A famous and prestigious company-one that you have heard of-recently named an adulterer to a very senior post. This is no ordinary adulterer; he got the other woman pregnant and then left his wife and child for her. He makes no secret of this; but he was promoted anyway.
Not many years ago we would have known how to deal with this man. People in his social circle would have been scandalised. His company would have found a reason to sideline him. He would have retained a job, probably a good one; but his life would never have been the same and-although no one would have said so-everyone would have known why.
These are the 1990s, and we are many years into the deconstruction and destruction of bourgeois social codes. As a supporter of homosexual marriage, I would be the last to call for blind obedience to social tradition. But some bourgeois conventions actually work. In fact they may be indispensable, even though they do not look good when subjected to rational scrutiny or legal challenge. The mild stigmatisation of divorce was probably useful (people could divorce, but they would not do it lightly); we may be moving back in this direction, especially where children are involved. So was the informal requirement that a boy marry the girl he got pregnant if he wanted to keep his good name. So was the shame of out-of-wedlock parenthood. So were the honour codes and rules of gentlemanliness.
Most of those Main Street codes are dead, but the adultery code lives on. The code is: if you screw around, keep it out of sight so that everybody can pretend not to notice. This convention is hypocritical, faux-moralistic, cumbersome and sometimes absurd-when, for example, everybody knows who is sleeping with whom, yet somehow the affair is still a secret. Oddly, however, the Main Street rule works-probably better than any alternative regime. It is also losing authority every day.
The recent crisis in Washington is a case in point. Politically speaking, the scandal involving President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was a straightforward question of lawbreaking: did the president lie under oath or encourage someone else to lie? But the affair should not be seen merely through a political lens. From a social point of view, the legal process was a direct attack on the adultery code-it insisted that the squishy hypocrisies of the bedroom give way before the legalisms of the courtroom. The lawyers did not understand that where infidelity is concerned, there are worse things than lying.
i enjoy a public indiscretion as much as the next man. Who did not have a giggle when Dick Morris, the self-aggrandising Clinton adviser, was caught sucking on a call-girl's toes? Without adultery, how dull art, literature, history and politics would be-and how much less of these we would have.
But our quiet enjoyment of other people's peccadilloes does not answer the question of what to do about adultery. Some would advise doing nothing: adultery is a private matter, best left to the discretion of the people concerned. But while that may be a reasonable legal policy, it is not a good social policy. Adultery represents a serious problem for society as well as for individuals, on a variety of levels.
Society has a strong interest in binding people together into long-term couples. Marriage civilises and settles men (especially younger men), promotes secure homes for children, helps achieve economic stability for both partners, ensures that everyone has somebody to look after him or her in times of ill health. To serve these functions, marriages must be durable. Thus a casual acceptance of adultery, which can lead to the dissolution of marriage, would be a problem-especially for women, who still enjoy, in general, less economic power than men, and who are more likely to have trouble remarrying in middle age. And a committed adulterer is a missile with two (or more) warheads, capable of wrecking a series of homes. Even in families which remain intact, the knowledge that one parent is cheating on the other can be devastating to children who find out about it.
A bit of adultery here and there is to be expected and can be borne. But if it becomes endemic, the social consequences could be dreadful-as with single parenthood, which is defensible in particular cases but disastrous as a norm. So from society's point of view, adultery is worth worrying about.
One thing to do would be to launch a government war against it, complete with community-service sentences, zero tolerance of philandering and tax breaks for faithful couples. There are many reasons why such an approach would be misguided. Adultery, like fornication, is too tempting and too commonplace ever to be stamped out; any real effort to prosecute it would either be absurdly rigid and intrusive or hopelessly arbitrary and exemption-ridden; we do not live in Iran. Plainly this is an area where social convention should do the regulating, not the state.
Moreover, trying to stamp out adultery is a bad idea even in principle. There is probably an optimal amount of infidelity which any society can accommodate, and that amount is almost certainly greater than zero. Within certain bounds, adultery has its uses. It can lead to divorce, ruin and mayhem, but it can also, if handled with tact, provide a way to accommodate human nature to human convention with a reasonable minimum of collateral damage.
Many a boiler has exploded for want of a steam valve. The man who looks for one-night stands on his business trips and the woman who relieves the desolation of her lonely marriage with visits to a gentleman friend are certainly not doing anything commendable. Yet in some cases such behaviour can help a partner hang on until the marriage is straightened out, or until an exit can be negotiated on acceptable terms. For Japanese wives, discreet affairs have long relieved the tedium of marriages to grunting, overtired husbands. In the US, a recent poll found 22 per cent of the public saying that adultery can sometimes be good for a marriage-presumably some of these people speak from experience.
Plainly, then, adultery is socially hazardous; but it is not an evil like murder, to be prohibited with all the brute power of the state. Rather it is a vice to be judiciously discouraged with the sensitive application of flexible adult judgement. The question must be: how to keep adultery to a reasonable minimum and soften its corrosive effects, while also recognising that some men and women will never be perfectly faithful spouses but can none the less be decent ones.
Fortunately, two or three millennia of experimentation have produced an answer: genteel hypocrisy. The wink and the closet; or, if you like, plausible deniability; or, if you insist on coming out with it in the modern fashion, everybody lies.
What a rich and nuanced social policy this turns out to be. On the surface there is the public story: adultery is wrong; never, ever do it. A good story to tell. But we all know that accidents happen, or there would be no milkmen jokes. So beneath the surface is a second rule: if you do it, make sure no one finds out about it. Keep it a shameful secret, even if you're not ashamed. Keep the affair in the closet where it will not contaminate Sunday school lessons or shock the neighbours. (Total secrecy is, of course, impossible. Which travels faster at your office: news of some marvellous new pension gimmick, or news that the finance director is bonking his assistant?) That leads to the third rule: if you must do it, be sufficiently discreet, so that anyone who knows about it can plausibly pretend not to know. (If you pretend not to do it, we'll pretend not to see it.)
When misdirected, this plausible deniability rule can be inhumane. For homosexuals, the closet meant driving love into an underworld of fear and squalor. But to say that a closet can be a torture chamber is not to say that it is necessarily so. Adultery is what many people once (wrongly) believed homosexuality to be: a behaviour to feel ashamed about but not to drag into court. For adulterers, the closet is the ticket. It forces people to be discreet; thus having affairs is inconvenient. It makes cheating logistically complicated, requiring that liaisons be mortared between the cracks of already busy lives and camouflaged with halfway plausible excuses. Obstacles are placed in the way of wandering appetites-and gossips act as watchmen against too obvious infractions.
What is perhaps less obvious, but even more important, is the way in which the plausible deniability rule protects the cuckolded spouse-whom we will assume, for present purposes, to be the wife. It might be thought that the pretence of secrecy is a male supremacist device designed to cover up the sins of errant husbands. But in fact the old rule helps to redress a natural imbalance of power that favours men. In real life, most often it is men who not only seek but also benefit from affairs which threaten marriages, because they can (and often do) remarry a younger, prettier mate. This is harder for women, who may have children or wrinkles. The convention of plausible deniability allows a cuckolded wife to pretend not to know what's going on. This gives her the option of tolerating her husband's bad habits without being humiliated. Adultery becomes a marriage-breaking issue only when she chooses to notice it. It also gives her a credible threat to wield against her husband: mend your ways or I blow the whistle -to your shame. The old wives' rule thus serves the interests of old wives, providing them with a measure of dignity in an inherently excruciating situation.
Then there is the "correspondent," as the third party used to be called. Assume again that it is a woman. As often as not-preferably most of the time-her lover will go back to his wife. Where does this leave her? If the affair is public, then she is damaged goods: at best a jilted lover, at worst an attempted homewrecker. But if the affair is private (meaning private, wink wink, nod nod) her neighbours and colleagues have the option of pretending it never happened, rather than viewing her as a threat to the morality of the young. She can get on with her life; yet the public teaching-that adultery is wrong-is unchallenged.
from a social point of view, any institution which teaches virtue while accommodating frailty is to be cherished; mere law can never do that, but the adulterer's closet can and does. Moreover, society benefits, because the Main Street rule helps married couples to stay together. It permits only as much adultery as can be kept safely underground. Its enforcement arm is at once the most gentle and powerful of sanctions: denial of respectability. It is true that some people can flout bourgeois respectability. The late James Goldsmith made no secret of his mistresses. But even most billionaires crave some measure of public approval, and it is right that people who are not respectable should find obstacles placed along their climb to the top rungs of society-including the American presidency.
So it is a good thing for an adulterous minister to preach fidelity and dread discovery. It is a good thing for neighbourhood biddies to whisper about a certain notorious swordsman while never bringing up the subject with his wife. It is a good thing to let the wife be deceived until she chooses otherwise. It is a good thing for tycoons, senators and university presidents to be expected not to embarrass their companies, constituents or alumni with an adultery scandal-even while certain colleagues, staff members and trustees look the other way when a lipstick stain turns up on a collar. It is a good thing to find flimsy reasons not to promote an executive who openly leaves his wife for another woman, even while giving a pass to another man who commits adultery on the sly. Adultery is in that class of sin which is best handled hypocritically-which is to say, sensitively.
Of course, the trouble with a social policy rooted in hypocrisy is that it is difficult to defend openly. If someone is misbehaving in ways that can hurt other people, damage morale and undermine moral standards, how can a law or rule justify ignoring it? If character is a fair qualification for public office, why not make a public issue of a politician's infidelity, regardless of how discreet he has been? Some social rules are stable and effective only until people start demanding consistency, transparency and due process. Unfortunately, that is what is happening now.
The turning point came at a press conference on 6th May 1987. The Miami Herald had staked out the Washington townhouse of former senator Gary Hart, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, and reported that it appeared he had spent the night with a woman who was not his wife. Hart had been dogged by whispers of womanising, but he had not been terribly indiscreet and-after the Herald went public with its revelation-his wife stood by him and accepted his pleas of innocence. "In all honesty, if it doesn't bother me, I don't think it ought to bother anyone else," Lee Hart told the press. Under the old rules, that would have been all; but this time the press would not drop the story. In the New Republic magazine, Michael Kinsley crowed that "We are witnessing the breakdown, at long last, of an anti-democratic conspiracy among the Washington elite of journalists and politicians to keep information from voters."
Hart withdrew from the race. But before that, something more important happened. At that 6th May press conference, Paul Taylor of the Washington Post asked The Question. "Have you ever committed adultery?" That word "ever" obliterated the old rules. It declared that any act of infidelity, never mind how discreet, was part of the public picture for a public figure. The door was blown off the closet, at least for politicians. Hart, understandably nonplussed, stammered that he did not have to answer the question-the right answer, at least by the old rule, although it did not save him. If a decent hypocrisy no longer affords protection then what rules are we playing by?
Narrowing the band of plausible deniability from, say, "Be discreet" to "Do nothing that might ever start a rumour"-because rumours will be investigated-is unlikely to give us a higher standard of morality among politicians and public figures. (In any case saints make lousy leaders.) It is more likely that adultery will be flushed out into the open more often. The closet will shrink or even disappear. What then? Either exposed adulterers will be steadfastly condemned and disgraced, even (sometimes) against common sense and the wishes of the betrayed spouse. Or people will quail from condemning so human a sin and will decide to relax about it instead. To illustrate these options, consider two figures caught up in high profile adultery stories in the US: Kelly Flinn and Bill Clinton.
Last year, the US Air Force's Lieutenant Flinn, the first woman to pilot a B-52, was threatened with court martial and forced out of the services after the authorities learned that she had been conducting an affair with a civilian who was married (Flinn was single) to an enlisted woman who served on Flinn's base. The armed services' rules against adultery used to be enforced in the usual hypocritical way (wink wink). But there were good reasons for punishing Flinn: she had lied to her superiors; she had disobeyed an order to change her conduct; she had threatened morale and order by her interference in the marriage of an enlisted colleague. But the decision to punish Flinn raised important questions. What does consensual adultery have to do with flying a plane? Should a bit of hanky-panky destroy a career into which the government had put a great deal of energy and money?
The armed services found themselves in an absurd position. Without the protection of hypocrisy they faced the possibility of a decimated officer corps. The Flinn case led to the case of Army Major General John Longhouser who, despite a long and distinguished career, was forced to retire after a telephone tip revealed that he had carried on an affair while separated from his wife, five years earlier. Later, General Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was disqualified for the top job after it emerged that he had carried on an affair 13 years earlier, although he, too, had been separated from his wife at the time.
Desperate for a policy which was both consistent and committed, the hapless generals set up a sexual misconduct hotline. But in the wake of the Flinn affair, reports of adultery came in so thick and fast that the army shut down the hotline. Senior officers expressed concern that minor transgressions were ending the careers of distinguished officers. The story confirmed what we already knew: no public, legalistic system of anti-adultery rules can work.
Thus the second alternative to hypocrisy is the one that, alas, we shall end up adopting: airing adultery in public and shrugging about it. Consider Bill Clinton. His case shows that what is happening now is the reverse of what ought to happen: adultery is being condemned legally and excused morally.
The Clinton story has two facets: Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky. In 1992, when Flowers went public with allegations that Governor Clinton had carried on an affair with her, this was rightly seen as a story which reflected on the character and veracity of a presidential candidate. Next thing we knew, Clinton was on television, with Hillary Clinton at his side, doing what honesty demanded: confessing that there had been problems in their marriage and that he had acknowledged wrongdoing, showing that they had patched it up and asking for the people's forgiveness. The people gave it-as they should have done, in the circumstances. But step back, and what you see is this: in 1987 a bright young presidential candidate got caught with his pants down and was forced out of the race; in 1992 another bright young presidential candidate got caught with his pants down and was elected president. In 1992 the public, probably for the first time, decided that it could live with an acknowledged adulterer as president.
"Acknowledged," not "adulterer," is the key word here. Personally, I am not against electing an adulterer as president. (In fact I am probably for it, considering the alternative-Jimmy Carter.) What makes for uneasiness is not the adultery itself but the combination of open inquiry, open acknowledgement and open indifference. Thus, by the time Monica Lewinsky entered the picture, Clinton had all but dropped the pretence of marital fidelity, and the public had all but dropped the pretence of caring.
This made the second round of events all the more perverse. As part of an officially unrelated investigation into sexual harassment, Clinton was asked under oath whether he had had sex with Lewinsky. He denied it. When Lewinsky was taped, saying she and the president had had an affair and that, with the White House's encouragement, she lied about it, the matter became one of perjury: a federal crime.
On national television in 1992, during the Flowers affair, Clinton was asked The Question. Could he say that he had never committed adultery? He replied: "I'm not prepared tonight to say that any married couple should ever discuss that with anybody but themselves." Translate: don't make me lie. That was the right answer; it had been for centuries. But in 1998 the law gives no quarter to tradition; a self-propelled legal process makes the traditional answer not just hypocritical but illegal. The lawyers were going to ask and the president would have to tell-never mind that he, his wife and his mistress all had agreed, for the protection of his presidency and of their own families, to bury the affair. The end result is the worst of all possible worlds. Lying about adultery, even in the interests of all concerned, has been made effectively illegal.
When the adulterer's closet becomes a zone of legal peril, adulterers will simply abandon it and take their chances with openness. According to a Newsweek poll, adultery is already at the bottom of the list of reasons for voting against a presidential candidate. As people get used to hearing about this or that prominent person's infidelities-a US president here, a British foreign secretary there-the taboo evaporates. I don't doubt that honesty has its good points. And yet, as with illegitimacy, abortion and dependency, we have found that there is a price for destigmatising behaviours which should be discouraged but are not illegal. Today most people in the US agree that adultery is wrong, and only a few admit to engaging in it: fewer than one in four men, and about half as many women, report ever having been unfaithful. Of course, people lie about adultery, so those figures should be taken as lower bounds. But that is the point. Imagine a society in which, say, 50 or 75 per cent of adults cheerfully admit to infidelity; people take adultery for granted; a wife's threat to go public or a boss's threat to be shocked ceases to be much of a deterrent, and it becomes harder to tell children, with a straight face, that cheating is really, truly, wrong-which is still a fairly useful thing to be able to say.
In January 1996, Fran?ois Mitterrand's funeral was attended by his three children, only two of whom were by his wife, Danielle. The third was Mazarine, the 21-year-old daughter of his mistress, Anne Pingeot. The wife, the mistress and the three children stood by the casket, grieving together. The president of France had been an active father to his illegitimate daughter; he had spent his last Christmas with the Pingeots and his last New Year with his wife and sons. His wife later said she had come to accept the situation. "Yes, I had married a seducer, and I had to put up with that," she said. "I was never bored with him." Only after his death was the truth acknowledged publicly (although a magazine did publish a photograph of Mitterrand with his daughter, about a year before he died). For years, everyone pretended not to know; and it was understood that France was better off that way. So hypocrisy squared the circle: it forced the president to be discreet, spared his wife a public humiliation and allowed his daughter to know her extraordinary father, while he served honourably in office. We shall never know, but perhaps the result was to save a presidency, a marriage and a child. True, no one does hypocrisy as well as the French. But can anyone imagine such a sublime collective wink in Britain or the US today? After all, Anglo-Saxon journalists have for years sneered at the alleged failure of their continental colleagues to reveal the details of politicians' sex lives.
The Main Street rule is not dead yet, but it is dying. It needs help. A better rule than the emerging practice of shrugging at adultery is: if the adulterer takes all reasonable steps to be discreet, if he performs his duties as parent, spouse and citizen, and if his mate chooses to hang on, then nothing has happened. This is not covering up; it is being grown-up.
