You All Know the Story of the Other Woman: Adultery and the (Third-Wave) Feminist Desire for Alternative Heterosexualities

In the conspiracies of your illicit adulterous cells, you lovers are pursuing desire, yes, but aren't you also playing closet theorists, vernacular utopians, performatively arguing the minority position that discontent isn't, pace Freud and everyone else, the human condition, or somehow natural?
—Laura Kipnis, "Adultery"

It is difficult to imagine garnering credibility as a woman speaking from the position of having had an affair with a married man without the requisite tone of unalloyed remorse.[1] Mainstream culture would perceive me as someone with no respect for the family and no respect for myself. Feminism might charge me with betraying another woman and the power of sisterhood, shoring up patriarchal privilege for my married male partner by servicing his body and emotional needs.[2] Anne Sexton's 1967 poem, "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman," rues such self-destructive missteps:

She is his selection, part time.
You know the story too! Look
when it is over he places her,
like a phone, back on the hook.

Sexton's biting recriminations seem to be directed at herself, as much as at her lover or the reader. She should have known.

Twenty years later the zany adulteress in When Harry Met Sally . . . finds a receipt for a new dining room table in her lover's briefcase and laments, "He's never going to leave his wife."

"Of course he isn't," says Sally.

Her friend replies, "You're right, you're right, I know you're right."

We all know the story of the other woman, these cultural texts insist. He is using her; she is being duped. The often iconoclastic feminist critic Laura Kipnis notes this tendency to oversimplify the equation of adultery: "Cynics, moralists, and feminists unite in telling us the answer is simply power—either the desire for more or the expectation of its protection." When moralists and feminists unite, I get nervous; in fact, while mainstream culture presents feminists as antagonistic to the family and family values, I cannot imagine many feminists reacting to my other womanhood with anything less than moral indictment. Nobody likes a home wrecker.

Out of this stigmatized space, I want to write a narrative of the Other Woman as a dissenting figure in contemporary marriage culture, a social agent bent on queering heterosexuality—valuing intimacy outside marriage, separating sex from reproduction, recognizing pleasure as a worthwhile end in itself, and resisting the categorization of women as "wives" and "mistresses" according to the state regulation of sexuality—rather than consenting to it whole cloth. Borrowing from Marilyn Frye's work on disidentifying with whiteness and John Stoltenberg's experiments in refusing to be a man, and mindful of Lynne Segal's assertion that there are "many heterosexualities" (260), I am breaking with traditional stories of heterosexuality in which the Other Woman is codified as victim, joke, or psycho; outside this framework lies an alternative heterosexuality not defined by marriage or simplistic theories of gender and power.[3] My intention is not to advocate adultery as intrinsically resistant to dominant cultural values or even to suggest that my experience of it was completely positive. Rather, I have resituated adultery in the contexts of queer theory and cultural studies that inform third-wave feminism in order to extrapolate its socially disruptive capacity from the complicity more often associated with it, thus examining a less familiar part of the story of the Other Woman.[4]