Why Do We Cheerlead the Scandals of Male Infidelity?

Really, you might want to tear yourself away from whatever you’re reading about and read this essay on sexuality, privacy, IM relationships, “emotional affairs,” the state of cheating and everything else. It asks the question: what is so “primally reassuring in these stories of male infidelity and wronged female virtue”? You know: “These tales of hookers and half-hookers and gold diggers and fame diggers and ‘soul mates’-it all presents itself as censure, but the sheer volume of media, the obsessive attention to it, represents a kind of cheering on. ‘We really want to believe that powerful men have harems or the equivalent,’ as a prominent female West Village writer of 50 put it to me, ‘because it’s reassuring us that boys will be boys. The alternative is unthinkable.’ There is much much more.