George Rebane
OK Martha, take the children upstairs, we’re gonna talk about sex and the male urge, or whatever you call it when men start thinking below the belt.
I’ve been a lifelong fan of Bill Cosby way back from the ‘I Spy’ days when he co-starred with Robert Culp. We have followed his career on to the stage, TV series and specials, and even driven to other towns to see his solo performances. His message to blacks, especially those on dole and drugs in the ghettos, has been particularly resonant. And then the country was told that national icon Dr William Henry Cosby Jr is really a scumbag who had drugged young women in order to make them more compliant to his sexual advances. We were devastated and asked ourselves one more time, ‘Is there nothing sacrosanct anymore?’
What causes otherwise upstanding males to risk reputation, career, family, friends, … just to get into someone’s pants on the sly? Is it the fact that our culture pays lip service to monogamous relationships? What would happen if our culture recognized the need for (some, many?) heterosexual males to openly enjoy the company of females for sex the same way they could enjoy such company for, say, a game of tennis singles or playing an instrumental duet?
Such a sexual need has been recognized for centuries by many cultures, some of which continue the accepted and open practice of male dalliance to this day. Jews could marry multiple wives in biblical times, and polygamy is still permitted in Islam and several other religious traditions. Some cultures like the Hmong people on the Indochina peninsula even condone gang raping young girls, which is admittedly beyond the pale for us in the west.
In recent years we in the west have become more open sexually. We have allowed the homosexuals to leave their closets and marry and raise children. We fully accept and even endorse couples ‘living in sin’ together before or instead of getting married. Now our European brethren are revisiting ‘incest is best’; at first between siblings, but once this taboo falls, parent/child sex will not be far behind. So our society has already embarked on that slippery slope away from puritanical mores, and our slide is picking up speed.
So why not institutionalize what we once approximated with ‘open marriage’, and allow both sexes in an otherwise monogamous and loving relationship (family, home, children, inheritance, …) to openly seek diversity, stimulation, and relief(?) outside such an anchoring and avowedly permanent marriage. Why not remove the last vestiges of moral misgivings from wanting to have occasional sex with partners other than your dearly beloved?
One wonders whether all those stories of kidnappings, rape, and murder would not be drastically reduced were we to take this next step toward removing ‘licentiousness’ and ‘adultery’ from our vocabulary. If two or more partners are willing to enjoy themselves, who is some third party to say that they shouldn’t because it is against an existing (outdated?) law or some ancient morē? We even have social media standing by and ready to facilitate such legitimate liaisons for fun and profit. Think about it, why does it have to be surreptitious? Why couldn’t Bill Cosby have talked it over with his then presumably copasetic wife before going out on the town for the evening? He wouldn’t have had to use drugs or even stay out overnight.
