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Perhaps it's that I just moved to France, where adultery seems to be the national pastime, but the subject of infidelity has been on my mind lately. Here, people still wonder why Monica Lewinsky was a big deal — after all, the current president's wife, whom he met when he officiated at her first wedding, spent most of 2005 living in New York with her lover. Infidelity is a touchier subject in Anglophone culture, paradoxically both less publicly accepted and more subject to neurotic analysis. Ergo, where the French have the civilized cinq à sept, we have binge drinking and two varieties of football. Why the apparent difference between the two cultures? The facile answer is to resort to macho-Latin clichés, but it's not like infidelity isn't also prevalent in Anglo-American culture. Proponents of that branch of voodoo science known as "evolutionary psychology" will quote you articles on "sperm competition" and that surprising numbers of kids aren't related to their supposed fathers. This isn't really the place to go into the game-theory explanations of non-monogamy (or why so many
evolutionary psychologists seem to be swingers trying to use research money to justify their predilections), but it does go to show that sleeping with people other than your ostensible mate is a cross-cultural phenomenon.
The most apparent difference is the influence of the Catholic Church. France didn't allow divorce, this theory goes, so people who couldn't stand each other any more made a tacit agreement to go their own ways while sharing the same house. The idea is appealing in its simplicity, but it's only half right: the Church's regulations on marriage, divorce, and the disposition of property were certainly influential, but they were more of an effect than a cause. Marriage in aristocratic circles was always for reasons of property and family alliance. Just so long as the business of producing an heir was taken care of, it didn't matter what you did in your spare time.
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