(Posted this on another subreddits a couple of days ago. I know it's controversial, but I believe it needs to be talked and understood.)

Cheating has been going on since, well as long as humans have been around basically. Desire is a part of us and we often act on it. Sex is one of our primary and greatest desires (unless you're asexual and nothing bad about that, just to make it clear). In relationships we know people sometimes desire others when they're already with someone. Sometimes they pursue the other person/people and sometimes they don't. Sometimes it remains a secret and other times it doesn't...but...what happens...when the secret is revealed...bad things may happen.

Now men cheat too, it happens and they do get confronted too, sometimes attacked (which isn't great either). I'm not saying it isn't understandable why someone would get mad at learning someone they're with had cheated. But what some do once they've learned the truth...is horrifying.

Now, it seems that in fiction, there's a difference in how often a cheating man is presented in contrast to a cheating woman. In one film (which I can't remember and didn't watch), but a man who had a wheelchair-bound wife as a result of an accident they were in (and she blames him for while taking her anger out on him while seeking some kind of miracle cure) and he has an affair with a woman (who is also married) yet it's supposed to represent a means of sympathy for him. That his affair is understandable and that he isn't bad for what he does. (There's also the matter of his wife being found dead and him being suspected of it, but I didn't watch the film so I don't know what happened.) This isn't to say how it's always presented, but it speaks as to how the cheating man is portrayed.

However, in the 1995 film Above Suspicion, a woman cheats on her paralyzed husband...and...I don't know what happened to her and her lover...but I saw some horrifying comments online that they 'deserved what happened'...and I know her husband planned their murder from the hypnosis...and I think he got away with it (didn't watch the movie). But it's framed in more than one 'colorful' way by people that she deserved what happened to her because she was cheating on him. We see women humiliated, degraded, beaten...and murdered because they cheated on a man. Women will be threatened with guns...or gunned down by men once they learned of the affairs.

Here's two links that shows in regards to the film I mentioned how some say what happened to the lady was deserved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDxt8G0n6lM

https://letterboxd.com/realy_bad/film/above-suspicion-1995/

In our world, there are men who have murdered their wives, fiancés, and girlfriends for learning they cheated on them. The women's deaths have been all kinds of horrifying and cruel. And fiction reflects this. Women die usually cruel deaths at the hands of men for being in affairs and people will say they deserved it, that they were glad it happened. Some say it should be expected if cheating happens. One guy on a site said he'd be glad to find out his wife was cheating so he could, as he said, decapitate her. And there are...stories where women have met such fates for cheating.

I know cheating is a sore spot for people and it garners heated attitudes from some. Some despise it no matter what, some perhaps aren't judgmental, but the 'popular' perspective is contempt. (I have never been in a relationship or been with anyone, but I find it complicated...and I certainly don't believe someone should be killed for being in/having an affair. As a guy, I don't know if this means more or less for what I'm saying. Maybe this is a statement coming from privilege...I don't know...but I felt regardless, it's something that should be said.)

Yes, men have died for being involved in affairs and this is also terrible. When we look at it, it's often the men a woman is cheating with (as in the movie I said and in other fiction, such as the movie Shooting the Warwicks where a cheating wife and the man she slept are murdered by her husband...and in several crime shows the same thing happens). Yet we also see where the women men cheat with are killed, but not the man at the hands of the/because of the wife as a way to 'punish' the cheating man. The women die, but he lives. We really don't, or don't usually, see this in the opposite case. The cheating woman and man die, or just the cheating wife.

Just...the women dying...for just embracing/acting on desires...is terrible...and it's cruel that men can/do get away with it. A few decades ago in Kentucky, a man learned his wife was sleeping with a Senator's son and murdered them both, but got away scot free because it was 'a matter of honor'. Men have murdered cheating women for millennia and gotten away with it, hell, they're often celebrated/uplifted for 'giving the woman what she deserved'.

No one should die for being involved in/having an affair. If someone thinks they should/tries to kill that person for cheating, they deserve to be cheated on. (A controversial opinion/perspective, I admit...but the suffering of women is often some of the worst when she acts on her desires...and society applauds when she gets her 'just desserts'.)

(I'm sorry for the rant...but...I keep coming across these stories, both in reality and in fiction...and I couldn't keep not saying something. Such stories replay in my mind constantly, and my heart breaks, my blood boils...and I cry...I know this may flair tempers and some may call me insane for this...but...women shouldn't die for being involved in affairs...)

(Stay safe everyone.)