OPINION/TED RALL
AWAITING A SLUT MOMENT
When will we admit that everybody cheats? We need a Slut Moment. As CIA director, David Petraeus led an organization that carries out extra-judicial assassinations, overthrows foreign heads of state and fires drone missiles at innocent civilians. For his performance as a leading state terrorist, Gen. Petraeus received four stars, 28 motorcycle policemen to escort him to a girlfriend’s house and nearly universal acclaim. For cheating on his wife, he was forced to resign in disgrace. What is wrong with our values? I wouldn’t lay it on quite as thickly as John Prados, senior research fellow at the National Security Archive did in The Washington Post: “Because of an affair that had already ended, the nation this month lost the services of a highly skilled public servant. The hysterical reaction to the news of thenCIA Director David Petraeus’s liaison with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, has done more to harm national security than the affair itself.” Still, I agree with Prados’s broader point. What happened to Petraeus—and Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer and Bill Clinton and Larry Craig and John Edwards—was stupid. Whether you’re a small-government conservative or a liberal libertine, one thing all Americans ought to agree upon is that we’re entitled to privacy in our sex lives. As long as the sex is consensual, what happens in the bedroom is nobody’s business but the two people involved. Or three. Or seven.
6 | NOVEMBER 28 – DECEMBER 4, 2012 | BOISEweekly
Cheating on your spouse shouldn’t cost you your career. Especially when so many of us do it. Laws and social mores that don’t reflect the behavior of the majority of the population do more harm than good, corroding respect for government and society while turning too many people into criminals and pariahs. That’s why Prohibition failed: Too many Americans drank. As Aharon Barak wrote, “When social reality changes, the law must change, too.” Like drinking, cheating is so popular and widespread that punishing people for sleeping with more than one officially recognized partner is counterproductive. “Estimates today find married men cheating at rates between 25 percent and 72 percent,” wrote Eric Anderson, author of The Monogamy Gap. For example: “In a 1991 study, sex researcher Shere Hite found that 70 percent of married women have cheated on their partners; a 1993 follow-up study found that 72 percent of married men have as well.” When anywhere from a quarter to threequarters of a population does something, it’s not a moral failing. It’s standard human behavior. Yet the gap between reality and expectation is growing rather than shrinking. “More Americans today (80 percent) say infidelity is “always 11 wrong” than in 1970 (70 percent).
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