Weekdays

Monday: sex with C in the morning; three hours at the Liberty Inn with B in the middle of the day.
Tuesday: nothing but a quickie with D - fifteen minutes in the back of her car.
Wednesday: sex with C in the morning; two hours with F.
Thursday: two-and-a-half hours with F.
Friday: sex with C in the morning; three hours with D.

Serious scientific research into sexual behavior has been starved of funding in the United States for many, many years. It is therefore difficult to know whether my own behavior is atypical. My hunch is that there are few men, or women, in their late-forties who are still having intra-marital sex twice a week or so, and also having extra-marital sex three or four or five times a week, with several different partners. Yet this is what the conventional wisdom (and conventional wisdom's lab-coated mouthpiece, evolutionary psychology) says that every man wants. If every man wants to be doing this sort of thing, and if this sort of thing is possible, why aren't lots more men doing it?

I assume that a large part of the answer has to do with the fact that it is wrong to do it. What makes me unusual, on this reading, is that I am peculiarly morally deficient. This is the view taken by The Ethical Slut in her post Doing Marrieds. [By now, The Ethical Slut really does need to abandon the 'slut' soubriquet and redub herself 'The Moralizing Monogamist'. For though she objects to cheating and blogging about it (Slut does not equal amoral), her objection is to the cheating, not the blogging.] But I don't think an appeal to moral depravity is interestingly explanatory. I am morally deficient, to be sure, but so are lots of other people: they pad their bills, take home supplies from the workplace, pocket money to which they are not entitled, cheat on their taxes, gouge their clients, conspire against others for their own advantage, and so on. Some of this behavior is illegal, some merely immoral. These people are liars, cheats, and extortionists; or liars, cheats, and thieves; or liars, cheats, and frauds; or liars, cheats, and self-centred, self-aggrandizing bastards. On top of their lying and cheating, they take what rightly belongs to another. I don't do any such thing. All I do is please myself, and please others in the process, as often as I can. I don't claim it isn't wrong to do so. But I don't see how the fact that it is wrong explains why so few people do it. For many people do wrong things. And of the wrong things that there are to do, adultery seems one of the least harmful - wrongdoing that results only in pleasure, ecstasy, joy, delight.