Lately, we have heard much about men behaving badly, especially with women. After we were starting to process the notion of celibate Catholic priests having sex with young boys, we became bombarded with tales of prominent people disgracing themselves with women.
Yes, many years ago there was the contender for the Presidential nomination of his party when he was caught on a yacht with a very attractive young woman on his lap. We got over that thinking that the woman could have done a lot better. But while that was tame, it ended the man’s political career.
But then we were forced to hear all about our former and, for many, favorite President having sex with a young intern in the Oval Office. And we had to watch and hear him lie about it again and again. Why did he do it? He said that he did it because he could.
During the prosecution of this President for impeachment, we learned that his accusers and his consolers were also involved in extra marital liaisons at that very time. There was the Speaker who had an affair while his wife was dying of cancer, divorced his wife, married his mistress, then had an affair, divorced his second wife and married his second mistress. Another major opposition leader was forced to resign because of his activities in someone else’s bedroom. And the President’s spiritual consoler was at the time advocating repentance, while fathering an illegitimate child, much to his wife’s surprise.
But most recently we have had several governors caught having affairs while married and in office. The Carolinian who claimed to be out hiking the trails while he was in fact in South America with the new love of his life. There was the New York governor who got caught paying a fortune for a high class prostitute but, the press was slow to note, he had been doing this for many years, not just once, and was doing this while at the same time prosecuting every other house of prostitution in his state. There was the New Jersey governor who was forced out of office because of his infidelity to his wife with another man. And now we have the former governor of the largest state admitting to an affair with his maid for an extended period of time and resulting in the birth of an illegitimate child. And, of course, there is the popular, populist candidate for President and Vice President denying reports that he too had cheated on his faithful wife who was dying of cancer. He then admitted the affair but denied paternity of the resulting offspring. He has since acknowledged his parental role in the child’s life and has been indicted on several felonies. The wife he betrayed is no longer alive to witness his complete fall from grace.
Recently we were informed of a sexual assault by a man of great importance in the world of finance, a possible candidate for the Presidency of France. He is accused of attacking a hotel maid. Not to be outdone, a high ranking Egyptian executive, ten years the Frenchman’s senior, raped another maid at another fancy hotel in the same town.
And then this: A dynamic New York congressman has admitted sending strange but sexual pictures to six women who had contacted him because of his political appeal. He was trying to turn it into another kind of appeal. And all this from a newly and happily married man, soon to be a father and, perhaps, a bachelor.
What does it all mean?
I think that it means that somehow the mechanism hard-wired into most males of the species to want sex to produce offspring, has gone out of control. The male members must be attracted to the female members for the the species to survive, but it’s going too far.
It seems that the more the stress of modern life has threatened this natural urge to merge, the more we have done to stimulate it. But as we have seen in other parts of the world, it doesn’t need stimulation and seems even greatest when repressed. Besides the thousands of examples of this in the behavior of Catholic priests, we see this throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. There, the respective cultures tried to rein in this strong urge in their men by covering up the women. The reason women there must sometimes be covered from head to toe even in hot weather is to keep the men from being so tempted by their feminine charms that they will try to have sex with them or at least try for some unwelcome physical contact. As we have learned from women in Northern Africa that even when fully covered, women are repeatedly subjected to unwanted touching and feeling.
A group of radical religious followers is fighting our troops in Afghanistan. People might ask themselves, what they are fighting for. It is not land or power nor for money, glory or freedom - it is for the right to continue to treat their women like possessions - objects with no personal consciousness or rights. The Taliban fighters fear that their women will become educated and learn about life in other places and no longer put up with the way they are treated. The women will learn that they have alternatives.
And now while Arab men are rising up and demanding freedom from tyranny, they are unwilling to grant the same right to their women - their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters.
We see the Western cultures also mistreating their women, albeit in much gentler, more subtle ways. While Western men would never sanction the vicious forms of abuse reported in the Middle East and Africa, they think nothing much about looking at women as sex objects rather than as the subjects of admiration they actually are. Now the French are rethinking their attitudes toward and treatment of their own women.
Lately, we have heard about American men sending revealing photographs of themselves or, at least, of specific parts of themselves, in the vain hopes of capturing a woman’s heart or at least her body. These men don’t realize that women are not like men. They are not into porn pictures of men. If being one of the greatest quarterbacks in history is not enough to get you a cheerleader, a picture of part of your anatomy won’t make a difference. And pictures of men naked above the waist are not even appealing to men who are into men.
So what are we men to do? How can many of us help ourselves from thinking of doing things that we know we shouldn’t for the love of or, rather, lust for women?
Perhaps, it would help to realize that what we are responding to is a vestigial impulse that is no longer necessary. We do not have to impregnate many women in order to preserve the species. There are six billion of us humans now, we can slow down and each have, at most, one offspring. Our desire to have our way with every woman who appeals to us no longer has a proper function. We can remember what this column repeats frequently - that we can treat each person and activity as ends in themselves and not only as means to other ends. We are all subjects as well as objects and should be treated accordingly.
And, we must always remember that women are the very flower of creation, G-d saved the best for last.
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