When the Eliot Spitzer scandal erupted in New York two years ago, amid the usual towering outrage I found myself more than usually irritated by the lavish sympathy directed at the soon-to-be-ex- governor's wife, Silda, who was presumed to be deeply humiliated by people who had no way of knowing what she was feeling; this sympathy was so lavish that at times it bore a striking resemblance to gloating. It was the same way Hillary Clinton had been talked about (though the gloating was more up front in that case) and Elizabeth Edwards would be talked about, at least until her book Resilience came out, when, with remarkable speed, that outsize sympathy turned to outsize contempt— suggesting it had been contempt all along.
Indeed, the way Elizabeth Edwards was attacked was extraordinary, from accusations of conspiring with her wicked husband to mislead the public to criticism of her attitude toward his mistress, culminating in a magnificently nasty piece written by Kathleen Parker for The Daily Beast website, in which she opined, "wise women know that the world's Elizabeths owe the world's Hunters a thank-you note." In the wildly vituperative context of the essay, this comment was almost a non sequitur. Commenters could make no sense of it. I think Parker flippantly meant to say that women married to cads ought to be thankful to the single predators out there for taking the worthless bastards off their hands—but on a more murky visceral level, it felt like a particularly sharp slap in Elizabeth's face: As the "good woman," she was actually being instructed to thank the "bad woman," who traditionally would be pilloried in the public square while the wife looked on with satisfaction. In this case, not only was the mistress getting a free pass, but for God's sake, the damn wife was in the stocks. As I read Parker's screed, along with dozens like it, I asked myself, What is going on here?
Perhaps it should be obvious: Adultery is a social threat that arouses raw anger and fear, which the bellicose then need to discharge rather than merely feel, traditionally on the philandering wife or the female home-wrecker. Monogamy is a religiously undergirded ideal in nearly every culture on the planet (even polygamous ones expect monogamy from women), and yet for eons men have been unfaithful and tolerated as such as long as they kept it quiet and respected their wives—as opposed to the mistresses or prostitutes with whom they dallied. For women straying outside of marriage, the price has been much higher. It is a good thing, or at least a fair thing, in modern life that fidelity is now expected on both sides. It is good, too, or at least realistic, that sexually independent women are not pilloried and that they have been socially integrated in the form of playfully sensual pop icons, respect for unmarried single moms, and acknowledgment of women's sexual feelings in, say, Sex and the City.
But fair and realistic can also be confusing. If men are to be monogamous too (even if they still seem less likely to be), that means everybody has to be good all the time, and that is hard, especially in a floridly sexual and permissive climate. Monogamy is desirable for many reasons, especially in creating a stable, emotionally connected home for children. But judging from centuries of human behavior, it is also a very difficult standard to meet. Women seem more inclined to it than men do, but I doubt it's because we're more moral; when women have children, their erotic and emotional energies are taken up, I think, in a way that men's traditionally are not. And it seems to me that morality is not always the issue—or rather, that total fidelity can come with a moral price tag of its own.
What is faithfulness, anyway? Can you be unfaithful to your own feelings and faithful to someone else? Is it faithful to lie in bed night after night with someone you love but no longer desire while ardently dreaming of someone else? Is it faithful to make love to your wife while lewdly fantasizing about someone else again and again? Is it faithful to be monogamous if that means deadening your own nature constantly in order to be genitally true to someone you may love but no longer have physical passion for? For two people to satisfy everything each needs for their entire lives is a tall order. Some couples may be equipped to do this. Some are not.
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the poet William Blake wrote, "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." Maybe he meant: Don't nurse it— kick it to the curb. But given the book's joyous mash-up of the hellish and the holy, it seems more likely that Blake meant to honor desire and its many forms of expression; whatever he meant in terms of action, the line speaks eloquently of the tension between the pure quality of desire and the forces of propriety that would contain it.
And how great that tension is when we live in a society where well-bred teenagers walk around with JUICY written in pink script across their butts—in other words, a society that is sexually hyperstimulated all the time yet fiercely values monogamy and fidelity. Adultery causes heartbreak—and yet men and women engage in it every day because they feel it would break their spirit not to. It's a problem, and everybody knows it. That's why Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are great heroines and why adultery is a soap-opera staple. It's also why infidelity among high-profile people, especially elected officials whose job is supposedly to be good all the time, brings out an especially nasty asexual desire— that is, the desire to stone someone in the public square, or to at least paddle his hypocritical ass.
This impulse is acted out on adulterers most vigorously: Eliot Spitzer lost his job and his honor; South Carolina governor Mark Sanford lost the latter and is in imminent danger as I write of losing the former. President Bill Clinton barely squeaked by with both sort of intact. The much-despised John Edwards will never make a successful run for higher office. Cad, heel, hypocrite, and narcissist were some of the nicer terms used for these men in papers of note; limitless scorn was heaped upon them via the Internet, where one anonymous poster suggested that Edwards ought to be "hung up by his mistress's favorite part of him."
I feel an impulse to defend these men on the perhaps lax grounds that none of us know why they acted as they did, what their personal circumstances really are, or what anguish they experienced—it's hard for me to imagine they experienced none. Their crimes were ordinary crimes of the heart that many everyday people commit without being subject to such punishment. Their hypocrisy is practically a job requirement that we, in our hypocrisy, demand of them.
And yet my defensive impulse to defend them is tempered by the obvious: They broke a hallowed moral code and, in some cases, may have used taxpayers' money to do it. If one wants to do that, one must be prepared to take the consequences, including vicious public scorn.
But why have their wives been punished too? Think of it: Would you want to be described, in print, over and over again, as "humiliated" by people—by strangers, actually— who are supposedly taking your side? Even Jenny Sanford, who didn't attend her husband's press-conference confession, and who read to me more pissed off than shamed, was criticized by Tina Brown for failing to "rip off her burqa and revolt on behalf of all the other downtrodden political wives called to genuflect before their husbands' outsize egos"—in other words, I guess, because she didn't chase Mr. Sanford down the street with a rolling pin.
What is humiliation, exactly? People often use the word as if it is merely a particularly potent form of embarrassment, but to me it's something more extreme. By it I mean that a person's image of herself has been debased not only before others but in her heart. The first dictionary definition is perhaps less dire: It means the loss of pride, self-respect, or dignity. These words in their most authentic sense refer more to internal states than to how one is seen by others.
Using any of these definitions, why is it right to automatically describe the wives of adulterers as humiliated? The wrongful act was committed by their husbands, not them. Why must they be said to have lost pride or self-respect because of the actions of someone close to them? It isn't surprising if they are embarrassed; anyone might feel that way about the kind of scrutiny they have been subjected to. But why should we announce that a woman has lost her dignity because her husband slept with someone else? Shouldn't she be the judge of that? Or do we actually believe that her dignity is entirely dependent on how men relate to her (or even just how one man does)? Is she humiliated because she has failed to be all things to her husband, all the time, in perpetuity, at least as far as he is concerned— in other words, because she has failed to do the impossible? (Or simply because she failed to be beautiful enough: During the Tiger Woods kerfuffle, pictures of Woods' gorgeous blond wife were posted on the Web with the caption "This is what Tiger Woods cheated on"—a piece of inanity that needs no comment.) It seems a curious form of emotional brutality to insist that a person must feel a certain way and then to repeatedly define her that way in public—if everyone is insisting that you are humiliated, how much harder it is to know what you actually feel.
Elizabeth Edwards was of course subjected to worse than this punitive definition: The real outrage came when she published her book—that is, when she tried to define herself. The anger was supposedly because (1) she had supported her husband's run for the presidency even though she knew about the affair; (2) she said that, aside from the affair, she had a perfect marriage; and (3) she was cashing in on the whole thing. But it seems to me that, like any loyal and ambitious wife, she'd been pointed at her husband's goal for decades and that it would have been hard to change direction with any speed, especially if she was feeling exhausted from living with a deadly illness. Yes, "the perfect marriage" sounds ridiculous— but doesn't anyone recognize in it a sort of stunned gallantry? Can anyone think she needs the money all that badly? I believe her real motive for writing the book and speaking about it was to show the world and her children that her misfortune had not defined her. Of course, the more you say whatever doesn't define you, the more it does. But can she be blamed for trying?
It is necessary to remember in all this that the cuckold has also been a traditional object of snickering sympathy—unless he does the manly thing and physically punishes his wife, possibly by murdering her, which is sanctioned by law in some countries. I wonder if we will ever see a high- profile female adulterer in politics, and if so, how that will be dealt with in the public square. I imagine that while the tenor of it would be different, the husbands too would be endlessly described as "humiliated" and that instead of committing murder, they too would content themselves with writing books. But do they have to be described that way? Who made this a rule of the game? Do all of us have to play by it, all the time? What's in it for us?
There is such a thing as humiliation through sexual betrayal, of course, and I don't mean to pretend otherwise. When passion is alive and joined with love, it is the closest thing to the sacred on earth, whether it takes place in marriage or not. When one lover loses this passion, it feels shocking and belittling to the other. And yet, I can't prove it, but it seems to me that most of the time in marriage when one partner loses that passionate engagement, the feeling is mutual or quickly becomes so. Sexual passion is generally short-lived. And while it may reignite, it seems to do so on its own terms; it doesn't come when you call. Even more difficult: Certain kinds of passion don't flourish in the dailiness of domestic life but depend on mystery, illusion, and risk. Passion is sometimes completely incompatible with politeness or dignity in the social sense of the words.
This kind of passion may be called immoral or immature, but passion doesn't care—it doesn't come where you call it, either. And if it doesn't, how can we be surprised if, after years or decades of its absence, one spouse, longing to feel that powerful life force again, not only gets interested in someone else but gives himself or herself over to it? The danger is anguish for everyone involved, and morality exists in part as protection against that kind of pain. However, there is such a thing as being so protected that your life begins to feel lifeless and rote.
Maybe we are so eager to seize on public figures who've been caught cheating and hold them up for outraged examination because we are secretly hoping for some kind of insight into how we might avoid their fate. But the emotional truth of what they've done and why they've done it can't be described in the crude, broad language of public discourse—language like "if you take that piece out, I do have a perfect marriage." Language like that is suitable for the public world but not for what goes on between married people in the intimate, vulnerable throes of adultery and its aftermath— one possible reality being that working through the infidelity and the reasons why it happened may bring them closer. Or not. In any case, they have to figure it out in their own way just as we do, in private. No matter how many interviews we read or see, how many pictures or videos are published, how many tell-alls get written, we will never see into the private circumstances of the Edwardses, the Sanfords, or the Spitzers, nor should we. We have enough to do trying to understand and know ourselves, if we could only stop bellowing about other people long enough to try.
And if we can't stop bellowing about the adulterers, can we at least maybe lay off their wives?