Young Women Are More Permissive of Women’s Infidelity, Survey Finds

Daniel Cox says roughly eight or nine in ten Americans consider infidelity morally wrong, a view he says has remained consistent even as attitudes toward other personal behavior have changed. To test whether judgments depend on who cheats, his survey split respondents into two independent groups: one was asked about a man committing adultery, the other about a woman. Respondents rated whether the act was morally wrong or morally acceptable. The survey measured those judgments, not the reasons behind them.

The difference was concentrated in one comparison. People judged men’s adultery similarly across groups, and men and women responded similarly when asked about a man cheating. Men also judged women’s adultery much as they judged men’s. The outlier was women judging women: younger women were less likely to say that a woman’s adultery was morally wrong in all circumstances. Some regarded it as not a moral issue or as morally acceptable. Older women, Cox says, were more like the other groups.

Chris Williamson checks whether women judged men who cheat more harshly than men did. Cox says they did not; those judgments were “pretty similar.” The distinction is not that women broadly condemn men’s infidelity more severely. It is that young women are more permissive in judging women’s infidelity.

Cox offers several possible reasons, without settling on one. Men may commit adultery more often, he says, or respondents may be weighing power dynamics. He also points to “shared fate” or “linked fate”: the idea that what happens to other people can affect you. Cox says this sense of shared fate is higher among young women than among men or older women. He adds that women are more likely than men to have experienced being cheated on. Those experiences, or stories about them, could affect how a person reads a particular case—for instance, if a woman’s cheating is understood alongside the way her partner treated her. Cox is explicit that these are hypotheses; the survey did not ask respondents why they answered as they did.

Williamson says that, in the online spaces he sees, people seem more likely to ask what a man did to deserve being cheated on than what a woman did. He presents this as an anecdotal impression, not a survey result. Cox connects it to a broader asymmetry in how people talk about sexual assault: women may say they know someone who has been assaulted, while men may say they do not know a man who assaults women.

Williamson asks how both perceptions can be true and raises an explanation associated with David Buss: serious offenses may be concentrated among a small number of repeat perpetrators, rather than distributed evenly across men. Cox says he finds that argument persuasive for more serious offenses. He draws a distinction, though, between those offenses and online sexual harassment, which he thinks involves a much larger group of perpetrators—not just one or two.

Williamson recalls abusive replies directed at women on early Twitter, describing some as “Call of Duty lobby level” material. He argues that being able to say something does not make it acceptable public discourse. Cox adds that online threats can follow someone home: a person may be in an apartment they regard as a safe space and still receive emails or instant messages promising harm. For him, the location matters to the experience of the threat; it reaches someone where they expect to feel secure.

Cox also says women are more likely to be asked for nude images, and that such requests can be exploitative or harmful. He says boys generally should not ask female classmates for nude pictures. When norms against the behavior are not firm, he argues, girls and young women are left to establish those boundaries themselves.

These concerns arise alongside the survey discussion, but Cox does not say they explain the adultery judgments. His proposed explanations for the survey result remain tentative: possible differences in experience, power dynamics, and the sense of shared fate he associates particularly with younger women.