This is really rather amusing. The way in which the rich are economising on their mistresses as a result of the current financial turmoil.

You know times are tough when the rich start cutting costs on their mistresses.

According to a new survey by Prince & Assoc., more than 80% of multimillionaires who had extra-marital lovers planned to cut back on their gifts and allowances. Still, only 12% of the multimillionaire cheaters said they plan to give up on their lovers altogether for financial reasons.

Indeed, most amusing, tee hee.

However, there is something of more interest to us buried further down the report.

The most surprising stats in the study relate to gender and what might be termed “length of service.” Fully 82% of men in the study said they planned to lower the allowances to their mistresses, while more than three quarters planned to provide fewer gifts, less expensive gifts and fewer perks, like jet rides, resort vacations and top restaurant meals.

Women were far more generous to their paramours in the face of financial crises. Less than 20% planned to lower allowances, gifts and perks, while more than half planned to raise them.

Susan Shapiro Barash, who teaches gender studies at Marymount Manhattan College and wrote “Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets,” about why women lie, said women value their lovers more than men in a time of economic trouble. “For the women, lovers matter more than ever now because the rest of life is so dreary,” she said. “For the men, they’re just cutting across the board.”

This would indicate, at least to me, that there’s a gender difference in the reason that (rich) people have lovers in the first place. For the men it might well be access to younger women, or to women who have not had children.

That last can actually be rather important actually. For of course most men do indeed desire children but they also desire that their sexual partner have a body that has not gone through the traumas and changes of pregnancy and childbirth.

But for women there’s much more of an emotional, rather than purely physical or sexual, attatchment to their paramours. We might even call it love rather than sex. Not that we might find that all that surprising. We do generally think that women go to bed with men that they like whereas men are thought to go to bed with women they like the looks of.

And if there is this difference between why men and women take lovers (rather than their steady partner) in the first place then I can’t say that we should be all that surprised if they react differently to straightened times. Indeed, that different reaction might be taken as an indication that they do take them for different reasons in the first place.