Pretenders – "The Adultress" (1981)

There’s nothing to understand

It’s understood

I’m the adulteress

In “The Adultress,” Chrissie Hynde has created a protagonist who would likely choose “It’s complicated” for her Facebook relationship status because “I’m an adulteress” is not one of the options.

(By the way, the dictionary spelling of the word is “adulteress” – not “adultress.”  Ms. Hynde may have chosen the nonstandard spelling “adultress” because a three-syllable word fits the meter of the song better than a four-syllable word would have.  Or maybe she flunked spelling in school.)

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines adultery as “voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and someone not his or her spouse.”  That means that lusting in your heart after someone when one or both of you is married, or just kissing someone else’s spouse isn’t technically adultery.  Feel better now?

Technically not adultery

(You lesbians can go a lot farther than kissing – at least in New Hampshire.  In 2003, the New Hampshire Supreme Court held in 2003 that female same-sex sexual relations did not constitute sexual intercourse – meaning that an extramarital affair between two women could not be adultery.)

The protagonist in “The Adultress” isn’t necessarily an adulteress even if she is having sex with a married man.  The Seventh Commandment prohibits adultery – which is punishable by death under Jewish law – but an extramarital affair between a married person and a single person is considered  adultery only if the married party is a woman.  If the woman is unmarried, both participants in the affair are guilty only of fornication regardless of the marital status of the male.  (Assuming incest isn’t involved, of course.)

That’s because intercourse between a wife and a man other than her husband can obviously lead to the impregnation of the wife.  Since Jewish law deemed any child born to a married woman to be the legal child of the husband, this adulteration of the husband’s genetic lineage by the wife's adulterous conception of a child would result in him being legally responsible for that child, which wasn’t fair.  (If the woman had no husband, that wasn’t an issue.)

The legal distinction between adultery and fornication made its way into English common law and the the laws of many other countries because of concerns about paternity.  Given the development of genetic testing, it is now possible to prove paternity with certainty – the husband of an adulterous wife can usually avoid legal responsibility for another’s man child.

But the traditional Seventh Commandment-inspired definition of adultery still applies in some jurisdictions.  For example, a Minnesota statute provides as follows:

When a married woman has sexual intercourse with a man other than her husband, whether married or not, both are guilty of adultery and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than one year or to payment of a fine of not more than $3,000, or both.

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We know that the woman in “The Adultress” is unmarried because she is described as a “spinster,” a word that refers to any unmarried woman – although it is usually used as a synonym for “old maid” – i.e., a single woman who is unlikely to get hitched because of her advanced age.  (The male equivalent of a “spinster” is a “bachelor,” which doesn’t carry the same negative connotations that “spinster” does for most people.)  

If the woman is a spinster, she’s not an adulteress under the traditional definition of that term.  Rather, she’s a fornicator – or perhaps a “fornicatress”?  (“The Fornicatress” just doesn’t have the same ring as “The Adultress,” does it?)

One final note: “adultery” and “adult” come from two different Latin roots.  “Adultery” and “adulterate” both come from a Latin word meaning “to defile or corrupt,” while “adult” is related to “adolescent” – both are derived from a Latin verb meaning “to grow up or mature.”   

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I’ll forgive Chrissie Hynde for her misuse (and misspelling) of “adulteress” because “The Adultress” is such a well-conceived and well-constructed song.  

I don’t know if Hynde based its lyrics on personal experience or whether the song’s title character is a product wholly of her imagination.  Regardless, Hynde’s lyrics are quite understated – she doesn’t stoop to using histrionics to create pathos – but her depiction of a woman whose unremarkable outward appearance belies the bitterness and self-loathing that are roiling her innermost being may leave you feeling a little shaken.

I don’t remember ever having a harder time choosing two or three lines from the lyrics of a featured song to quote at the beginning of a 2 or 3 lines post.

(Did the penny just drop?  Did it finally hit you what the title of my wildly successful little blog signifies?)

There are some great songs that simply don’t have two or three particularly quotable lines – I’ll go through the lyrics several times, struggling to make a choice because there’s no passage that seems quite right.  

With other songs, it’s easy to choose two or three lines to quote – either because they are particularly clever or poignant, or because they are well-known and iconic.

Occasionally, I find it hard to choose because there are two or even three quotable passages in a song’s lyrics.

But rarely are the lyrics to a song so artfully written that almost any two or three lines from that song  would do. 

“The Adultress” is an example of such a song, which is one reason I've chosen it for the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME.  Click here to listen to it.

At the same time, click here so you can follow the lyrics as you listen.

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon: