US Edition 
Has being unfaithful become easier for women?
Typically women are judged more harshly for having affairs than men. But is the internet changing that? Rebecca Holman reports
John Major did it, Kristen Stewart did it, and Gwyneth Paltrow denied Vanity Fair's claims that she may have done it. Proof that the question of infidelity transcends the cultural demarcation lines that usually ensure that John Major is never, ever put in a box with Gwyneth.
Lots of people cheat, all the time (it’s difficult to get exact figures – they veer between 25 and 70 per cent for women, and 40 and 80 per cent for men some of the time), yet infidelity remains the deadliest of sins. We are obsessed with it, yet have somehow created a series of complicated and convoluted rules and narratives that films, books, television programmes, celebrities and the media have to follow to make cheating acceptable:
1. If you meet someone and fall in love, when you’re already stuck in a loveless marriage, then that’s fine because finding The One supersedes everything else (for this to work, you then have to stay with The One forever. If you part ways after 15 years then it doesn’t count. Sorry. (See: Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt). Did they break up?
2. If your partner is mean or abusive, or unappreciative in anyway, then it’s ok to cheat, because you’re doing so in order to be rescued. This only counts for women, because everyone knows that men don’t need rescuing. (See: Titanic, although as Jack was also Rose’s One True Love, she gets a double cheating free pass for that one).
3. If you’re married to someone in a lunatic asylum/attic who is showing no signs of recovering from the unnamed mental illness that renders them either comatose or psychotic at all times. (see: Downton Abbey, Jane Eyre).
4. If both parties are attractive, wealthy, French, and meet on a train.
Ugly people can’t cheat, poor people can’t cheat. Cheat over the age of 40 and it’s a midlife crisis, start an affair in the office and it’s cheap and tawdry. And then there’s the biggie – women can’t be the cheaters.
We express surprise and disbelief when it’s a woman doing the cheating, and women’s magazines still treat infidelity (sometimes ours, but mainly his) with a shrill hysteria – ‘don’t do anything to make him stray, or you’ll end up alone, and that’s THE WORST’. And they’re still churning out the ‘How To Stop Your Man From Cheating’ features, while men’s magazines seem remarkably unconcerned with the issue.
Our attitude to affairs is positively puritanical compared to our continental counterparts. Sociologist and writer Catherine Hakim started researching a book on internet dating, but quickly moved her focus onto infidelity when it became clear how many attached people were using dating websites to get a bit of extra curricular. She thinks our attitude to cheating (our tendency to view infidelities as a bad thing, and to automatically walk out on a relationship if an affair is discovered) as unhelpful and unrealistic. “The French have the same attitude, it will be great entertainment, it will be lovely, we will go to nice restaurants and for weekends away to wonderful places – and everyone keeps their mouths shut
“They have rules there are certain ways to do it – it’s about style and elegance – everything’s done nicely. If it’s not done nicely, it’s not attractive.”
And the reality is plenty of people – plenty of women – do cheat. Noel Biderman set up Ashley Madison, a dating agency for married people looking for affairs, after working as a sporting agent, and seeing how many of his clients were juggling wives and mistresses. At the same time he read about how 30 per cent of the supposedly single men on dating sites were married or in a relationship.
Seeing a gap in the market, Biderman began to investigate further, and decided to focus his site primarily on women. “When I looked at the business of being unfaithful, the more I realised that there was already a billion dollar industry aimed at men – whether it was adult films, strip clubs, or so called massage parlours and ultimately escorts, so what I came to realise was that catering to women was going to be dramatically different, so that’s where I planted my flag.”
The website is based in North America, but he has a substantial British user base. Interestingly, female registration in the UK is growing at a far quicker pace than male. “For women it’s not just about sex, one word we hear all the time is passion. It’s not just about sex, it’s about intimacy.”
And Biderman notes that female users of the site in the UK are fairly young (averaging in at 25-34, which seems incredibly young, given that the average age for first time marriage in the UK is 28.9), female users in France are more likely to be in their 40s.
He feels that this reflects the way we view female sexuality beyond a certain age: in a word, we don’t. “Women [in their late 30s and 40s] who are having affairs believe that their sexual appetite is atypical, and that other women, their colleagues, their neighbours, their friends don’t have the same sexual appetites. They need to realise that being in your late 30s or early 40s and wanting to have sex all the time is not atypical, it’s quite natural, they shouldn’t be socialised out of that mentality.”
But where do we start? Our views of male versus female sexuality are so ingrained, that even those women who are having extra-marital affairs play along. “Women who are having affairs tend to blame their husbands for not paying them attention,” notes Biderman. “Men blame their genetics – I just couldn’t help myself.” Essentially, men will (rightly or wrongly) put their behaviour down to an uncontrollable sexual impulse, whereas women would rather find someone else to ‘blame.’
Both Biderman and Hakim predict that as the internet opens people up to ever-broader circles of potential lovers, more people will have more opportunity to cheat, more often. But will the way we view cheating evolve quite so quickly? I doubt it.
The New Rules of Marriage, Catherine Hakim, £14.99, Gibbon Square Books