By: Michael Washburn
“It’s not the cheating, it’s the lyingâ€â€”or so goes our national post-affair mantra. But of course, it’s the cheating. The cheating is the lying, as much as it’s the sex. (If you aren’t lying, you’re not cheating: You’re swinging.) We know the distinction between the physical act of sex and the illocutionary act of lying is false, yet this is the first line in the last act of every American domestic tragedy. It’s what betrayed spouses are supposed to say when confronted with their wayward partners, and it sets the stage for scenes filled with apology, contrition and, oddly, the detailed recitation of each liaison. It’s like this everywhere, right?
Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee, former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman’s witty, engaging exploration of comparative infidelity, answers this question with an emphatic No. Every country has its adulterers—some more than others—but each culture’s cuckoldry has a flair all its own.
“Infidelity,†Ms. Druckerman writes, “isn’t just ubiquitous, it’s revealing.†From the status-anxious cafés of the Upper East Side to Moscow’s bureaucratic institutes of sexology to the stimulacra of Tokyo’s “pervert trains,†she exposes styles of infidelity as varied as the names used to describe them—“going strange,†“pinching the cat in the dark,†“a tied-up mare eats, too,†“standing in two boats at once.†Ms. Druckerman dramatizes the desire-driven lives of, among others, Williamsburg’s frustrated Hasidim, Indonesia’s bored wives and the torpid yi lais who inhabit China’s concubine villages. (more…)
