Nersessian, Mary.  CTV.ca News.  Retrieved on August 27, 2007. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070511/lustintranslation_feature_070511/20070515/
 
 

Adultery is alluring the world over, author finds
Updated Tue. May. 15 2007 12:02 PM ET

Mary Nersessian, CTV.ca News

The language of love transcends all borders, but the dialect of adultery is sometimes lost in translation, says the author of a book that takes readers on a round-the-world tour of cheating.  On her journey, which makes pit stops in Japan, South Africa, France, Indonesia and the United States, author Pamela Druckerman finds there's no country in the world where people are immune to temptation.  She also discovers -- no surprise there -- that men are more likely to cheat, as are those in the lower-income bracket. Druckerman also finds that American men and women under the age of 40 tend to cheat at about the same rate.  But adultery crises in America last longer, cost more, and inflict more emotional torture than anywhere else, says Druckerman, author of the new book "Lust In Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee" (Penguin Press).  Among North Americans, for example, marital lapses are widely perceived as the first step toward divorce court, says Druckerman.  Yet in European frontiers and beyond, infidelity is simply considered an unexpected challenge to overcome.  While the purportedly open-minded French are perceived as bed-hopping adulterers, they are actually just slightly less unfaithful than North Americans, Druckerman found in her informal survey of worldwide cheating.

Coping with the Aftermath

Though North Americans are more likely to be unfaithful, they were the worst at both having affairs and dealing with the aftermath, she says.  Druckerman found Americans had more remedies for fixing broken marriages than anywhere else -- by 2004, she counted more than 50,000 marriage and family therapists in the U.S.  Yet one Frenchman told Druckerman, who lives in Paris, that "he had dropped out of therapy soon after meeting the woman who became his mistress, since he was finally happy."  Druckerman realized during her travels as a former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal that it was not just North Americans who obsess over questions of fidelity and monogamy.  "But I noticed people have very different ways of coping with aftermath of infidelity and that actually you can learn a lot about culture by looking at their private lives," Druckerman told CTV.ca.  "One of the conclusions in my book is that North Americans are particularly bad at dealing with infidelity," she says.  Unlike other continents, the social taboo over adultery still casts a shadow over North America, Druckerman says.  "Adultery provokes more outrage in America than in almost any other country on record," Druckerman writes.  She blames the founding fathers for instilling within Americans a fear of immorality, believing as they did that "the strength and perhaps the very survival of their country hinged on the moral fitness of its citizens."  In the last 35 years, "Americans have come to expect much more of their marriages and to follow the storybook narrative to the letter," she says.  Since the 1970s, Americans have become more liberal on practically every sexual issue, including homosexuality, premarital sex, babies out of wedlock and cohabitation.  But cheating still remains a social taboo. A 2006 Gallup poll found Americans believe infidelity is more morally wrong than polygamy and human cloning.

Russian Romps

Where North Americans are still comparable prudes, Druckerman found views on between-the-sheets relations to be starkly different in Russia.  "In Russia, I basically couldn't find anyone in the country who hadn't cheated," she says. "The taboo was in the opposite direction -- if you hadn't had an affair you lied and said you did."  One paint salesman from Saransk told her: "In Russia they say, 'A good love affair makes a family more solid. After you spend time with another woman, you feel guilty in front of your wife, and you start to treat her better.'"  In Africa, even the spectre of HIV hasn't created a strong taboo on cheating.  "The most cheating definitely goes on in sub-Saharan Africa," Druckerman says, adding that Togo has highest rate of infidelity on record.  In South Africa, AIDS has "transformed cheating from a naughty hobby into a lethal practice," she writes.

'Sexless marriage'

Infidelity was also rampant in Japan -- but under another name. The Japanese institutionalized adultery in the form of bizarre sex clubs decorated to look like subway cars and elementary school classrooms; to hostess bars, to restaurants that serve sushi on the bodies of naked women.  Japanese men told Druckerman that "If you pay for it, it's not cheating."  At home, however, the "sexless marriage" prevailed after children entered the picture.  "Once the children are born, Japanese women typically move their futons into their children's room and sleep there," she says.  It's because adultery is socially verboten that it is so seductive, Druckerman believes.  One anecdote she didn't include in her book was about a middle-class banker in London. He was in his late 30s, and hadn't cheated on his wife until the year before.  "He created a spreadsheet of different women he wanted to bed in that year -- two Japanese, an Indian, he wanted to have a threesome," Druckerman says.  "He was checking them off as the year went on, and he was very nervous he wasn't going to find the second Japanese woman."  He had turned into a kid in a candy store, she says.  "The taboo is so powerful that when people cheat, they act as teenagers."

The End