Bonking … and monogamy

ADAM Phillips, the delightfully provocative psychotherapist and author says of monogamy, “At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with. At its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused.”

Over the past week the discovery that Deputy British Prime Minister John Prescott has been enjoying carnal pleasures with a woman who is not his wife, has outraged the moralists in our society.

In the same way that Bill Clinton was hung, drawn and quartered by his political and media opponents for his dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Mr Prescott is being subjected extraordinary media and political attention.

The immature way in which the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic culture deals with infidelity is because it assumes that monogamy is the norm and that while it is ok for taxpayers’ funds to be spent by politicians and their wives, husbands or de facto partners, if a politician such as Mr Prescott takes his mistress to his government funded office for sex, then all hell breaks loose.

Let’s compare this with the French.  The French President, Francois Mitterrand, dead a decade this year, installed his wife in the Presidential Palace in Paris and his mistress in the President’s country house.  Both his wife and his mistress and the children of both liaisons attended the President’s funeral.  And more to the point, both were in the official mourning party.  The wife and the mistress walked arm in arm in a very public display of French resolve.

And the reaction of the French nation to President Mitterrand’s conduct in this matter?  It is simply a case of cést la vie.

There’s a fair degree of hypocrisy in the way in which societies such as the UK and Australia think of monogamy.  Whilst the agony aunts and religious types fulminate about the fact that monogamy is an ideal to which we should all aim, the rest of society titters excitedly when a Prescott or Clinton is exposed in the media.

There is a case of ‘voyeurism maximus’ as we rush to buy newspapers, surf the net, and watch TV programs we normally shun, simply to find out the details of Monica Lewinsky’s dress stain or John Prescott’s kissing style.

Cads and bounders

We all wish we were cads and bounders in another life.  We all wish we had the dare to do what those we read about the media get up to.

Take Alan Clark, the now sadly deceased former Tory MP and minister in the Thatcher government.  Clark’s diaries, currently being shown on ABC TV, are sheer good fun.  His relationship with a judge’s wife and her two daughters is talked about in revered terms (he refers to them as ‘the coven’) – I mean how did he manage to get away with it?  And his constant desire and yearning to bed everyone from a working class girl on the train to his awfully prim and politically correct secretary, is searingly honest.

Of course, Clark’s wife, Jane was equally observant when she said of the fact that Valerie Harkess, the judge’s wife and her daughters, went to the media with their tales of bedding Mr Clark, “If you bed people of below-stairs class, they will go to the papers.”

Monogamy it seems in a society like ours, has become for many a new religion for many people.  It has replaced God.  And so anyone who flouts this new religion so publicly, like Messrs Clinton, Clark and Prescott, will be exposed and punished.

As Adam Phillips observes, ‘ the kind of words we would once have used about our relationship with God get used about our relationships with each other. It’s not an accident that, say, fidelity is the word we use for a certain kind of monogamous relationship.’  

Like Dr Phillips, this columnist is not urging louche conduct on anyone, but he is saying that we ought to be a little more relaxed about monogamy.  We ought to become more pragmatic about it, and accept the fact that for some people it works and for others it doesn’t.

Monogamy, by the way is not the be all and end all to the majority of people in the world.  As a Euro RSCG survey published last year observed, less than fifty percent of Britons, Germans and French people think monogamy is a natural state.

Monogamy, you see, is a matter of taste.  Mr Prescott and Mr Clinton have simply demonstrated to us all that for them monogamy is not always to their liking.  Ditto the millions of other men and women who take the same view.

As the Adam Phllips acutely observes, ‘a society without sexual infidelity — or without the promiscuous going their wanton way — could be dangerous. Who would we be fascinated by, who would we persecute?’

First published in The Mercury Monday