HOME / human nature: Science, technology, and life.

Textual InfidelityE-mail, adultery, and Mark Sanford.

By William SaletanPosted Thursday, July 2, 2009, at 7:26 AM ET

Back in the old days, if you loved somebody far away, the only way you could communicate was by letter. That wasn't so great, for three reasons. First, it was slow. Second, you couldn't hear or see her. Third, she could keep your letters, and if the relationship was forbidden, you could be exposed. The letters were evidence.

Then phones came along. Now you could reach your lover right away. You could hear the sweet sound of her voice. And if you were married to somebody else, phone calls left no textual record. Unless they were taped, you could deny the affair.

RSS

Then came e-mail. Like phones, e-mail provided instant communication. And if you were having an affair, e-mail had a big advantage: It was silent. You could write to your lover even if your wife was in the next room.

Over the last decade, we've witnessed this media revolution through a series of sex scandals. First came Bill Clinton. According to Ken Starr's "Table of Contacts Between Monica Lewinsky and the President," Clinton and Lewinsky had phone sex 17 times. Clinton denied the affair for months and might have gotten away with it—even though Lewinsky's conversations with Linda Tripp were taped—if he hadn't left a DNA sample on Lewinsky's dress.

Then came Mark Foley. Having chastised Clinton for behaving "carelessly" in the Lewinsky affair, Foley avoided phones. He seduced his targets over the Internet. Boys chatting with Foley were interrupted by their mothers, but the chats were silent, so the moms heard nothing. "Hope she didn't see anything," Foley told one boy. "No," said the kid. "She is computer dumb." "Good. Haha," replied the congressman. But the joke was on Foley: Chats, unlike phone calls, leave transcripts. That's what eventually did him in.

Then came Kwame Kilpatrick, the mayor of Detroit. Kilpatrick stayed away from computers. He communicated with his lover and chief of staff, Christine Beatty, via cell phone. To keep the affair quiet, he texted her instead of speaking out loud. But text messages, too, can be preserved and subpoenaed. That's what happened to Kilpatrick's messages, forcing him to resign and plead guilty to obstruction of justice.

Thanks to Starr's trove of phone recordings, subpoenas, and interrogations, we've heard plenty about what Clinton did with Lewinsky. But we know way more, and with much greater certainty and specificity, about what Foley and Kilpatrick did, because we have it in their own writing. Want the blow-by-blow from Foley's chats? You can read them in Slate or ABC News ("cute butt bouncing in the air … i always use lotion and the hand"). If those aren't graphic enough for you, the Kilpatrick-Beatty exchanges are posted for all to see at the Detroit Free Press ("I really wanted to give you some good head this morning. … I would then ask you to gently grab my ass and you would put your finger in just enough to make beg yo").

Now comes Mark Sanford. He calls himself a traditional, spiritual man. Unlike Foley or Kilpatrick, Sanford didn't text or chat about sex acts. He stuck to old-fashioned e-mail and wrote of love. But because he wrote, we know all about his longings. Some were spiritual: "Despite the best efforts of my head my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul." Others were physical: "I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night's light."

Page: 1 | 2 SINGLE PAGE

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

COMMENTS

Regardless of what one may think of Sanford's behavior, to this reader of non-fiction and biographies I find it disheartening that more and more people are losing the fine art of letter writing. If I had read Sanford's "letters" many years from now, I may have thought him to be quite the romantic, in spite of his bad judgment or some might say juvenile ramblings.

Old letters convey an intangible something that can never be gotten from a phone call or e-mail. And whether they be damning or praiseworthy, letters provide tangible evidence of the truth. So much history has been preserved in letters that without them how could we ever be trustful of our past.

Thankfully, the telephone and the internet were not around several hundred years ago.

-- dantesfurlough
(To reply, click here)

I completely agree about the value of letters, though I have to question the idea that "letters provide tangible evidence of the truth." I think that much of any of our communication is driven by telling our audience what they want to hear, and honestly, as a male and a father of daughters made fairly suspicious by my own memories, I have to wonder how much of Sanford's writing was unedited romance pouring from his heart and how much of it was an effort, literally and literarily, to charm the pants off this particular woman.

-- phark
(To reply, click here)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES