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Whatever the state of their own relationships, most Americans have some personal experience with infidelity. According to the TIME/CNN poll, 69% say they know at least one husband who has strayed; 60% say they know at least one wife who has been unfaithful. Of those respondents, 62% said they "thought less" of the adulterous husbands, while 56% "thought less" of the adulterous wives. These numbers are significantly lower than the previously cited condemnations of adultery in the abstract, suggesting that Americans tend to follow the dictum of hating the sin, not the sinner.
"Knowing someone who commits adultery puts flesh on a morally abstract situation," says John H. Gagnon, a sociologist who was a co-author of the Chicago study. "It's morally wrong, but if I know someone who did it, I know maybe they had a bad marriage; maybe it was an accident. Maybe there's a compelling narrative to explain why they strayed." In other words, familiarity breeds moral relativism. While President Clinton has yet to offer a compelling narrative of his own, this phenomenon may help explain the consistent findings in polls that while Americans don't like the idea of the President's cheating on his wife, they are not inclined to punish him for doing so. Welcome to the club, as Frank Gifford might say.
When the TIME/CNN responses are broken down by gender, however, there may be more danger signs for Clinton, who has traditionally found his greatest levels of support among women. Men tend to be as forgiving of other men as they are of women: 43% said that adultery hadn't lowered their opinion of the straying husbands they knew; 41% said it hadn't lowered their opinion of straying wives. Women, on the other hand, go easier on their own sex while training a harsher eye on men: 39% said adultery hadn't affected their opinion of unfaithful wives, compared with only 27% who were as understanding of wandering husbands they knew--70% had lowered their opinions of the men in question.
Others have noted a similar gender gap. "If a man cheats," says Gagnon, "women think less of him. If a woman cheats, they think she must have been provoked." Rufus Griscom, the editor in chief of Nerve, the online magazine of "literate smut," agrees: "My cocktail party polling has yielded the same results. A lot of women I've talked to definitely feel that women sleeping around is kind of retribution." Be that as it may, a TIME/CNN poll following Clinton's speech showed that women haven't yet deserted him, but there may be trouble in this: when asked, "If you were about to go on vacation with your husband and he had just admitted having sex with a 21-year-old intern, would you still go?" 68% of women said no.