It’s often regarded as axiomatic that adultery is common in Japan. Men have sex at their fingertips. Just take a trip to one of the countless “fuzoku” sex services available or go on a “compensated date.”
The ladies are catching up, though, if you believe that is the reason for the growth of Ashley Madison in Japan.
One Japanese survey, at least, suggests that adultery is really not as gender-biased as you might think. In fact, slightly more women admitted to cheating on their partner in the past.
The survey was conducted, somewhat bizarrely, by a hair-removal salon with coupes aged between 20 and 49 about infidelity.
Here is how one English-language blog summarized the results.
531 responses were collected, with 19.6% admitting to having cheated. The faithful/unfaithful ratio was pretty even between the sexes, with 19.2% of men saying they’d cheated in the past and only slightly more women, 20%, revealing the same.
However, this doesn’t tell the whole story, since there is a major difference in genders in terms of when they think it’s fine to cheat on a partner. Only a small number of the women did so after they had got married, while the men did not see this as an obstacle to satisfying their urges.
Among married respondents, 38.5% of men had had an extramarital affair, more than twice as many as the 18.1% figure for married women. The women, however, were more likely to cheat as long as they didn’t have a ring on their finger, as 21.7% had been playing around behind their boyfriend’s back, compared to 12.9% of the single men who’d cheated on their girlfriends.
The ages when men or women cheated also diverged, with single men in their twenties the most likely, though followed closely by married men in their forties.
The numbers were modest for married women in their twenties, but doubled with such women in their twenties and only slightly decreased for women in their forties. And then among unmarried women, it was a similar story for those in their twenties, yet the ratio was almost four times higher for unmarried women in their forties. The percentages for unmarried men also increased with age but not as extreme a jump.
So what’s the lesson to be taken from all this? If you’re lucky enough to be dating a Japanese lady in her forties, be prepared that she may still be playing the field!
