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Gen. David Petraeus May Have Fallen from Pedestal, but Woe to the ‘Fallen Woman’

posted on November 19, 2012

The Washington Post’s Lisa Miller places the Petraeus affair in a historical context of the “fallen woman” and “the professional virgin.” While societies have often forgiven the men who commit adultery, the women involved are often scorned, while the betrayed wives seem to be forced into silence and described in asexual terms. “[F]rom the time Constantine legalized Christianity throughout Rome, the faith from which so many of our cultural assumptions still springs favored and protected men and preserved the invisibility and impotence especially of married women.”

Read at The Washington Post