Adultery
From Encyclopedia of Sex and Sexuality
In common usage, adultery means sexual intercourse by a married person with someone other that their spouse. From biblical times to the present, societies in the Western Jewish and Christian tradition have meted out punishments—often severe—for adultery, while permitting certain sexual relationships outside marriage. Of all the possible variations of sexual behaviors, adultery is the only one specifically forbidden by the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Another commandment, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” bans similar behavior indirectly.
According to biblical Jewish laws (based on Leviticus 20:10), adultery was defined specifically as sexual intercourse by a married woman with a man other than her husband. It did not apply to a married man who had sex with an unmarried woman. Thus, according to the law, a woman would not be granted a divorce if she caught her husband having sex with an unmarried woman. A similar double standard existed in both ancient Greece and Rome and until the rise of early Christianity, when for the first time the prohibitions and punishments specified in laws concerning adultery were applied equally to men and to women. However, according to psychologist Bernard Murstein, the purpose of the change was not to right a wrong for women but to discourage sexual activity by both men and women. Though in principle the laws punished men and women equally, in practice church officials generally urged the wife to forgive her adulterous husband but heaped much condemnation on the adulterous wife, who was often rejected and expelled from the household by her husband.
After centuries of alternating leniency and repressiveness, by the seventeenth century moral standards had again become somewhat lenient and, as the English legal commentator William Blackstone noted, “the temporal courts, therefore, take no cognizance of the crime of adultery, otherwise than as a private injury.” The historian Vern Bullough commented:
In surveying the history of royalty from the last part of the seventeenth until almost the end of the eighteenth century, it seems as if kings had to have mistresses as part of the mark of their royalty. Henry IV … was alleged to have had some fifty-six mistresses. The most famous [mistress of Louis XIV] was … Madame de Pompadour.
Among the European nobility of the time, there was no secret that many women kept two “husbands,” one in name and one for sex. In the American colonies the influence of the Puritans was increasingly felt. Although puritanism arose as a Calvinist reaction to what was seen as Roman Catholic tendencies in the Church of England, in America the Puritans (who did not belong to any particular religion) included Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, and others dissatisfied with traditional religious groups and hierarchies. They were very concerned with sexual morality and found adultery particularly repugnant. Some Puritan colonies passed statutes making it punishable by death, as were rape, sodomy, and bestiality. Gradually, these rarely-invoked penalties were replaced by lesser ones involving public humiliation: flogging, branding, and the infamous “scarlet letter A,” and later by a fine or short imprisonment. In spite of these stated prohibitions, many famous Americans, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, had known adulterous liaisons without much damage to their reputations.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, punishment for adultery seemed less and less a social concern; by the middle of the twentieth century it was reduced to become merely one of the grounds for divorce. The frequency of adultery in the United States appeared to be growing and its extent was made apparent when the Kinsey data became available. The Kinsey Report on Male Sexual Behavior, published in 1948, said:
On the basis of these active data, and allowing for the cover-up that has been involved, it is probably safe to suggest that about half of all the married males have intercourse with women other than their wives, at some time while they are married.
The Kinsey Report on Female Sexual Behavior, published in 1953, said that by the age of forty, 26 percent of married women interviewed had reported sexual encounters involving intercourse with men other than their husbands.
It seems that we have always had adultery, and observers of the American sexual scene today might say that if we were to repeat Kinsey’s study, we would probably find adultery rates to be much higher. For many persons, what had formerly been secretive and marriage-threatening—cheating on one’s spouse—has apparently become permissible. How did this attitudinal and value change come about?
The issue of adultery and the moral principles related to it are both simple and complex. From religious and moral perspectives it is always a violation of marital vows, sacraments, or contractual agreements. It is complex because changes have taken place in our modern world that psychologically tempt or pull marital partners away from each other. Observers of contemporary sexual behavior have noted some of the factors placing strain on marital fidelity:
- Little fear of unwanted pregnancy due to effective contraceptives
- A longer, more vigorous, and healthy life
- An increasing number of wives entering the labor force, creating a greater number of sexual opportunities in the workplace
- Greater amounts of leisure time for both husbands and wives
- A cultural obsession with and emphasis on youthful activities
- A decline of religious control and influence
- A decline in social controls with a concomitant rise of peer influence
- Increased urbanization, resulting in a decrease in general community scrutiny
- A general questioning of traditional religious sexual values, even by the religiously observant
- Increasing affluence for all classes, giving them more to spend on “fun”
- More media-generated sexual stimulation
- A cultural emphasis upon personal satisfaction and happiness
Some of these factors that contribute to adultery appear to be desirable; others represent increasing strains and dangers to stable marital and family life. However, it is unlikely that Western culture will revert to the mores of a simpler time.
