Only affaires de coeur should be considered adulterous

Creating and adjusting definitions is one of the ways we carry on mankind's ancient endeavor of imposing order onto chaos. A necessary side effect of this ordering is that we limit our reality, and we must evaluate our definitions carefully to ensure that we are okay with exactly who or what we are limiting. I will make the case that my opponent's definition of adultery gives more freedom to husbands while limiting the freedom of wives. Put aside for a moment the absurdity of trying to prove emotional involvement in a courtroom, for the problem is far more serious than this simple practical impossibility. Reading my opponent's argument, a person might come to the conclusion that married women have little or no desire to engage in their own extramarital couplings. However, "14 percent of married women have had affairs at least once during their married lives" (. http://www.menstuff.org...). More staggering, 68% of women say they *would* have an affair if they knew they would never get caught (. http://www.infidelityfacts.com...). Clearly, men are not the only ones who believe sexual fulfillment is to be found outside the confines of marriage. As my opponent asserts, men generally are more interested than women in having *casual* sex. His examples of clothing choice and prostitution offer two clear instances of the lopsidedness of skin-deep lust. It does not follow, however, that women are less interested in having sex. Rather, women are more likely to desire an *emotional context* for sex, which explains why they are the nearly exclusive consumers of romance novels. Consider also the hard-wired biological differences between the sexes. A woman's post-coital responsibility is to carry and feed a baby for nine months and then to give birth to and rear the baby for several years (because humans are, compared to other species, helpless for an awfully long time after birth). The man's responsibility, in contrast, is to find another woman to mate with to increase the local population's chances of survival. Contraception, overpopulation, and the luxury to value the quality of their relationships over the harsh requirements of simple survival have inspired men and women alike to reevaluate their roles in the sex process, but the biological underpinnings remain widely disparate for the two sexes: hit it and quit it for men, and emotional involvement for women. Therefore, when my opponent proposes that a divorce court should view an affair de coeur as a more serious offense than a meaningless fling, he is arguing that women should be punished for adultery while men should not. Just as tougher sentencing guidelines for crack possession than for cocaine possession are implicitly racist, a definition of adultery that includes sex with emotional involvement but excludes the satisfaction of simple lust is implicitly sexist. To any male voters who took my opponent's quiz at the BBC and worry about their ability to live a married life free of infidelity, let me remind them that adultery is no longer a crime in most of Western Europe (de jure) or the United States (de facto). The definition of adultery only matters in divorce court, and a man only goes there at his own request or at the request of his spouse. If husband and wife agree to allow each other to engage in extramarital acts of simple lust, affaires de coeur, or even affairs de sheep, the state does not care. Rather than encourage husbands and wives to determine for themselves the extent to which they will allow extramarital sex, however, my opponent proposes a state judgment that clearly favors men and punishes women. Instead of requiring men to negotiate with women as equal parties, he wants to use the law to cater to men and oppress women, which has been the strategy of patriarchy for about 6,000 years too many.