And Lisa, I have the sneaking feeling that you might have inspired me to do one of my navel-gazing sermons, sometime soon.

But I don’t think in the context of feminist blogging and critique that shaming these individuals is either valuable or appropriate. There’s already an enormous amount of shame leveled at adulterers and sex workers, and it seems needlessly harmful to add more.

I also don’t think it’s helpful to write all women in these positions off as either pathologically damaged or failures as people—either you can have your agency, or your virtue, but not any mix of both. A fifth of men in monogamous marriages cheat; they are cheating with someone. Like zingerella said, that’s an awful lot of women to write off.

There are structural reasons to explain why cheating is so common despite the censure that it entails, and addressing those seems to be much more worthwhile. Even and especially at a grassroots level, in your own relationships (romantic and otherwise), making someone feel worse about something they already feel bad about isn’t going to actually help a situation. It’s possible to provide emotional support for women who’ve been hurt without also dealing out that kind of emotional damage, and I think raising awareness of and openness to radical relationship structures (even within marriage) is just better practice.

I also tend to believe there isn’t a lot of room for shaming in feminist ethical critique in general, particularly when we’re talking about women who are already shamed by society. It’s just incredibly easy for that sort of criticism to support the patriarchal narrative, even unintentionally. It’s like the woman who gets pregnant after having unprotected sex. Yes, she shouldn’t have had unprotected sex. It’s hardly helpful to shame her for that, though, and if you do, it isn’t distinguishable from a wingnut pro-lifer doing the same. In the case of adultery, probably the most practically visible effect of shaming is that it tends to seriously damage or destroy relationships between women, while their relationships with the cheating man are, typically, much more resilient. This is part of the patriarchal devaluation of relationships between women—you may forgive your man if he cheats, but you can never, ever forgive the former-BFF he slept with.

Some other points:

I certainly never portrayed any woman whatsoever as being a temptress or tried to even slightly pretend that they were ever the initiators of the situation. When you feel you must put words into my mouth to support your argument, Vi, it makes your argument look pretty weak.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that you were actually saying all that; the paragraph was meant to be an account of the traditional marriage narrative. It’s relevant not because you’re supporting all of it, but because supporting part of it invokes the whole.

If not, grant that I have more authority than you do to speak to the difficulties…or lack thereof…of keeping it in your pants during marriage and in leaving the marriage once you decide you really just must fuck some strange.

It’s illegal for me to get married where I live. So no, I haven’t.

Moreover, while it’s great that monogamy has worked flawlessly for you, I don’t think you can generalize it to everyone. (Also, you’re suggesting here that had John Edwards divorced his wife—at that point suffering with cancer and grieving for the loss of a child—prior to sleeping with Hunter, that would have been the right thing to do. Not the most right thing he could have done, but more right than cheating on her. That seems unclear to me; not impossible, but perhaps unlikely.)

I mean, “maybe she felt pressured into sex?” That is one of the most random assignations of possible cause that I’ve seen.

It’s completely random to suggest that in a sexual relationship between man in a position of substantial power and one of his employees, there could be some element of pressure?

Both John and Elizabeth Edwards have made extensive statements to the press about the entire situation; I suggest you read them.

I don’t really put any weight on what they’ve said publicly because I couldn’t realistically imagine them saying anything else. If they got on television and said, “we had an open polyamorous marriage,” then I’d go outside and wait for the fleet of Irkan attack cows.

The problem is is that you’re all pretending that you DON’T know and doing so requires that you, sorry to be crude but it’s the best descriptor of the situation, are always willing and eager to issue a pussy pass.

It’s probably worth noting that I actually think avoiding shaming is a good idea regardless of the gender of the cheater and their lover, but it isn’t typically as much of an issue when the lover is a man.

Knowing that I have at points in my life behaved less than entirely honourably changes how I am now in a couple of ways: it makes me adamant that I don’t want to be anyone’s dirty little secret, and it makes me more of the ways that insecurity and hurt can damage other people, and make it more difficult for them to behave honourably.

This isn’t the place to discuss that, though, so I’ll deftly change the subject:

I really admired .

I have been married. I am currently cheerfully consensually non-monogamous. I have been in a lot of messed-up sexual interactions, and have at various points on the past seemed to have an invisible sign on my person telling men that I was a sucker for a sob story and therefore a safe person to proposition from their married positions.

I’ve had those moments that could have gone either way, too. And I have, at least once, played games with myself and just plain not asked about the details of the other party’s relationship status. I don’t, to this day, know precisely how open that long-ago relationship was or wasn’t. I’m fairly sure we crossed some lines. There’s nothing I can do about it now.

I’m not proud of those times. I can say that, at the time, I was suffering from extremely poor self-esteem, so questions of personal integrity were kind of moot to me. I was pretty sure that I sucked, as a human being, that nothing I could do could possibly affect anyone else, because I was just that insignificant, and that the only reason anyone would want to have anything at all to do with me was because they weren’t going to fall in love with me, so I wasn’t an emotional threat.

Let’s just say I went through a bit of a rough spell, and did some things of which I am not proud.

This isn’t a plea for pity or compassion. I’m through all that horribleness now, and out the other side, and, I more or less have to own that I participated in some questionable interactions, and was only too willing to buy some of the rationalizations fed to me. I’m not at all proud of fooling around with someone whose other relationship boundaries were less clearly defined than I insist on now. I also don’t think I’m a horrible person utterly lacking in all integrity and honour. I’m posting under my usual sobriquet because I’ve accepted that people are complex creatures, who sometimes do stupid things, as I did, and some of us are lucky enough to emerge from our dark times, learn what we need to learn, and go on to do better.

Tangentially, I’d like to point out that it’s possible to cheat within the framework of consensual non-monogamy: cheating happens when one partner’s extra-relationship liaisons break the rules of the interaction. If my sweetie and I have a “please tell me rule,” and that sweetie gets it on with someone of whom they know I disapprove, and, wishing to avoid an awkward conversation, doesn’t tell me, that’s cheating.

My point, and I do have one—this isn’t all maudlin, overwrought confessional bullshit—is that feminism provides a number of perspectives on the social phenomenon of cheating, yes, independent of whether we believe that cheating is ethical or not, and independent of how much we think the parties deserve censure. I also think that if we’re going to look at all facets of women’s experience, as part of developing feminist consciousness, we have to look at the vast numbers of mistresses (both professional and more or less uncompensated) from a less judgemental perspective. Maybe it’s true that they’re all simply greedy, silly people. Maybe there’s something else there.

I think we can do this—examine women’s experiences, both as wives and mistresses, without acting as apologists for either party.

We can say “cheating is unethical,” without it being a feminist question.

We can say that a woman who sleeps with or carries on with someone she knows to be in a committed monogamous relationship is almost certainly not helping another woman.

We can also examine the social narratives surrounding Other Women, and Dirty Little Secrets, recognizing that one of the things that happens when a system is broken is a statistically significant number of instances where all the available options appear to suck, and ask ourselves “Why do so many people cheat? What’s going on with the people who enable their cheating?”

And I think that’s what Violet is trying to do.

What I think I’m reading Lisa reacting to is the blurred line between examining a social phenomenon non-judgementally and celebrating choices that are damaging to other people.

What I want to know is how we create a culture in which it’s easier for people to talk about their relationship problems and deal with them constructively.

How we avoid damaging women to the extent that their own integrity and honour mean so little to them that they’ll let themselves be used, and comply in their own deceit.

How we teach men to take responsibility for their promises, and stop giving them easy outs and convenient cultural narratives that provide some legitimacy to infidelity.

Clearly telling adulterers that adultery is bad and wrong isn’t enough,