I'm not sure anyone is saying that exactly. An incontrovertible fact is that affairs happen and while they don't happen by accident, a lot of people report that they never set out to have an affair, it "just happened". Now, you can tell me how strong your will is, how strong the will is of your significant other is, how moral you both are, how neither of you would ever contemplate such a thing etc. You may even be perfectly correct. The divorce statistics and the high incidence of infidelity among virtually all races, creeds and religions in America suggests that you are not the norm. Healthy attractive heterosexual contemporaries of the opposite sex that spend a lot of private time together either resist natural feelings of desire or don't. Granted we are not animals and we do not have to give into base desire, but culturally we seem to have a big problem with that.
Anybody saying the “just happened” is excuse mongering. As I said before, every part of the act of having an affair are voluntary actions, there aren’t Fu Manchu women out there, they don’t have mind control power. At some point in the process, probably multiple some points given how the path from the bar to the bedroom generally works, the person having an affair DECIDED to take that next step.
I’m not saying my will is strong, or that I’m exceedingly moral, I’m just pointing out that the people saying they can’t be trusted to be friends with women are skipping some portion of the decision action matrix.
And if you really want to talk about the stats how about the surveys that say that most affairs are not friends turning into mistresses, they’re hookups with random people, on the road in the bar, nights “out with the boys” that really aren’t. The female friends are NOT the danger zone, neither are the co-workers, that chick in the tight skirt at the bar where you went to unwind is.
I don’t think culturally we have that big a problem. The divorce stats get skewed. The problem is there’s this chunk of the population that doesn’t seem to get the idea of “til death do us part” and they wind up on the Larry King/ Liz Taylor path. So they get married and divorced and married again and divorced again. Most of the folks over 40 I know that have 1 ex have more than 1 ex. And these folks with 3, 4, 5 divorces in their life represent a lot of people with none. It’s really telling when you see the divorce rate sliced up by people rather than by marriages, that’s when you start seeing that it’s 20 to 30% of the people getting the divorces, rather than 50% of the marriages failing.