You may have seen a recent report by the University of Texas stating that while only about twenty percent of us are willing to forgive most kinds of cheating, girl-on-girl is apparently a special kind of cheating that 50% of men are willing to forgive. Or at least 718 college-aged men in Texas are willing to forgive it, which is good since most women I know who've explored lesbianism generally do it in college, after about five to seven Midori shots.

What's especially interesting is that anything else was far less forgiving, about a quarter, but being gay seems the least forgivable if you're a man. Ladies coming across their man sleeping with another man would only go back to him about 21% of the time, compared to 28% if he was sleeping with another woman, and presumably only after making him stop subscribing to all those muscle magazines.

That's a heck of a disparity, especially since, man or woman, we're talking about cheating here, which can be incredibly hurtful. Apparently, your partner being secretly at least bi is seven percent less forgivable than sleeping with another woman, although personal experience tells me that rule goes out the window if it's her sister.

Normally I'd just say "HOORAY LESBIANS!" and move on (and, indeed, hooray lesbians in both the polite "good-for-you" way and the drooling caveman way), but if men are thirty percent more forgiving of gay cheating, you find yourself wondering why. Beyond the obvious of "Maybe she'll let me watch."

I think it comes down to what we're taught about gay cheating by TV. Your average depiction of a lesbian most people come across is a cheaply shot video on the Internet where we're taught a "lesbian couple" is two horny women with a penchant for not wearing underwear, and with no desirable man immediately available. Also they play terrible soft jazz in the background, for some reason. Really, they're only killing time until a plumber shows up.

Gay men, meanwhile, are the province of serious dramas. If a woman comes across her husband with another man in the movies, you can be pretty sure that he's completely gay and that their marriage is a tragic sham (see for example "Far From Heaven", "Brokeback Mountain", any terrible independent movie about a middle-aged woman faced with upheaval). By the end of the movie, he's either dead or with some equally straight-seeming gay man introduced in the third act.

I'd love to claim I'm incredibly enlightened, but no, I learned most of what I knew about lesbians from porn, at least until I went to college and met real ones. And I can't imagine I'm alone. All the sensitivity exercises in the world can't fight what you learn from Cinemax. Hence, at least half of people seem to think if their girlfriend is stepping out with another woman, they'll just get over it.

Sure, we shouldn't cheat, and in an ideal world, gay people could just come out and not have to worry about any sort of consequences. But until then, let's cut the gay men a little slack and hold the lesbians to the same standard we hold everyone else.

At least until I find my plumber's outfit.