THE FIG LEAF

The world is falling apart, one designer fly at a time. So terrorists be damned and babies be burped while they wait their turn, for how could we talk of anything else this week. Everywhere you look, there’s someone hobbling around with his trousers around his ankles, with the world playing judge and jeery jury. Running their hardest aft er fig leaves in this week’s races are champagne socialist Dominique Strauss- Kahn and Man-U super star Ryan ‘oops-I-said it’ Giggs and bringing up the rear are a bunch of old boys from the Turkish parliament caught with their hands in the hicky-jar and the gnarly old Austrian oak and his maid of dishonour.

It is unfair of course to compare these apples, oranges and avocados to each other for who is to say which is lust and which is love, illicit though it may be, and which mere perversion. But I have sinned, as have you, and you, and you, and so I would not be the one to cast the first stone. Strauss-Kahn deserves the 25 years and the sharp edged slice of medieval justice (if you catch my drift ) to relieve him of his misery, if he is the preying sexual brigand circumstances make him out to be, and the world’s apology if found not guilty. The Turks got more than what they paid for if you ask me and as for Giggs and the Governator, it really is a private affair and we really have no right to point any jealous fingers at them. We don’t know what their married lives have been like. We don’t know if they were happy or unfulfilled. We don’t know if there was love, within or without the marriage. But yes, what we do know is that there was betrayal, and there were lies, and it is that, and that alone that deserves condemnation, not by you or me but by those affected by those lies and the betrayal.

But what is it that spurs people, apparently happily married people, beautiful and the not so beautiful people, successful people and ordinary people, mothers, fathers, leaders and teachers, to commit acts of unbridled passion that are doomed to start with sex and end in lies at the least and a tape (video, audio or if you are really unlucky, yellow crime scene tape) of some sort at worst? Is it the joy of the chase, or is it the ‘heat’ of the moment? Is it a sense of power or is it the fear of losing power? Is it old love or new lusts? Is the lure a forbidden fruit, or is the seed a fruitless marriage? Well, the truth in this matter would depend on who is speaking it. Research shows that as far as types go, no one, which means neither you, nor me, nor our grandparents (if still young enough) or our grand-children(if they are old enough) are, are likely to be or have ever been, above an adulterous thought or two.

We are a polygamous species feigning allegiance to monogamy. It’s a bit like a Jewish family leaving their eight year old son and sixteen year old daughter with a well behaved baby-sitter named Adolf Hitler with the belief that they’ll find ‘nothing wrong’ when they return. Such is the nature of this beast.

The human race is like a buffalo calf kicking for dear life between the jaws of a lion called evolution tugging at its legs while a pair of crocodiles called history and religion is chewing away at the head. Evolution keeps pushing women to seek rugged, strong and masculine genes, the kind you might find at the end of Salman Khan’s cheek swab, when she is looking for a suitable mate to have a baby with. But when it comes to rearing that baby and nurturing her family, she prefers the gentle, caring and communicative type, like the metrosexual Khan who is all heart and epiglottis instead. Left to evolution’s own devices, men would have been too busy spreading their seed far and wide to realize that the above dichotomy could leave them cuckolded. But then along came religion to plot with history and before you knew it monogamy had becomes God’s decree.

Wedding vows may well insist that we are to be together as man and wife, in love and life, today tomorrow and forever. But science reveals that when we are in love, the brain ‘suffers’ from a certain degree of serotonin depletion and no matter how deep the professed love, serotonin levels return back to normal in about two years. In other words, the brain tricks us into falling in love with a suitable mate for only about as long as enough genetic matter has been exchanged to further life and then the partners are, from a chemical standpoint, ready for the market again.

So that might explain the itch and escapades, but what do we do if we want to stay together in spite of evolutionary biology and cerebral chemistry holding their ground? I do not know about the levels of serotonin in my system today but what I do know is that the woman I have been with for the last sixteen years of my life, thirteen of them aft er exchanging vows, is still the woman I want to see when I wake and is still the woman whose hand I want to hold when I go to bed. And when she is away from me, her face is still the one I see when I close my eyes and smile. But does that mean I’m oblivious to the primitive, almost involuntary evolutionary tremors that emanate from the epicenter of my being when I’m in the presence of appropriate stimuli?

I would be lying if I said I was, and the truth is, so would you.

And yet love between soul mates, if you happen to have found yours, you would know is neither shaken nor touched by these tremors and there is a method towards sustaining this madness. Lets exchange notes on that in the weeks to come but until then, here’s an old Taoist thought to keep you company…

Sex is like fire burning on a cold winter night. Ignore it and it’ll wither, leaving you cold and dead. Fan it too much and it’ll burn your house down. But nurture it, acknowledge it, celebrate it and control it, and it’ll keep you, warm, happy and comforted… perhaps it will even be the light…

Until next week, chew on that Dominique…