Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity From Tokyo to Tennessee by Pamela Druckerman, The Pe... Global Adultery Hooks Up W | Sex Press
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Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity From Tokyo to Tennessee by Pamela Druckerman, The Pe... Global Adultery Hooks Up W

Submitted by admin on Wed, 2007-04-18 11:00.

Ms. Druckerman is less amusing when the topic is South Africa, where infidelity promotes serial transmission of H.I.V. That the story of a country so ravaged by AIDS shares space in a book that revels in the novelty fact that one South African survey distinguished between those who cheat and those who cheat “while drunk” is bad enough. But to write “South Africans [by which the author means black South Africans] would rather die than be monogamous” is insulting and patently absurd. Lust in Translation presents itself as cosmopolitan, but the book’s heart remains true to the U.S.A. According to Ms. Druckerman’s numbers, Americans cheat about as much as other First World nations. We just don’t deal well with the consequences. Only in America, where the taboo of adultery transcends otherwise impervious political and economic divides, do people so completely separate the act of sex from the attempt to cover it up; and only in America do people demand absolute disclosure about their affairs upon discovery. These stock American reactions to the discovery of an affair aren’t natural: They are the received wisdom of the Marriage Industrial Complex, Ms. Druckerman’s name for the constellation of self-help books, recovery groups and marriage therapists that have multiplied since the 1970’s, the golden age of American divorce. The confrontations, “cry-talks” and demoralizing feelings of guilt demanded by our conventional wisdom create an intimacy that couples rarely experience. As a result, Ms. Druckerman finds herself interviewing spouses devastated by affairs—photos shredded, guns pointed, police called—who nevertheless wax nostalgic about their shared suffering. Insights such as these into America’s twisted affair with adultery make Lust in Translation undeniably alluring. Michael Washburn is the assistant director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

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