There's always "sweetheart."

Or "lady friend" instead of "girlfriend."

And, on the other side, there's "sugar daddy."

I vote paramour- it captures the illict and inappropriate nature of the relationship without being nasty or gendered.

Whaddya say?

She's not a prostitute; to the best of our knowledge, Sanford is the only one, and there was no money exchanged. She's done a low-down thing, sleeping with him when she knew he was married, but I don't see how that makes her slutty.

The word for Chapur is "paramour". It means illicit lover. "Mistress" works too -- "a woman other than his wife with whom a married man has a continuing sexual relationship".

Paramour

When I first heard that Governor Sanford had a mistress, I new exactly what the term meant. So, no, a better word is not necessary.

I'm actually shocked at the vitrol and frank misogyny directed at Ms. Chapur. What did she do wrong? She's divorced. She can have sex when even, and with whoever, she wants to. She didn't promise to be faithful to anybody. If you believe in some sort of old fashioned morality that blames everything on women and exonerates men as incapable of fidelity, I suppose you could just call her a "homewrecker," but this isn't then 1930's for Christ's sake.

Personally, I think the entire issue of Gov. Stanford's affair is overblown. Were it not for the fact that he's a Bible thumping Republican, and therefore a hypocrite, it should be completely irrelevant and entirely his (his wife, and Maria's) business. But if you struggle with what to call her, I'd suggest "paramour," "girlfriend," "lover," "mistress", or "inamorata" (in that order) are all fine.

Maybe I'm being unkind, but while this post may have a good point at its base, it seems kind of, well, weird to be reading about sexually-based semantic games in a blog called "Broadsheet."

Third input girl?

It’s not misogynistic to think a person should avoid sleeping with married people. (while some of the language harlot, etc is misogynistic.) It isn't ok to go around sleeping with whomever you want because you single. That goes for men and women.

The traditional view would hold the mistress to blame and probably throw in some blame for the wife for not fulfilling her husband.

Certainly the cheating - married person is to blame and the lion share of the blame should go to the married Sanford here. But it is not a very nice thing to carry on an affair with a married person. Saying the married person is to blame doesn’t mean we have to do a flip and say the unmarried person involved is completely blameless.

And for the record I could care less about the governor’s marital problems and who he is fucking. The only reason it is relevant (outside of his iresponsible behavior in taking off) is because this is a person who has worked legislate morality and to deny many legal rights to gay people based on his religion that he would like to impose. Adultery I think deserves some social contempt but I’m not about to try and legislate adultery laws. (Which incidentally something that Jesus himself was all worked up about and actually cited in scripture – but somehow the evangelicals are all about gay sex which is only mentioned in the old testament and abortion which I’m pretty sure isn’t in there at all.)

. . . what's wrong with calling her his lover? There is nothing exotic about the word "amante."

I just used to say I felt like Cake... as in having it and eating it too.

That's what we call it in the 'hood

Or ambiguerra- depending on the gender, is a word that I came up with to describe that one person in my life I can't explain.

So far, it works for me. (And it has a vaguely Latin ring to it, which helps with the love/not love aspect of it all...)

The view that a single woman shouldn't sleep with a married man rubs me wrong on many, many levels.

* It assigns the role of gate-keeping for the man's behaviour, marriage, and principles to the women he comes in contact with.

* It reduces the man to property and invalidates his free will.

* In doing so, it devalues the commitment and the fidelity of partners who don't cheat, because it's no longer about whether they would have cheated given the opportunity, but just that they didn't run into women who would let them cheat.

* We don't assign the same blame to a man who sleeps with another man's wife; in both cases, rightly and wrongly, it is the woman to whom we assign the majority of the blame.

If you are married, and your marriage is a closed one, you should not sleep with other people. That is your responsibility. It is not anyone else's responsibility to police those boundaries for you to keep you from temptation, and if you require that kind of policing, then your vows are already meaningless; you're keeping them because you have to, not because you're committed to keeping them. I wouldn't settle for that in my own relationships, and I don't understand why anyone else would hold it as an ideal to the point of wanting other people to enforce it.

...concubine?

God I hate the constant shifting of moniker. Beginning in the 60s: Negro. My God, offensive! Colored. Colored! Horreur! Afro-American. Jon Stewart's "Senior Black Correspondent" said: We named ourselves after a hairstyle! Did white people ever call themselves "Beehive-Americans"? African-American. Not yet, but of course, soon African-American will be horribly, unthinkably shocking--for some reason.

I took a class in Greek a while ago, and a gay man got angry and made the teacher stop saying the word "Fagito." "Fagito" (with a soft G sound in the middle, from the Gamma) means "Food." She was doing an exercise asking "What food do you like?" The man freaked saying "I don't like that word. I don't want us to use that word," until he forced her to come up with a different word: "well...let me think... kouzino! Cuisine. There. What kind of cuisine do you like? Ti kouzino tou aresei?" It's a Greek class! It's not a slag against gay people! It's the Greek word for "Food."

So: Get a grip! I like the idea of coining new words, so head on. And no, I don't want to ghettoize or oppress gay people, African-Americans (am I prohibited from saying that yet?), or mistresses. But God, does it make me feel jerked around when people play the "you better jump through my semantic hoops or else" game.