Are You Cheating? How Can You Tell?

In fact, since Clinterngate first hit the media fan, rumors have circulated that the traditional definition of adultery is just too confining for some sophisticates. There are those, it is said, who figure that in the 1990s, anything short of extramarital coitus--including oral sex--is kinda OK.

To which the universal reaction appears to be: "Yeah, right."

An unscientific survey from East L.A. beauty salons to Westside bars produced what can be paraphrased as a basic, often-blushing, three-part response:

Sure, the rest of society has modified its definition of and tolerance for adultery, but my standard is more restrictive than ever--and, by the way, Buster, the real problem is idiot reporters who continue to lower the level of civil discourse by asking inane questions about subjects best kept private.

The 10th edition of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary describes adultery as: "Voluntary sexual intercourse between a married man and someone other than his wife, or between a married woman and someone other than her husband."

The same dictionary describes intercourse as "physical sexual contact between individuals that involves the genitalia of at least one person."

Only one person approached for this story even knew someone who thought oral sex should be excluded from the definition of adultery. This person said she told a friend about widespread speculation that perhaps the president held such a view. The friend reportedly replied: "Why would talking on the phone be adultery?"

Most people contacted, though, said that even the dictionary definition is far too forgiving.

"Adultery is absolutely anything," said a 29-year-old dietitian named Ester, casting meaningful looks at her mother and sister, who sat across from her outside a Farmers Market doughnut house. "It's meeting a colleague at lunch and getting close to them. It's anything."

And what about the folks who would exclude oral . . .

"Absolute rubbish!" she interrupted.

Her sister, Pamela, looked down at her hands. "It doesn't even have to be physical," she said.

Then the sisters glanced at each other and broke into whoops of cathartic laughter. Wiping tears from her eyes, Ester explained that she's going through a divorce brought on by her husband's infidelity.

"It killed me; it wounded me; it left me without breath. It was worse than death," she said, the laughter gone.

At Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade, Kirt McMaster said he learned that same lesson from a former girlfriend.

"There's nothing worse than being betrayed," he said, as he sat sideways to the procession of temptation parading past Yankee Doodle's. "It affects every fiber of your body. I'd rather be stabbed."

McMaster and his friend Shane Walker, a young film industry multi-hyphenate, agreed that the word "marriage" is academic in such discussions--that adultery and unfaithfulness to a lover are essentially the same thing. They also agreed that there's no wiggle room in defining the term.

"It's black and white," said Walker. "There's no gray area . . . . It's not like you can go out and kiss someone else and it's OK."

McMaster nodded. "Even dancing freaks me out," he said.

Down the promenade at Teaser's, US Airways flight attendant Donna Davenport, 32, broke adultery down like this:

"Dancing. Kissing. Any betrayal of trust. Those are things you're supposed to share with your husband. Even if he goes to a single female's house [alone], that's betrayal."

Society, Davenport said, has a looser view on adultery than her own--a slip she blames on the media. "It's in movies. On TV. Kids are exposed to it so much more than when I was a kid."

Her friend Julie Barber disagreed only in nuance.

"I don't think society's standards have changed so much. It's just that we're not shocked by it any more," she said.

The media, she said, have "glamorized a raunchy thing. It's everywhere. It's huge." And as a result of media infatuation with celebrity infidelity, people seem to figure that if they succumb to the apparent trend, well, they're in pretty cool company, she said.

Indeed, judging from talk shows, pop psychology columns and popular magazines, adultery appears to be the rage. Last year, for instance, psychologist Joyce Brothers suggested that more than 50% of married people cheat. In her 1976 study of women, author Shere Hite wrote that 75% of females married for five years or more have been unfaithful.

Most polls, however, have tended to report much lower numbers.

The late sex researcher Alfred Kinsey has been under attack lately for purportedly slanting his research to fit his allegedly libertine views. But even the Kinsey Institute of Sex Research estimated in 1990 that only 37% of married men and 29% of married women had been unfaithful.