Do Men and Women Cheat for Different Reason?
If you're exposed to any form of American media, you may think that everyone is having an affair. The news is full of celebrities, athletes and politicians caught with someone other than their spouses. In prime time, you can watch the Desperate Housewives commit adultery, then flip the channel and find the Mad Men doing the same thing. Romance novels feature illicit trysts, and much of country music would have gone unwritten without someone's cheatin' heart.
Is infidelity the norm? Scientists know of only a few species that are completely sexually monogamous; one such species is the Diplozoon paradoxum, a flatworm that fuses to its partner until its death [source: Angier]. Even in animal species that practice social monogamy, such as birds that raise their broods in pairs, sexual monogamy is not the norm. A male bird may be raising a brood in which 10 to 30 percent of the offspring aren't his own [source: Barash].
But here's one case in which humans aren't emulating the birds and the (assumedly frisky) bees.
If you're exposed to any form of American media, you may think that everyone is having an affair. The news is full of celebrities, athletes and politicians caught with someone other than their spouses. In prime time, you can watch the Desperate Housewives commit adultery, then flip the channel and find the Mad Men doing the same thing. Romance novels feature illicit trysts, and much of country music would have gone unwritten without someone's cheatin' heart.
But here's one case in which humans aren't emulating the birds and the (assumedly frisky) bees.