LUST IN TRANSLATION by Pamela Druckerman

Pamela Druckerman wrote “Lust in translation”, a book about adultery around the globe.

When I finished reading it, I understood that adultery is a <<National sport>> in almost every country.  

“Finns aren’t ambivalent about sex. They see it as a positive experience.
Finnish media don’t focus on the perils of sex, such as disease and unwanted pregnancies.
Also, Finns travel a lot, creating opportunities for affairs.”

“Parisian women really are beautiful. Looking good makes it more fun to flirt.
Flirting with someone’s else partner isn’t a betrayal of your spouse or a gateway to extramarital sex.”

“Russians almost always recite the national joke: <<There was no sex in the Soviet Union.>>
By the 1960s anyone who suspected a spouse of cheating could turn him or her to the local Communist party boss. The party would convene a meeting, and anyone “found” guilty of adultery could be kicked out of the party and lose any chance of ever getting a better job.”
(it was the same in my country, Romania, before 1989)

“Japan is the land of single bed.
Mother typically moves her futon into the baby’s room and sleeps there until he’s five or six (according to tradition, her husband replaces her in the master bedroom with a large stereo system and a flat-screen TV).
When I read this paragraph to my husband, he laughed and said to me: the Japanese are smart  men!!! (for obvious reasons, we don’t have a TV set in our bedroom…)
That’s why they call it “sexless marriage”. 
Sexless marriage describes Japanese couples who either have very little sex or no sex at all, particularly after their first child. It’s a kind of syndrome that afflicts couples as young as their twenties and thirties and can last for years or even forever, usually without the couple ever mentioning the problem.
There are certain men who believe you don’t bring sex and work into the home.”

“Medical workers in a South African township called Alexandra have been noticing a phenomenon that they dub “Alex syndrome”.
Poor black men, some as old as sixty-five, arrive at the clinic complaining of impotence. But impotent turns out to mean that the men have enough strength to have sex only once or twice a night, every night.
Because they have a wife and a girlfriend. So they’ve been with the girlfriend, and they have to come back to the wife, and maybe they can only do it once.”

“Money has created new opportunities for cheating in China. But money alone can’t account for the fact that people are taking advantage of these opportunities.
China’s sexual revolution is very contagious.
I keep hearing stories about married Western men who, after working in China for a few months, decide that monogamy really isn’t for them”.
Our friends who live in Shanghai confirmed this as being true.

“Once they’re married, Hasidic couples (as well as some other ultra-Orthodox Jews) don’t touch, hand each other objects, or use terms of endearment while the wife is menstruating, and then for another protective week after that. Doing so could incite the couple’s lust and lead them to have sex while the wife is considered impure.”

“Ultra-Orthodox Jews aren’t the only religious people who get worked up about sex.
By one count, 80% of Islamic law deals with marriage and women’s behaviour. 
Islamic, Judaism, and Christianity all ban adultery in the most severe terms.”

“Muslims have a different technique to keep believers from straying: polygamy.
If a religious man can’t stick to one wife, perhaps he can stick to four?
Polygamy is something that induces adultery, in that before they get married for the second time, there’s a period of adultery.”

But:
“Even in countries where people supposedly tolerate cheating, almost everyone is heartbroken to discover infidelity”.

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2012