Always “the man’s fault”?!

Gov. Mark Sanford, you and your fellow unzipped politicians are giving us men a bad name.

Make that, “a worse name.” We already had a bad name with most women when it comes to sex. They love to trade knowing glances and self-righteous tidbits about how sex is all we think about, we can’t be trusted in certain situations, always be suspicious when a husband says he has to “work late at the office,” yadda yadda yadda. If you’re a woman, especially a wife, you’ve probably said all the above and more. If you’re a man, especially a husband, you’ve probably heard it more than once.  And yes, you may well have given “the little woman” good cause to say some of those things. I seem to hear legions of good ole boys saying, “Can’t blame a good ole boy for gittin’ ‘im a little strange once in a while.”

Our politicians may be better educated, on the average, than many of us, and more articulate, but their desire to “git a little strange” seems to be right in line with many of we more common mortals of the male gender. We found out many years later that John F. Kennedy was an enthusiastic bedder of women not his spouse. Bill Clinton was disgraced, in the eyes of many, by his inability or unwillingness to keep his hands and other parts of his anatomy to himself. Then in more recent years we had Gov. Elliot Spitzer of New York (patronizer of prostitutes); Gov. Jim McGreevey of New Jersey (out of the statehouse closet); Sen. Larry “Wide Stance” Craig of the men’s room follies; and now Gov. Sanford of South Carolina with his Argentine hotsie and the possibility that he will have plenty of time to spend with her in the future, if he’s forced to resign as governor and is divorced by his wife.

What would possess a man who has achieved election as a U.S. senator or a governor, and is being regarded as a possible presidential candidate, to risk it all for a few rolls in the sheets? I’ve heard commentators on Fox News — all of them women, on the program I watched — say that the politicians are “arrogant,” (well, I’ll go along with that); that they “never had a date in high school,” (unlikely as an explanation for such self-destructive behavior), and other female guesses at what makes men act the way they do.

But let’s go back to the dawn of civilization (I just borrowed H.G. Welles’ Time Machine, so it’ll be no problem) and look at how the Great Planner set things up when he created the world. I prefer to say “The Great Planner” instead of “God” or some other name because I think that planning well was the best thing he did.

Anyway, when the Great Planner decided to create a species called “man” (or “humans,” if you prefer), he decided that this species would reproduce itself by having sexual congress (pun intended). Now, the Great Planner knew that if both sexes, men and women, were “hot to trot” all the time, the women would be pregnant so often that there would be no feeding all the offspring, and humankind would die of starvation.

On the other hand, he knew that if both sexes were likely to say things like, “Not tonight, dear — I have a headache;” or, “What was that noise outside? I don’t care what you were just about to do — you get up, go outside and see what that noise was!”; or “Oh, is it that night of the week again? Yawwn! OK; wake me up when you’re through, because I need to tell you about something Johnny’s teacher told me today;” that is to say, if both sexes were  lukewarm about sex, the human race would probably die out for lack of procreation.

So, since his plan was for the women to conceive and bear the babies, while the men were merely the impregnators, he decided that it would be the men who received the insatiable urge for sex, while the women would tend to be more — oh, shall we say, “Take it or leave it.”

With some notable exceptions. Which brings me to the point I wanted to make lo those many paragraphs ago (you knew I’d get there eventually, didn’t you?) For every man who still in this day and age acts like he’s being paid a handsome wage for every additional woman he can lure into bed with him, there will be a whole line of women, waiting eagerly to share said bed. Did you ever hear of a “skirt chaser” who couldn’t find any willing skirts to chase? My friend, it doesn’t happen. For every married man who strays, there is a woman — also married, quite frequently — who strays with him. That is, unless he’s like Sen. Craig or Gov. McGreevey, who strayed into the bull pen instead of the cow pasture.

I don’t know if women say to each other, when no men are around, “Can’t blame an ole girl for gittin’ ‘er a little strange once in a while.” Likely they phrase it a bit differently.

But Mark Sanford, John Kennedy, Larry Craig, and all those others who couldn’t keep their flies zipped, were cheating with women (usually) who couldn’t keep their skirts down.

As they say in Argentina, “It takes two to tango.”