Either way, Mr. Ellis isn't talking, but maybe someone could wring the truth from Brat Packer Molly Ringwald:

Gah, no! She is ruining our John Hughes' fantasy of the 80s! (We just hope she's referring to James Spader or something.)

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!"

editorial@observer.com

The only problem with the headline--"Edwards To Testify About Sex Tape"--is that the report says Ms. Hunter has skipped five dates for her own deposition (which Oprah surely appreciates), and there appears to be no reason Mr. Edwards couldn't do the same thing.

The Daily Beast says it's Ms. Hunter's suit, so presumably she could drop it before either of them actually has to bare any more embarrassing details.

But there's also a federal grand jury looking into whether the former presidential candidate paid for Ms. Hunter's silence with campaign funds, and those federal subpoenas can be much harder to ignore.

She had no idea the photos were going to be so sexy: She calls them "repulsive."

(But, for the rest of us, probably not as repulsive as the Daily Beast's sex tape details.)

But one of the strangest things about Ms. Hunter's story has always been that she kind of inspired Jay McInerney's Story of My Life, which she brought up.

There's this Jay McInerney book [Story of My Life, narrated by a character based on Hunter, who briefly dated McInerney], and let's correct a part of that right now. In my early twenties, there was a time period when I, in the late '80s, did cocaine. And partied. I was living in New York City.

Ms. Hunter says she wasn't a drug addict, but that, yes, there was a lot of "hooking up" going on. The interviewer, Lisa DePaulo--who has written quite a bit about married people hooking up--was curious.

What was McInerney like to hook up with?
[laughs] I love Jay. Jay is a great guy, a lovely man. To date? That time in my life was a nightmare.

She is much happier now, she says.

"Replete with colorful anecdotes and vignettes, this forceful memoir offers a familiar, if a bit slippery, tale of lost youthful innocence," wrote Jacob Heilbrunn.

But, just like Mr. and Mrs. Edwards stole the show in Game Change, it's the mistress, Rielle Hunter, who waltzes away with Mr. Young's story.

"Hunter, not Edwards, is the truly fascinating character in this creepy little drama. As she observed about his lavish efforts to appease her during her pregnancy, 'not too bad, considering I was sleeping in my car a few years ago.'"

If he plans to follow through on that promise to have Dave Matthews, it's going to cost "an incredible amount of money." 

Stephanopoulos, who didn't name any of the staffers, made the claim after bringing up the story of Edwards' affair with the campaign videographer, which is back in the news thanks to the release of Elizabeth Edwards' new book. As George Will began pointing out how disastrous it would have been had Edwards emerged as the Democratic nominee last year, Stephanopoulos cut him off and said, "That wasn't going to happen."

"I've actually talked to a lot of former Edwards staffers about this," he explained. "And it's amazing to me. They had their doubts. They believed up until December (of 2007) that this was not true.

"By December and January, several people in his circle started to think, ‘You know what, this is probably true.' The affair. And they actually had something of a doomsday strategy. Several of them had gotten together and basically said, ‘If it looks like he's going to win, we're going to sabotage the campaign. We're going to blow it up.'"

The scheme, Stephanopoulos said, was never implemented because Edwards' odds of winning were already slim by late 2007 and early 2008. "But they say they're Democrats first and that they would have found a way to get the information out so that he was not the nominee," he added.

Needless this say, this raises a few questions.

First, obviously, is: Who are the people "in his circle" who hatched this plan? Were they all staffers? Were they all high-level? How widespread within the Edwards universe was the conspiracy? And when did Stephanopoulos himself first learn of it? Stephanopoulos offered no hints.

Also: In talking to Stephanopoulos, is it possible that they were just engaging in a game of inside-the-Beltway C.Y.A.? That is, is this a case of a few chastened aides attempting to save face with a preeminent D.C. opinion-shaper (and a former top-level campaign staffer himself) after working on a candidacy that, in hindsight, could have destroyed a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the Democratic Party. Sure, George, we were working hard for him, but it's not like we were really going to let him win!

And when would this conspiracy have been implemented? And how? And would it have worked? Sure, it (sort of) makes sense that the staffers would have held off in late '07 and early '08. Edwards was running far behind Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and an early elimination seemed likely.

But his campaign did craft a victory strategy after Obama's victory in Iowa, where Edwards finished second, just ahead of Clinton. The basic idea, even though his aides wouldn't quite say it, was to eliminate Clinton and to force a one-on-one race between Obama and Edwards-a race that would favor Edwards when white voters panicked at the idea of nominating a black candidate. This is why, if you remember, Edwards so aggressively attacked Clinton in the final pre–New Hampshire debate. Her campaign seemed to be in a free fall and he hoped to finish her off on the spot.

We now know how hopeless that game plan was: Clinton rebounded to win New Hampshire, Edwards exited the race a few weeks later and white voters were never as scared of Obama as cynics believed they would be. But what if it had worked? When would the Edwards staffers have made their move? After South Carolina? Super Tuesday? Ohio? And what would they have done? Leaked word to the press that they actually believed the affair rumors? Tried to undermine his campaign through intentionally awful strategic decisions? If Edwards had been on a roll, would this have been enough to stop him?

The bigger question, though, is what responsibility—if any—staffers have when they believe that they are working for a candidate whose nomination will doom their party.

Stephanopoulos stressed that the Edwards staffers felt a duty as "Democrats first" to protect their party. Looking back now, it seems obvious that their concerns were well placed. Had Edwards secured the nomination and had confirmation of his affair then emerged last summer, his candidacy likely would have imploded. If he tried to stay in the race for the fall, he almost certainly would have lost. If he pulled out, there would have been chaos in the party, with Clinton and Obama suddenly vying for an open nomination. The convention probably would have been bloody.

But maybe that wouldn't have happened. Remember that the Edwards story only broke when he was caught by the National Enquirer paying a secret visit to his mistress in Beverly Hills last July. At the time, he was a former candidate. Had he been in the thick of a campaign and on the verge of accepting the nomination, he might not have been so reckless. And without the Enquirer's smoking-gun confirmation, the story might have existed for the rest of the campaign as only the latest in a long line of unconfirmed (and vehemently denied) affair rumors involving presidential candidates. It's possible that no one would have known and that Edwards would have gone on to win in the fall.

Was it the role of an Edwards staffer who believed the affair rumors were true to undermine Edwards so that the party wouldn't be at risk in the fall? Perhaps you believe the answer is yes (and maybe you're right). But then where do you draw the line?

In early 1992, after all, Bill Clinton seemed every bit the ticking time bomb that Edwards was last year. Like Edwards, his dirty laundry was aired in a tabloid (a January '92 Star report that alleged a 12-year affair with Gennifer Flowers), and like Edwards he dismissed the report as trash. Rumors of other indiscretions—"bimbo eruptions" was the term used at the time—were rampant. Surely, Clinton's aides, particularly those who'd been with him since his Arkansas days, had to be suspicious that the Flowers story was true—and that there would be more (probably many more) like it to follow. And surely they had to be afraid that it might destroy their party in the fall with Clinton as the nominee.

Clinton's aides, of course, didn't sabotage him, and he went on to win in the fall. His victory was remarkable: A year earlier, when Gary Hart's 1987 demise was the standard against which political sex scandals were measured, no one would have believed that a candidate with Clinton's baggage could ever win the presidency.

Which raises one more question: Did Stephanopoulos, a top Clinton aide in the '92 campaign, ever think of sabotaging his boss?

The news served as a reminder of the sad fate of John Edwards' political career. Not long ago, he was on the cusp of unparalleled power and glory; and even when his presidential ambitions fell short last year, he still seemed, at just 55 years old, to have a bright political future—perhaps A.G. in the Obama administration, or a return to North Carolina politics, maybe even one more shot at the White House sometime down the road.

But now he lives in exile. When he or his wife make the news, Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter, and the lingering questions that surround it, features prominently in the coverage. Pressing ahead with a political career is hopeless. Any message he might have is drowned out whenever he shows his face. He's the man who cheated on his cancer-stricken wife. That's it.

Among the six major Democrats who sought their party's nomination last year, Edwards' fate is clearly the most pitiful. But he's not the only one of them whose political career is in a much worse place now than it was back in 2008.

Chris Dodd, first elected to the Senate in 1980, spent much of his career toying with running for president before finally taking the plunge in '08. Today, his standing in deep blue Connecticut is eroding by the day and his political career seems destined to end on Election Day 2010, if not sooner. And in New Mexico, Bill Richardson, who also made a long-anticipated presidential run last year, is facing a federal probe into a possible pay-to-play scheme involving his political action committee - a scandal that already forced him to withdraw as Obama's pick for Commerce secretary.

By contrast, the other three Democrats who ran in '08 are sitting pretty. Obama, obviously, was the biggest winner, but Hillary Clinton got about the best possible consolation prize—a posting as secretary of state that has already improved her national standing and will probably position her for another presidential run. And Joe Biden is enjoying a stint as vice president that has elevated his stature and that, at least in theory, keeps the presidential aspirations alive that he's nursed for decades.

The disparity between the haves and have-nots from the Democratic presidential class of '08 is startling. Three of last year's candidates reaped immediate and significant rewards. The other three are now facing shame and oblivion.

This is not usual. Sure, there have been past candidates, like Gary Hart in 1988, who were undermined by scandal and whose careers promptly evaporated. But his example is the exception.

Even losing candidates almost always emerge stronger from the experience. Lamar Alexander and Elizabeth Dole, for instance, put their names in the G.O.P. mix for 2000, only to be quickly pushed aside by George W. Bush. But they both ended up with Senate seats two years later. Paul Tsongas was a former senator with zero percent name recognition when he decided to run for the 1992 Democratic nod; he fell short, but emerged as a national voice on fiscal issues.

Or just look at last year's Republican field. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee both lost out to John McCain, but each is now a prime contender for 2012—and Huckabee even got a TV show out of the deal. And while Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson were both embarrassed as their high poll numbers vanished and their campaigns ended with little support, they each remain relevant national voices; they didn't win, but they weren't ruined, either.

What's most interesting about the cases of Edwards, Dodd and Richardson is that each man's post-campaign demise was triggered, at least in part, by the campaign itself.

Take Edwards, who offered the following explanation for his affair when he gave his only interview on the subject last summer, to ABC's Bob Woodruff: "I went from being a senator, to being considered for vice president, running for president, being a vice presidential candidate and becoming a national public figure, all of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want. You're invincible. And there will be no consequences."

Dodd, for his part, is now being haunted by the way he financed his bid. With little grass-roots support, he leaned on his extensive contacts in the financial services industry—executives who knew his presidential campaign was going nowhere but who also knew that donating to the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee was never a bad idea.

As a result, Dodd, who didn't last past Iowa (where he finished with 0 percent), ended up leading all candidates, Democratic and Republican, in one category: contributions from AIG suits. This has made it ridiculously easy for his opponents to tag Dodd as the bought-and-paid-for symbol of the negligence that produced the current economic crisis.

Richardson, too, might have been undone by the quest for presidential campaign cash. A federal grand jury is now looking into how a California-based company received $1.5 million in fees from the New Mexico state government after donating $100,000 to Richardson's political action committee in 2004. That money didn't directly finance Richardson's '08 bid, but it did help lay the groundwork.

If they had it to do over, you can bet that Edwards, Dodd and Richardson would all think twice before giving in to the presidential bug.

An indignant Tim Robbins spent five hours attempting to vote yesterday after a registration mix-up that eventually required the attention of two police officers and the Board of Elections. [R&M]

The red and black dress Michelle Obama wore at last night's acceptance speech was from Narciso Rodriguez's Spring 2009 ready-to-wear collection. [Mrs. O via Racked] 

Cameron Diaz refused to share her cigarettes with her fellow guests at Drew Barrymore's Halloween party. [P6]

The National Enquirer likely stole a dirty diaper belonging to Rielle Hunter's son. The gossip sheet plans to submit the find to DNA testing in order to prove that John Edwards fathered the child. [R&M] 

A "disoriented" Countess Luann de Lesseps, of The Real Housewives of New York, "couldn't stand still" at Noah Tepperberg and Danny A's Halloween party at Lucky Strike Lanes. [P6]