The big elephant in the room that nobody wants to touch is the medieval double standard in gender relations. Male rulers could easily get away with siring bastards. Spouses of rulers could not. This does not go well with moderen audeinces, it goes against the principle of "he can do it, so she can do it too".
The question is what circumstances could there be where a rulers spouse - under medieval standards - could think to have a chance of getting "away with it".
I can see only very few circumstances where this makes sense like
+ she is a lunatic, an imbecile or inbred
+ she is herself a ruler with armies under her command, and hates you, imprisoning her would risk a major civil war
+ she is your spymaster, and thinks she can hide it. Even so, she would still need a reason to have a lover like hating the ruler, the ruler is infirm and/or much older than her, he is ugly, a leper etc.
See the problem? I just don´t see the devs script something like that without causing outrage of "sexism" etc.. The only way i see is an option to turn seduction off entirely.
EDIT: IF the devs would decide on plausible triggers like above, PC be damned, then i would be OK with it even without an option to turn it off. You know what you are getting into, after all, it would be the consequence of the players actions.
The double standard is actually already in the game in some ways -- for example, the Adulteress modifier (and
Incestuous Adulteress, too) is twice as bad as the male counterpart, and unless you increase Status of Women enough (which the AI never bothers to do, even if it is female, Ambitious, etc.) an unfaithful husband can't be justifiably imprisoned for that reason alone while an unfaithful wife always can be if you've discovered the affair -- so I don't really think that perceived sexism is what has been keeping that kind of seduction logic out as much as the fact that it would become more complicated to script separate logic for men and women than having essentially the same logic (with a few instances of women being more likely to turn down seduction), particularly since there are plenty of other places where the game favours men for historical reasons (e.g. without certain game rules or changing the SoW laws, most rulers can't get True Cognatic Succession) and haven't been particularly many complaints about it (I believe there were more complaints over the SoW laws being added and HF allowing Enatic Clans/Equality than complaints about various things that put female characters at a disadvantage).
As for reasons where it would be sensible for the woman to risk it, I can think of some additional reasons to the ones you've mentioned:
- The party trying to seduce her is of a much higher rank than her/her family/her husband/her husband's family. For example, if an emperor attempts to seduce a countess or duchess, she'd probably stand to gain more from going along with it than an empress/princess/wife of someone in the imperial family would stand to gain from tumbling a random count or duke.
- Her husband is imprisoned, not terribly bright, or the like. Obviously, in the first case, it would be hard to explain away a pregnancy, but if he can't act against her she might still risk it, and she might be smart enough to take steps to ensure that pregnancy is unlikely or that it ends before it becomes obvious.
- She's in a court friendly to her rather than her husband, and he/his family wouldn't be in a position to act on it. For example, a matri-married princess in her father's court would probably not have to worry about her father chopping off her head if she's discovered to be unfaithful (though her lover might stand to lose his head or certain other parts of his body...).
- She follows a religion that's got Enatic Clans, since that should make her infidelity more okay than her husband's.
Of course, regardless of what would make the risk acceptable, she should still have traits that makes it plausible (e.g. not Chaste/Celibate), should have a negative enough opinion of her husband to consider it, and so on, as just having a reasonable opportunity to be unfaithful shouldn't translate into actually being unfaithful if the character has no reason to consider that course of action.
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