Good Adultery, Bad Adultery: Difference between revisions

* The entire film of ''[[It's Complicated]]'' is one big hypocritical example of this trope.

* The [[Mike Judge]] film ''Extract'' [[Parodied Trope|has the lead character hire a young pool boy to seduce his wife while he was drunk and (unwittingly) under the influence of heavy drugs, just so he feels morally justified in sleeping with the new, attractive, younger girl at work due to feeling sexually unsatisfied and realizing that his wife is losing interest in him.]] Once he sobers up he decides against the [[Zany Scheme]] at the last minute {{spoiler|only to discover his wife's already slept with the pool boy.}} As for that new girl at work {{spoiler|he finally gets her into bed by [[What the Hell, Hero?|threatening to turn her over to the police for petty theft,]] sending him into full-on midlife crisis [[Moral Myopia]]}} All of this is played sympathetically, and it turns out that {{spoiler|the girl he was attracted to ''was'' a petty thief, and also a con-artist who was seducing and manipulating one of the lead character's employees in order to extort everything the lead character had away from him. It's heavily implied that while he was attracted to her, she seduced ''him'' in order that he wouldn't call the police (as he was intending to do) and so that she could make a getaway.}} So while he's certainly no saint, he's also not ''quite'' an irredeemable bastard either.

* [[Lifetime Movie of the Week|Lifetime movies]] often use this theme. [[The Unfair Sex|And guess who is the "good" adulterer and the "bad" adulterer]]...

* The main plot of ''[[The Descendants]]'' is George Clooney finding out that his wife, who was recently put into a coma, had cheated on him for a long time. When he confronts her friends about the affair, the female friend tries to justify the cheating, at one point saying, "It wasn't her fault...." Clooney immediately shuts down that line of conversation, saying, "You're talking to me in cliches? It's never the woman's fault? Give me a break!" While the movie does suggest that her motives were not unsympathetic and that Clooney's character had his part to play in the breaking-down of their marriage, it's still made clear that her affair was selfish and destructive to her family.