It's like some postmodern myth cycle, Zeus and Hera in a 21st century of zoom-lens pap photos and manic dirty texts that live forever courtesy of AT&T. We can't, or won't, stop consuming the details. (Mr. Gore said what to the masseuse about "releasing" his second chakra?) The narratives hurtle from the first mistress revelation in The Enquirer or a trashy blog to-a million or so Huffington Post comments later-the wife's book deal and public "healing"; at the moment, we have forever-shocked Elizabeth Edwards in a second media push as her book, Resilience, comes out in paperback.

As the recession grinds on, there must be something primally reassuring in these stories of male infidelity and wronged female virtue among the elite. The über-cheaters give us evidence that entitled males still exist, are still in charge, while sober, de-eroticized women-even nubile, beautiful, ultra-blonde Elin Nordegren seems willingly desexualized-safeguard The Family. "The saddest part for me," Ms. Edwards told Larry King last week, "is that I know I'll never again be held in that way ... with passion." Meanwhile, Tiger has a new girlfriend already; Sanford is working on "rekindling things" with his Argentine lover.

These tales of hookers and half-hookers and gold diggers and fame diggers and "soul mates"-it all presents itself as censure, but the sheer volume of media, the obsessive attention to it, represents a kind of cheering on. "We really want to believe that powerful men have harems or the equivalent," as a prominent female West Village writer of 50 put it to me, "because it's reassuring us that boys will be boys. The alternative is unthinkable."

She went on to speculate that famous male serial cheaters want to be exposed. "I think being held up as the bad (yet randy!) boy in front of a nation is kind of a turn-on for some of them. A lot of men want to think of themselves as naughty, and of course they know that other men will envy them, which is one reason, no doubt, that they are so ambitious in the first place."

WHEN ELITE WOMEN'S cheating goes public, meanwhile, the outrage can be shrill: Just a year before Hanna Rosin's recent, well-received Atlantic cover story, "The End of Men," readers of that magazine excoriated Sandra Tsing Loh for her confessional piece about leaving her husband after an affair. And yet somehow, compared to what the male cheaters inspire, female adulterers' hold on our attention is short-lived, even, in the end, a bit ambivalent. Nikki Haley's reported extramarital liaisons were good for maybe a week of headlines, and did little to slow her political rise-she is now the G.O.P. candidate to succeed, yes, Mr. Sanford as governor of South Carolina. Over in Hollywood, when Laurie David left Larry David-gossip had her hooking up with the handyman of her Martha's Vineyard estate-the story was a blip on celebrity blogs for a few days, then disappeared. Where was Larry David's anguish, his healing, the journey that, say, Sandra Bullock has been on since revelations that Jesse James was cheating? Made into a mockery by "Larry David" on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Whatever the real Larry David was going through, we looked politely away; maybe it's just too much to contemplate, the idea that a rich, successful man isn't a winner in romance, too. Laurie David, meanwhile, has gotten more fulsome tabloid attention in a week for her rumored role in the story of Al and Tipper's divorce than in the adulterous provocation of her own. (Her publicist quickly sputtered a disgusted denial that she was cheating with the ex-VP, whose movie she produced.)

Even non-celebrity men want to be part of the story line of the cheating, sexually voracious husband and the wife who is muted or uninterested in bed. It's a staple of men's magazines and male confessional journalism: the half-cri de coeur, half-boast about how hard it is to be monogamous when you have such a monster sex drive, or how some anonymous author has decided to indulge in guilt-free adultery since his otherwise exemplary wife simply cannot fill his needs. (Exhibit A: Philip Weiss' exhaustive 2008 examination in New York magazine of his own wandering eye and his wife's lack of interest in sex.)

But let's put aside media mythologizing and look at real life for a moment among the married, educated, affluent class, who share the background and lifestyle of the über-cheaters. Is it a hotbed of unbridled male lust desperate for an outlet, coming home to a female libido that the high-achieving wife has shushed as adroitly as she puts her baby down to sleep? That scenario seems more and more passé-not to mention blind to certain realities of female erotic nature. The statistics say that marital cheating is at about 25 percent for men, 15 percent for women. But one wonders about those numbers. Self-reporting about any sexual matter is notoriously unreliable, and with adultery, any over-reporting is likely to be by men while under-reporting is likely to be by women, due to cultural pressures on men to be studly and women to be chaste.

When you talk to married women about their attitudes toward infidelity, their own, their husband's, or their friends', you get a more subtle, complicated picture. For one thing, raging male libido is not the starting point of the discussion. This email from a married mother of two, an author married to another author, is typical: "Were infidelity to occur, there's no reason to assume it would be on his part. I don't worry that 'my husband is going to cheat on me.' That's not really a scenario I roll over in my head. ... But you get the sense from movies-like Judd Apatow's supposedly relatable Knocked Up-that a women's job is just to HOLD those virile, roaming husbands down! Crazy. Not something I experience or see in ANY of my peers."

Neither is there some male need for sexual variety that's paramount over the female's enjoyment, or potential enjoyment, of same. It's female desire, above all, that is notoriously difficult to sustain in a long-term relationship (hence the "lesbian bed death" syndrome). As an observant friend of mine once noted, heterosexual men may be the only ones ideally suited to monogamy, anyway, since only they can reliably be turned on by anyone, even a long-term partner. When a woman's desire for her husband wanes, it's all too convenient to assume her sexuality itself has been put aside.

"I know a few women who are cheating/have cheated," said Anna Holmes, until recently the editor of Gawker's women-oriented site, Jezebel, over IM. "When I first heard about them, I was shocked-because even I somewhat bought into the narrative that 'men cheat; women, not so much.'" She was also surprised to feel some "admiration" for these women. "I also think that women who cheat upend the narrative that the end goal is marriage. Because here they were, seemingly happily married-some of them, I believe were honestly HAPPILY MARRIED but restless-but it wasn't enough. We're always told that it's enough."

"My 20s in New York went like this: Most of the women around me continually beat themselves up in the pursuit of male attention-myself included!-we felt like passive players in our own romantic and sexual lives," Ms. Holmes tippety-tapped. "'Cheating,' for better or worse, is not really passive. So when I say I felt a strange sense of admiration, what I mean is that I saw women who had previously played second-bit roles in their own romantic and sexual stories take charge. This isn't to say that you have to cheat to 'take charge'-simply that by the time we hit our 30s, most of us were married, and so for one of us to unashamedly look elsewhere for sexual or emotional companionship-on our own terms-felt revolutionary."

THERE IS THIS perhaps uncomfortable fact: Sex means just as much to women as to men, but secrecy is a more fundamental component of sexuality for women (Ms. Holmes said the female cheaters she knew had all successfully kept it from their husbands.) "My sexual life is pivotal to me, as I believe it is for everyone else," Edna O'Brien, no stranger to self-revelation, once said while being interviewed by Philip Roth. "For me, primarily, it is secretive and contains elements of mystery and plunder. My daily life and my sexual life are not of a whole-they are separated." A cheating woman will tend to be very, very good at hiding it.

Female sexual secrecy is not the same thing as repression. There's much more to it than that. Set loose in the world, female sexuality can invite danger. Every category of violence against women, from stalking to murder, is heavily weighted toward ex-relationships, according to government statistics. Strangers are no day at the beach, either. It's not that an available woman in a sexy outfit chatting up guys in a bar is asking to be preyed upon-but can you blame a woman who, out of inchoate fear as much as anything, chooses to express her sexuality in more private ways? For mothers, there's even more at stake in sussing out and avoiding potentially violent men. Children really do need to be protected from abusive men, and how do you know which ones are? A Los Angeles woman who has just started dating after a divorce told me that meeting men now makes her worry about protecting her 4-year-old daughter, "about the fact that we are presented to the world as a package."

Not only are women better at keeping secrets, the forms their extramarital relationships take tend to be much more varied, often easy to not even classify as cheating: The IM relationship, the "emotional affair," the "work husband"; there is perhaps less boning in a hotel, more pouring out of her heart and dropping erotically charged lines to someone who is not her husband, someone she may not even have met in person; she may be trying to decide if she is in fact having an affair with the guy. (Women can keep sexual secrets even from themselves.) The experts agree: It's all infidelity. If she doesn't even tell her friends about it, that may be because in the end she finds the whole thing not a badge of pride but actually embarrassing-the not the sexual but the emotional exposure. When Karen Karbo tried to get women to talk about their experiences with "online cheating" for an article in Canadian Elle, she found her subjects slinking away after initially agreeing to talk. They were ashamed not so much of the cheating part, but of the neediness it seemed to advertise. "They all said they had great stories but that they were too embarrassed because it made them look pathetic," she emailed.

There is one giant exception to the rule of female sexual secrecy: women who sleep with the married alpha males. These women seem to relish the chance to tell the world about their epic forbidden romance with, or their shoddy treatment at the hands of, someone famous. Their blabbing is in fact another big reason that the public face of cheating is so overwhelmingly male. "Hollywood women probably cheat just as much as the men," speculated Amy Sohn, author of the novel Prospect Park West, which depicts cheating among the Park Slope stroller set. "But there are all sorts of reasons that the men they have affairs with wouldn't go to the tabloids, where the Tiger Woods-type women do. For one thing, the women they go for-the low-hanging fruit, as they say, not their economic or social equals-have an economic incentive to expose it, while the men don't, necessarily."

In the end, the female propensity to wrap sex in romance may explain why they, more than men, can find that cheating does not brand them with notoriety-if they handle it right. "With the cheating women, they often end up in a relationship with the person, so there's nothing tawdry about it, and the stories just fade away," Ms. Sohn said. "It means you fell out of love with your first husband and fell in love with your second husband! Wow!"

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