Tonight:
4°c
Here we go again. Two high-flying men have been brought down by not being able to keep their trousers up. Both Eliot Spitzer, the former New York Governor, and Michael Todd, the late Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, were upholders of the law, supposedly specimens of rectitude. Spitzer had actually prosecuted a sex-tourism business and passed a tough law against the sex trade - at the same time that he himself had been patronising expensive prostitutes. Resigning, he admitted: "I did not live up to what was expected of me", a singularly mild way of describing such rank hypocrisy.
And it seems that Todd's lonely death near Mount Snowdon had been precipitated by fears that his extramarital sex-life was about to be made public too.
Spitzer's downfall has attracted the usual mixture of amazement, sanctimony and glee. How could he have been doing such different things in private and in public? But actually his story tells us nothing whatsoever about men that we don't all already know. Or all ought already to know, for the information comes to us non-stop from every quarter, including common experience, or just looking around the room.
There's a passage in How the Mind Works by the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker that I always find choicely relevant to these disasters. Pinker observes: "Zoologists have found that the males of many species will court an enormous range of objects having a vague resemblance to the female: other males, females of the wrong species, females of the right species that have been stuffed and nailed to a board, parts of stuffed females such as a head suspended in mid-air, even parts of stuffed females with important features missing like the eyes and the mouth."
Quite a sentence. But every man recognises the feeling, if he is honest.
The reasons why such promiscuous urges have been selected more for males are crashingly obvious. "The reproductive success of males depends on how many females they mate with, but the reproductive success of females does not depend on how many males they mate with. That makes females more discriminating."
Not all, and not always, eh? But being a man is to live with the realisation that sexual desire is - how to put this delicately? - not always fully integrated into the rest of your life. Between the trousers and the head, or even the heart, there can be a distance, and sometimes no communication at all.
It doesn't mean that misbehaviour is not misbehaviour. Or that Spitzer does not cut a laughable figure, saying - with his wife by his side, contemplating him as though he had just owned up to being a Martian - "I have begun to atone for my private failings". But why do we always, time and again, act so surprised? The men among us, anyway.
Reader views (1)
Indeed. I do agree with you, though I hope my wife doesn't find out that I agree with you. I've never cheated, but I would not condemn Spitzer. The fact is, I would cheat if I was dumb enough to believe I could get away with it. Thing is, I'm too stupid not to muck it up. Therefore, I do not cheat, but oh, do I ever want to. I want to cheat at the grocery store in the produce aisle, on the subway, walking down the street, at church on Sundays! If the wind blows, if the moon is full, if the moon is not full, for world peace. I want to have sex with another woman. And that's what men have to deal with on a daily basis. This, cursed urge that no feminist could ever understand.
- G, Toronto, ON, Canada, 16/03/2008 18:20
Report abuse
