I've no particular insights into Ralph Fiennes, except that I saw him in the anti-war march (good chap!) and he was amazingly small and curiously hairless. Perhaps that information has influenced my response to his philanderings which, should you have missed the Daily Mail as well as - where have you been, on the moon? - the Express, amount to this: he's been sleeping, on and off, with a Romanian singer called Cornelia Crisan, who looks a bit like a dark-haired Daniella Westbrook with a septum.

Fiennes is, of course, married to the actress Francesca Annis, or to give her her full tabloid title, The 62-Year-Old Stage Actress For Whom The Much Younger Fiennes Left His Wife Alex Kingston. Annis, according to her camp, knew that she couldn't keep Ralph "sexually satisfied", so isn't too worried about his young patsy on the side. This is such an extraordinary 50s position, if it's true, that part of me thinks this is some weird exhibitionist sexual crank ("I'll dress up in an apron and deny the works of Betty Friedan, while you take me roughly from behind, huh?"), and outsiders really shouldn't get involved.

Anyway, what this all unleashes is the age-old debate between, on the one hand, people who are loath to judge infidelity too harshly because they're only, you know, human, and on the other, people who think infidelity is inherently misogynistic, since it's always men and they never tell their wives, and the wives can stand by them or leave them but they will always end up weeping in a corner somewhere. Really, it's buyer-beware on either position - if you take the first, you effectively toss out all that most of us have that amounts to a moral position of any kind on anything. If you take the second, you ram home the women-as-victims message that is partly plain wrong, but mainly just annoys me.

My preferred, indeed gut, response in this instance is to remember the curious hairlessness. I can't really take Ralph seriously as a sexual predator. I think of him more as a grateful supplicant. Suddenly, the infidelity feels rather Sunday-afternoon ...

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