International Affairs

LUST IN TRANSLATION

The Rules of Infidelity From Tokyo to Tennessee

By Pamela Druckerman

Penguin Press. 291 pp. $24.95

In America, we have someone "on the side." The Irish "play offsides"; the English "play away." Swedes and Russians "sneak to the left," the Japanese "go off the path" and the Dutch "go strange" or "pinch the cat in the dark," whatever that means. The Indonesians, more romantically, have a "wonderful interval." Few activities in life have such delightful euphemisms as those describing infidelity. No wonder people succumb to temptation the world over.

In "Lust in Translation," Pamela Druckerman offers an amusing, if flippant, global tour of adultery. Inspired by her background as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal as well as her international lineup of ex-lovers, she travels to two dozen cities in 10 countries to discover how people from different cultures channel what she believes are the universal urges toward sex outside marriage. Her most shocking discovery? The supposedly sophisticated French actually sleep around less than Americans do -- and Americans don't sleep around much.

In broad strokes, Druckerman lays out what lures married folks toward adultery. "The biggest 'risk factor' for infidelity," she claims, "is simply being male." No surprise there. But it also helps (or hurts) to be poor. If you made less than $10,000, you were twice as likely to cuckold your spouse as those who earned more than $60,000.

Communism, on the other hand, is bad for illicit love -- in both the Soviet Union and China, suspected adulterers were reported to party officials and severely punished. Meanwhile, as Ronald Reagan wished he'd said, the free market equals free love. With the introduction of economic reforms, Russia and China have become adulterous utopias, at least compared to the bad old days.

You'd think that capitalist Americans would be particularly blase about the whole affair, or affairs. Not so: "Adultery provokes more outrage in America than in almost any other country on record," Druckerman writes. She blames the founding fathers -- and not just randy Thomas Jefferson -- for instilling within Americans a horror of marital lapses, believing as they did that "the strength and perhaps the very survival of their country hinged on the moral fitness of its citizens." Alas, where once we led the charge toward freedom for all, now we've pioneered self-indulgent guilt. To wit, one woman posted on a message board that she had interrogated her cheating spouse for nearly two years about the details of his affair and then "with the aid of my master calendar, the 1000+ email, the photo albums, visa receipts, and his old expense reports, he and I set out to put all of those 2 1/2 years of infidelity on a timeline." Who would submit to this? Nobody, Druckerman claims, but a guilt-ridden American adulterer.

As entertaining as all this is, "Lust in Translation" ends up feeling superficial and stereotypical. Depth may be too much to expect from a slender book that purports to explain the "rules of infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee." After all, few expect cultural immersion from a package tour. Nor should they, but a study of adultery risks being casually cruel, without sympathy for those on both sides of the sheets. And some of her throwaway comments -- for instance, "even Mexican men were a lower adultery risk than the lawyers I'm used to. Perhaps I should have given some of them my number" -- don't inspire much confidence in Druckerman's cultural sensitivity.

Indeed, her whole underlying premise -- that "adultery crises in America last longer, cost more, and seem to inflict more emotional torture than they do in anyplace else" and that adultery is something that can be managed maturely between consenting adults -- falls apart when she reaches South Africa. To her credit, she drops the snide tone during most of this sobering chapter. After all, there's not much to joke about in a country where one in five adults has HIV and men often don't "sleep at home," as one HIV-positive woman puts it. In South Africa, Druckerman writes, AIDS has "transformed cheating from a naughty hobby into a lethal practice."

But couldn't adultery be lethal anywhere? Setting aside the very real danger of contracting AIDS (or enraging a murderous husband), doesn't infidelity kill trust? And isn't that what marriage is all about? But what do I know? I'm just an unsophisticated American.