Francis Morrone: Thou Shalt Not

Francis Morrone is a regular contributor to The New Criterion and author of The Architectural Guide to New York City (Gibbs Smith).

Tracy Quan: Are the sexes equal where cheating's concerned?

Francis Morrone: I think there are differences between men and women that are physiological. Men probably suspect cheating far less than women do. The male impulse is more immediate and pressing, so a man is more likely to be momentarily betrayed into infidelity.

TQ: Is the straying husband, then, some sort of unwitting wanderer? How so?

FM: I mean that his infidelity is not necessarily something he wants in the broader sense. It's not something he sets out to do. It's just something that happens. One of the unfortunate things about male sexuality is that things "just happen." The very sight of a woman can make a man behave in ways totally contrary to the ways in which he wants to behave. Probably this is not as true of women vis a vis men. I don't think the sexual impulse in women is as immediate or as visible.

TQ: The adulterous woman -- is she more like a man?

FM: Adulterous women are often looking for something very different from what adulterous men want. Lately, there is this cult of women aping male sexual behavior -- like the woman in the TV commercial ogling the construction worker. A great many women are play-acting a male role without feeling the immediate impulse a man experiences. Men, in general, find their sexual impulses difficult to control. For a man to repress these impulses, he has to work at it and be aware of it all the time. Those who engage in self-flagellation, as some members of the Catholic sect Opus Dei are said to do, are the ones who are so turned on they have to resort to extraordinary measures to turn themselves off. That kind of pressure is masculine, not feminine. I think a woman's adultery is a commentary on her own marriage or close relationship. She is seeing beyond the act of coupling.

TQ: If women are more deliberate, does this mean we're more evil?

FM: It doesn't follow that women are more evil. Although maybe, if I were honest with myself, I would have to say that I may at times have behaved as though I thought they were.

TQ: When did you become aware of adultery?

FM: When did I first learn the Ten Commandments? The concept of the sin of adultery was something I began to learn about when I was two or three years old. The first things I read were Bible stories -- at the age of four or five -- and there's an awful lot of adultery in the Bible. And adultery is the great subject of Western literature. The question is: How many books have not been written about adultery? We don't ask how many have been. Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina -- the greatest expressions of the Western mind concern adultery.

TQ: Are adulterous women more interesting to read about than their male counterparts?

FM: Women's reasons for committing adultery are always more complicated. In literature as in life, I think the woman is using the man rather than vice versa, as many present-day feminists would have it... There's nothing remotely interesting about male sexuality. It's basically a response to stimuli. Infidelity is natural; repressing it is not. That's where male sexuality becomes interesting. And what's really interesting is non-sexual friendship between a man and a woman. Such friendship is, to me, the highest expression of civilization, because it seeks to find the spirit that is cloaked in the blinding haze of bodily impulse.

TQ: You mentioned self-flagellation but there are less extreme options, aren't there?

FM: There is a particularly Italian way of looking at these things: the Madonna/Whore complex. Italian and Italian-American men often place women they find appealing into one of these two camps. There are women with whom one would not engage in pre-marital or extra-marital sex and there are women with whom one would. It sounds godawful, I know, but it is one way -- a rather time- honored way -- that men have found to order the sexual impulse that is always and too much with them.