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"But wasn't it her fault as well as the man's?"
"Nothing is ever a lady's fault, you'll learn that," Lord Trimingham told me.
This remark, confirming something I already felt, made an immense impression on me.
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Kelly Bundy: I hate men.
Peg Bundy: So does God. That's why He made them want us.
Married With Children.

A special kind of Double Standard that completely screws around with a show's internal logic. A male character is portrayed performing an act that seems evil and unfair in a relationship, like say, looking at another woman. Meanwhile, a female character can perpetuate the exact same actions but not receive any sort of penalty or negative dividends for it.

This trope most commonly appears in long-running series — shorter works rarely deal with the characters long enough for the disconnect to be very obvious. This trope is also highly abstract in execution — expect the target of the discontent to either be a Guy Or Girl of The Week.

For a look at affairs in general, see Good Adultery Bad Adultery. Interestingly, the more involved named characters a work has in any given adultery plot, the closer the Sympathetic Adulterer ratio between men and women reaches 1:1. Im A Man I Cant Help It overrides this trope, but only with sympathetic male characters. The Inverted Trope of My Girl Is Not A Slut, for the post-Women's Lib era.

Overlaps with Closer To Earth, The Mistress.

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