Do famous women cheat?

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The past year or so has been hard on the Hollywood male.

That’s the exact thought that was running through my mind today as I watched the video for Chris Brown’s latest single, “Crawl” — a musical apology to Rihanna, the ex-girlfriend he beat up in February of last year? — on TV. From Brown to John Edwards to Tiger Woods to David Letterman to John Mayer to Jesse James, male celebrities have been issuing public mea culpa after public mea culpa for private and not-so-private wrongdoings.

In truth, famous guys have been acting up forever, long before last year, long before Kobe Bryant, long before Charlie Sheen, long before Bobby Brown, Tommy Lee, Bill Clinton and Hugh Grant.

But is it just men who behave badly? Do famous ladies screw up and screw around, too? In the past, they have. Six decades ago, Ingrid Bergman was exiled from Hollywood for seven years after launching a major scandal by cheating on her husband with Italian director Roberto Rossellini and getting pregnant, too. Nearly 10 years later, Elizabeth Taylor hooked up with Eddie Fischer at Debbie Reynolds’s expense — and eventually dumped him for Richard Burton. Nowadays, though, when a married female star is caught in the act, overexposed body parts are usually involved but not another man.

If it’s true, as they say, that women cheat, too, why, in Hollywood, do we only hear about the men’s extramarital flings? Are they just the only ones getting caught? After all, the other woman is more likely than the other man to kiss and tell all. Someone recently suggested to me that it’s a matter of ego. Guys generally don’t tattle on their married paramours because they don’t want anyone to think that they couldn’t get her to leave her husband.

Or maybe the affairs of female stars are well-kept secrets because famous women are more likely to hook up with famous men (see Ingrid Bergman and Elizabeth Taylor), who have more to lose by telling all than an unknown woman does. Just look at what loose lips have done to John Mayer’s reputation. Eight years ago when Jennifer Lopez’s marriage to Cris Judd ended at about the same time that she got together with Ben Affleck, the media tried to brand her with a scarlet letter, but neither Lopez, Affleck nor Judd were talking, and no public apologies were issued. (Tellingly, though, the eventual collapse of Lopez and Affleck’s relationship was blamed on Affleck by the media.)

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When was the last time a female star said she was sorry? Instead we get Whitney Houston and Jessica Simpson going on Oprah and singing that somebody done somebody wrong song. No doubt we’ll get Madonna doing the same thing around the time her next album is released because, you know, her split with Guy Ritchie couldn’t possibly have been her fault.

Of course, I’m kidding. Girls are not inherently better than boys. The civilian population is full of women behaving badly. They’re the ones having affairs with married male celebrities. Female stars, wed and unwed, do it, too — they just choose not to publicly brag about it.