a rumored affair with the mayor of Venice, others defend her passionately. Says MP Souad Sbai, according to the Guardian, "Veronica is a woman in love. I would have done the same thing, or even gone further, locking up the prime minister in a room and throwing away the key."

For those who don't understand why she's still with him, why his popularity is higher than ever, how this jibes with her stated interest in the dignity of the PM's station, how this is for real in our sanitized and PR'd world, or why the story has captured the imagination of the Italian people, well, you may need a lesson in Italian cliches, a set of values Berlusconi has enthusiastically embraced, to the chagrin of those interested in challenging stereotypes. Says one writer, simply, to the Times, "People identify with it."

While one can only sympathize with any long-suffering wife married to an evident lecher, we do begin to wonder, if she is interested in setting a good example for female dignity, why she is still with him, and that's not the kind of speculative argument I usually welcome, because it's none of our business. But the difference is, she's inviting it. It would be one thing if she decided to turn a blind eye, or stand stoic, or play; but she chooses to confront it - sort of - a weird, but not wholly apposite counterpoint to the quietly supportive wives of shamed politicians we're used to seeing over here. A more vocal martyrdom, but a martyrdom still! She and her children may indeed be "victims" - and Berlusconi is, no question, the villain of the piece - but they're really starting to look evenly matched in utter impunity.

Premier's Roving Eye Enrages Wife, But Not His Public [NY Times]
Being Mrs Berlusconi [Guardian]
Trouble At Home For Italy's Berlusconi [AP]
Berlusconi Says He Is World's Most Popular Lleader [Reuters]

If this guy's situation sounds like a (male) fantasy to you, you're not the only one. But according to the dude's Details piece, this sort of mid-Victorian kinda-open relationship is all the rage! "Call it negotiated wedlock, open fidelity, or monogamy 2.0. Call it every guy's fantasy. In my case it's a limited pass, authorization to tomcat without sacrificing my primary saucer of cream."

All the people (all men) quoted in the article say their open relationships have been the best thing that ever happened to their marriage: better sex, a richer connection, more trust. Although one guy says a girl he met was "pretty skeeved out" by the idea of sleeping with a married man, most of those quoted don't seem to have encountered any trouble. A couple of the cases cited are true open relationships, but in the others, it's just the man sleeping with other people, and while the author tries to make it all seem like one phenomenon, it's...not. One guy who sleeps around but doesn't want his wife to, puts it this way: "I'm a hypocrite...I admit it. I'm jealous."

And, as the author notes, it takes a "very secure" person to deal with letting your husband sleep around on you while you stay faithful. I'll admit right now to not measuring up. Because while true open relationships are one thing, and polyamory another, the gray area the author's describing seems....self-serving. And having been on the wrong end of a relationship that someone else thought was "open," this sort of thing raises my hackles. At the very least, I'd feel a lot better about the whole thing if a single one of these wives had actually been quoted, rather than our being told that it's their privilege to let their husbands get their manly, bestial urges out of the way while they wait happily at home. I present the author's conclusion with no comment:

Before my own mild foray to the dark side, my wife and I had become roommates, business partners, occasionally warring nations. But, after I fessed up to my outside activities, my wife seemed to see me in a new light-no longer the beleaguered husband but the swaggering player. And her incredibly selfless gesture reminded me why I'd fallen in love with her in the first place. Romance bloomed again...In fact, it's worked so well that my wife is now joking about playing the field herself. I will, of course, support her. With one caveat: Please, no bunny boilers.

Family Affair[Details]

In their enduring quest to provide an arbitrary 10 answers for any question (and there are generally only about five), AskMen has presented the world with "Top 10: Reasons Not To Tell Her You’ve Cheated" and, correspondingly, the Top 10 reasons to come clean. (Which, I guess, frees the site from flagrant emotional irresponsibility?) They're about what you'd expect, a mix of the obvious, the self-justifying and the same-thing-differently-worded-to-make-10-answers.

Pro honesty rationales include: guilt/paranoia will kill you; she'll hear it somewhere else; and (oddly at #2) "it's the right thing to do." The "Don't Tell" list is a combination of self-righteous (it would only hurt her; it's "selfish" to tell; it meant nothing) and the self-serving (she'll leave you; she may be cheating too!; she won't find out.)

But there is really only one answer: where sex has taken place, nowadays, secrecy is not an option. Whatever the emotional rationale for concealing such a mistake, health consequences render the debate moot — or should. But grown up life is disappointingly messy and I'd be lying if I said that was my first thought when I got The Confession — not least because I'd never had to consider that stuff before. I remember when my friend asked me if I was sorry to have been told, my response: "No, I'm sorry he did it in the first place!" I mean, as long as it had happened I'd rather have known, and I'd rather have known a lot sooner. Strange as it sounds, while ignorance may have been bliss, retroactively the period of obliviousness felt like the worst part. In some ways unburdening oneself is selfish; but so is keeping a partner in the dark and not arming them with the facts of a situation, emotional and otherwise. (Although, given that that's only maybe four arguments, we should probably defer to AskMen.)

Top 10: Reasons Not To Tell Her You’ve Cheated [AskMen]

We started off talking about the article itself, which he says he wrote at the suggestion of Elle editor Amy Goldwasser. Other than what he calls "the little Jezebel shitstorm," he says responses have been mostly positive. A female friend of his told him that his detractors were just afraid, that "the mammal brain's first response is 'Oh fuck, that could happen to me.'" Which, to be fair, is true. Lots of women are afraid of getting dumped for a younger model, and when someone does this, we're not exactly going to be thrilled.

But if that someone is our friend, Nobel thinks we owe him a little more. "The only thing I wanted was to be treated as me," he says, "to be treated as an individual case." He also says that those who thought his actions were classic untrustworthy male behavior were themselves reverting to cliché, lapsing into a "limited way of looking at the world, one that doesn't allow for humanity."

Of course, it's entirely possible that Nobel's friends actually did see him as him, and just didn't like who he'd become. There's a whole post in Nobel's reactions to his friends' reactions, but we wrote that post last week. What's more interesting — and more troubling — is Nobel's view that "there's a poor fit between societal institutions and biological fact." He thinks "maybe there's something wrong at the structural level with the whole idea of state-sanctioned monogamy" if so many people have trouble sticking with it. It's not a new idea, but Nobel takes it to sort of a new place, suggesting that Jezebel spearhead a "marriage strike until the institution could be fixed."

"What would fix it?" I asked him.

He said it wasn't "the introduction of loopholes that would allow infidelity," but as to what the solution actually was, he was more vague. He mentioned the need for a "critical discussion," the fact that marriage is not a panacea, the fact that the happiest couples he knows seem to live apart. But he also said, "I believe in love, and I believe in children, and I believe in commitments, and I believe in lifetime commitments."

The guy is a cynic and a romantic! And he's not alone. It's hip to criticize modern marriage, to state, as Nobel does, that the conflation of childrearing with "romantic love and all matters of the heart and mind is a relatively recent societal occurrence." Esther Perel says exactly that in her 2006 interview with Salon; Susan Squire makes a similar claim in her new book I Don't.

But both of those women are married, and it's certainly not yet hip to forgo marriage entirely. Nor is anyone offering us any particularly good ways to decouple love and child rearing, or excitement and commitment, or emotions and economics, or any of the other potentially conflicting aspects of modern American marriage. What we're left with is just what Nobel's friend identified: fear. Fear that we'll never get married, fear that our marriages will suck, fear that our husbands or wives will leave us, fear that we're doing it all wrong. Nobel doesn't have the solution to any of these fears. I'm sure hoping someone else does, because I for one, am stumped.

Danger Man [Elle]

Earlier: Elle Writer's Ex: "It's A Strange Luxury To See Someone Else's Version Of Your Life"
Elle Writer Didn't Plan To Be The Poster Boy For Male Recklessness

Throughout the piece, which is not available online, Nobel uses Ingrid (not her real name) as a foil — first for his wife, and then for himself. In the first instance, he builds Ingrid's character up, favorably contrasting her proficiency in the "verbal sparring [that] was intense and playful, erotic when it wasn't obscene," which contributed to their "profound intellectual compatibility" with his wife's supposed intellectual timidity and general inhibited wimpiness ("She thought the world was a scary place"). In the second, Nobel tears Ingrid down. When his relationship with her has run the same course as his marriage, Ingrid's role in the essay shrinks to simply being the yardstick — the culpably naïve, young, substance-sotted yardstick — against which the author measures his progress toward sound mental health and adulthood.

“My first reactions were ‘No, that's not how it went,’” said Ingrid. (She has remarkably different — and sometimes flatly contradictory — accounts of several of Nobel’s essay’s key scenes.) “But my second and third [reactions] were just interest in how decisions or moments that to me had been insignificant or profoundly significant had been perceived either than or now, and written about — now.” Turns out it’s deeply weird to wake up and discover you’re a cover line on a women’s magazine.

What's also strange is I didn't find Nobel's plight inherently unsympathetic, at least at first. Nobody can help whom they fall for; I don't believe anybody who's ever been in a long-term relationship can truthfully say they've never felt their eye wander. (Of course, the choices you make when that almost-innocent flash of attraction occurs are what truly matter.) But Nobel structures his little expiatory exercise as a demand for not just our understanding, but our support.

Situations like his, you see, require women to exercise our "moral imagination"; the essay rests on the premise that it is precisely his newfound ability to fuck around (sorry, his "free[dom] to bounce through different situations each night") that has cured Nobel's depression, awakened his long-neglected personal identity, and made him the kind of father who, rather than spending as many evenings away from the family home as he can, calls his kids "My love" and "Handsome." (Or at least quotes himself doing so in the pages of national magazines.) Leaving his wife, Nobel wants us to understand, was a Good Thing He Needed to Do. It was "original."

And if his portrait of personal growth just happens to require two women to be the canvas, well, so be it. Nobel doesn't imbue the character of Ingrid, or the character of his ex-wife, with much agency or independence; towards the end, he even tosses off a casual reference to going back to his wife — as if he assumes such an option must automatically be available.

And he uses Ingrid shamelessly in the closing paragraph to show how far he's come. After the break-up of their two-year relationship, Nobel runs into her on the street, "walking home at nine in the morning." (Yes, he has the audacity to try and slut-shame her, after everything.) Nobel writes

And without the distractions of others, or maybe because I had grown up a little, or maybe it was just a trick of the light, I saw her for the first time as a little girl — is that what everyone had been trying to tell me? — too much a stranger to herself to settle down. As I was. Twice.

How nice for him!

Turning his most recent girlfriend into a device to throw into positive relief his own life seems to encapsulate the problem of this essay: you can’t ever write honestly about others when your goal is just to excuse your own behavior.

What does it feel like to be made into a character in someone else’s (wholly public) story? Especially one that seems so unsympathetic? It's something I've been thinking about a little guiltily since I wrote, rather unkindly, about some of my dating experiences (to his credit, when I rang the Guy to tell him there was some shit written on the Internet about him that it might not make him happy to read, even if it was all knitted out of grievances I'd aired with him previously, all he said was "If you don't use my name, then I don't care, write what you want.") (I did, however, get a sort of irate e-mail from the would-be impregnator.)

Ingrid had some interesting insight into this question because she too is a writer. She gets how what she called “the iron filings of ‘fact’” get rearranged into narrative, and how that’s an author’s prerogative. “If I wanted to write the story of how I was the awed 20-year-old, I could. And if I wanted to write the story of how this all led to my recovery, I could do that, too. And if I wanted to write the story of how I had a relationship with an older man that had its good parts as well as its struggles, I could do that.” In a way, she said, “it's a strange and fascinating luxury to be able to see someone else's version of your life.”

It's hard to write honestly about the people closest to us in life, for the simple reason that it's hard to see them objectively — they are so much personalities to us, we are often hard put to describe them as actual people. Nobel's various unkindnesses in describing the women the choice to leave his marriage most impacted might well be simply the unconscious result of never questioning his own perspective long enough to wonder if he was fairly getting across theirs. But there is a suspicious convenience in the narrative arc of "Danger Man" — man leaves dull marriage, man is enlivened by life with younger woman, man realizes in dating younger woman how mature and adult he is — that denigrates both of his exes at once.

And having met Ingrid and found her to be a fascinating, sassy, intelligent, shit-together kind of type, I'm going with the conclusion that it is Nobel who's utterly failed to describe his ex girlfriend — and, I'm willing to bet, his ex wife. (Call me, formerly-Mrs-Nobel!)

Which leaves me thinking that my initial reaction to the essay — what an entitled creep — is probably right on the money.

Earlier: Elle Writer Didn't Plan To Be The Poster Boy For Male Recklessness