I think the point was that they lost respect for their friend, who was a man, for cheating, but still respected his wife, a woman, who did not cheat. I think Senor Smut is responding to those on this thread who accuse those of us who don't approve of Vivian's behavior of being sexists because she is a woman. With Senor Smut, he and his friends, did not let their buddy off the hook for cheating on his wife because their buddy was a man which they would have if they used a double standard and they were sexists.
Exactly right. I don't condemn everyone who cheats in a relationship because people are complicated, messy creatures, and when you put two of us together then nobody who's not in that particular relationship can really understand what it's like. In my former friend's case, he was always kind of a jackass who liked to shoot his mouth off -- we all liked him because he was funny (often unintentionally) and was fun to be around. His wife was (and is) a phenomenal human being whom we all admired for who she was, how she carried herself, and what she did. She was (and is) smarter than our ex-friend, funnier than our ex-friend, more responsible, kinder, more generous, harder-working, vastly better looking -- their relationship was really like a shitty sitcom setup where the wonderful woman is married to the horrible schlub. My ex-friend cheated with the babysitter (statutory rape, because she was a year underage, but he was never charged) and then bragged about it to us. We all told him off pretty hard, and the next day while we were trying to decide whether to tell his wife (the question was not whether we were willing, but whether she would believe us or welcome the information) the babysitter came clean to the wife. When the dust settled we were all still friends with the wife and none of us were even speaking to her ex-husband.
Now, with this game, Vivian is horrible. She's not horrible because she cheats, she's horrible because of how she absolutely revels in humiliating her kind husband but still has the audacity to think that she's a virtuous person. She claims she loves her husband when in fact she scorns him and doesn't care the least little bit about his feelings. She resists his bargain-basement-Ted-Bundy boss for a nanosecond and then gleefully throws herself into being his whore in a fashion guaranteed to break the spirit of her husband, who apparently has never done anything but love her. Her lust doesn't damn her, but her reaction to it does.
The boss is a standard-issue sociopath doing what standard-issue sociopaths do, but she's the one who makes the choice to hurl herself into his sociopathy at the first opportunity and revel in her cruelty to her husband. They're both awful human beings.