Monogamy is Monotony?

When the sensational expose of 44 men and their sexual escapades with an underaged girl came to light this week, my first thought was one of comic irony. I told myself, "It's official then, behind every successful men is a woman. Behind every unsuccessful men is two: wife and a mistress."

Since the beginning of time, men have issues with their "lower tissues" (And I believe women are no exception; except that in this male-dominated, patriarchal world, theirs are just more repressed). But why? Why is it that humanity is constantly plagued by sex scandals, more frequent of late? Why are marriages broken by it? Why are children's lives destroyed by it? And why are societies threatened by it?

The irony is this, the more puritanical a society, the more scandalous it becomes. Like a burst dam, one can imagine all the repressed sexual pressure gushing forward in a gigantic rush to escape. The writing is all over the religious wall and yet no allegedly pious person would want to face it.  There are statistics that show that teenage pregnancy is highest among the most religious.

In another 2005-2006 report, 315 (30%) of pastors surveyed said that they had either been in an ongoing affair or a one-time sexual encounter with a parishioner. In the same report, "almost 40% said they (pastors) had had an extramarital affair since beginning their ministry" and "38% (399) of the pastors said they were divorced or currently in a divorce process."

Lastly, it is surveyed that 70% of pastors constantly fought depression!  Are there some sort of sexual hypocrisy going on in the religious circle? (and i am not even going to speak about the unspeakable sexual abuse in the catholic church with all it's shameful cover ups!) Isn't it time for the many pious heads to be unearthed from the sand?

I was in court the day the scandal broke and I saw some of the men rushing out of the court trying to escape from the glare of public light. They scurried out in all manner of disguises. One had what seemed like a makeshift dustbin on his head. The others had hands covering their faces. Still, a strange teacher was mummified to the eye level with dark glasses and a donned cap, very much like the invisible man.

This reminds me of another comic irony, "We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. But the real tragedy is for men to be afraid of the light."

Sure, there is unmask-able shame for sex with an underage, especially for the seemingly pious, the publicly upright, and the stalwart of society.  But this shame, many would say, are brought upon by themselves. These men have asked for it, some public stone-throwers would say.  But is it that simple? What is so potently seductive about these sex scandals that even the highly religious and the society's role models are not spared?

In other words, should we be so ready to cast the first stone at them before trying to understand the pervasive role of sex  in our morally straitjacket society?

I believe that sex, like markets, technology and political institutions, are all inventions of civilization. We basically set the boundaries of how sex is to be expressed, what sexual taboos are to be avoided, and what punishments should be meted out to the sexual deviants.

But before I delve into this cultural aspect of sex, let me just burst some religious bubbles with this joke: "Moses came down from Mt Sinai lugging two tablets that contained the ten commandments (decalogue). As he descended, he announced, "There's good news and bad news. The good news is that I kept Him to ten. The bad news is, adultery's still in there!"

There are many things to say about sex and religion. The Bible is replete with examples of strange sex and liaisons, particularly in the old testament, that would raise more than just an eyebrow. Some of the sexual connotations are hilarious.  Here are just a few.

King Saul once offered his daughter Michal to his nemesis David with this awfully weird bride-price: one hundred Philistine foreskins! Of course, Saul's plot was to see David killed in the battle of securing the foreskins. But, presumably with God's kind assistance, David triumphantly got Michal for double the foreskins! Imagine the number of squirming philistines, half-arching in discomfort.

How about poor Onan? In the Bible, he was tasked to fulfill his dead brother's duties to impregnate his wife, Tamar, so as to carry forth his dead brother's lineage. Apparently, God stuck his brother dead because he was wicked. So, Onan was compelled by his father, Jacob, to sleep with Tamar and he did it very reluctantly. Dreading the thought of raising his seed for his brother, he spilled them on the ground. Although his name is anonymous to masturbation, Onan was in fact practicing "coitus interruptus". However, this wasteful spillage angered God and Onan was put to death as well.

Then, let's talk about polygamy in the Bible. Abraham had three wives, the third one was Keturah. Jacob had four wives. King David had eight or more wives. And to cap it all, one must not forget the last feather on Solomon's 699 feathered cap - excluding his three hundred concubines.

On promiscuity, I guess Samson is up there with the other biblical heroes. He had three sexual partners; not counting a prostitute. If you are wondering how some women could become your downfall, like the sorry fate of our 44 men, you can look no further than the hapless life of Samson. It is even said that God had "engineered" his life all the way to his death with the philistines.

Samson's two wives were tattlers who sabotaged him. One spilled the answer to a secret riddle and the other the secret of his strength. Samson then gave away his first wife to his best man and probably killed the other.

Last, but definitely not least, we have our own bible-styled incest. This is where Lot's unmarried daughters come into the pornographic cineplex. After the destruction of Sodom, and thinking that there were no worthy men alive, the two dimwitted daughters got their father drunk and, on successive nights, slept with him. From these unions, came the descendants of the Ammonites and the Moabites.

Then, we have Reuben who had sex with his father's concubine. We also have the forbidden kiss of David on Jonathan and Hosea's wife, Gomer the goner, who was equivalent to the "wife of whoredom".

On rape, the Bible is not silent. There is the poor life of jacob's daughter, Dinah, who was raped by the son of a ruler. This pissed Dinah's brothers off, one of whom was Levi, and they concocted a cruel plot. They allowed the rapist to marry Dinah on one condition: all the men of the area are to be circumcised as a customary tradition. On the third day of the circumcision, while the men were still in tender pain, Dinah's brothers plundered their future brother-in-law's household and army, and took captive the women and children.

So you see, sex in the bible is a strange bedfellow. After digesting the above, I am reminded of this quote, "Of all the sexual deviations, chastity is the strangest."

Now, going back to the fascination and peculiarity of sex in our modern society, I trust that the common refrain is that we have come a long way from our ancient past, from our prehistory narrative.

For the Christians, we can proudly say that we are living the new covenant. For the atheists, we can dismissively say, "to each his own just as long as it doesn't harm others." For the newly wed, it is this idealism that fences up the wild passion, "if he truly loves me, he couldn't even get an erection at another body, another breast."

Well, it is said that idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the lust. Are we really free, as the Christians would have it, from the feverish tugging of the unbridled passion? When God commanded us to multiply and populate the earth, did He tell us at what number to stop or to go slow? Five hundred or seven billion?

It is not disputed that during our evolutionary past, polygyny and polyandry were the tribal norms. If so, when did monogamy come into the social arena? Because the last time I checked, only 3% of the primate world (including us) are monogamous, aren't we the exception rather than the rule?

From a crude biological view, our body betrays us. For men, we have the largest testicles among monogamous primates. They are hung exteriorly to keep the millions of ready sperm cool for rapid, a moment's notice, deployment. Then, our penis is the longest and thickest, capable of multiple ejaculation at 150 to 500 sperms per definite thrust.

For women, with no apology, their pendulous breast and female's copulatory wails are evolutionary Venus love traps. This is to say nothing of their ability for multiple orgasms.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once joked, "The basic conflict between men and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen. To men, sex is an emergency, and no matter what we're doing, we can be ready in 2 minutes. Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They're very exciting, but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur."

So, from a biological standpoint, we are created or evolved to be actively sexual and sexually active. In fact, our survival depends on thriving on 4 Fs: Fight, Flight, Food, Reproduce. Think about it. Without reproduction, and reproducing indiscriminately and unremittingly over time, we would have been a failed species, facing certain early extinction! Freud even opined that our modern civilization is driven by "erotic energy".

One author wrote, "Modern men and women are obsessed with the sexual. It is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. Like apes in a zoo, we spend our energies on the one field of play remaining; human lives otherwise are pretty well caged in by the walls, bars, chains, and locked gates of our industrial culture."

It is thus a no-brainer to say that our early ancestors were promiscuous, whether religiously or not. In fact, some writers have a screwy label for it, "omnigamy", which is based on multi-male, multi-female mating system. I believe it is a mating system that our self-righteous, religiously suffocated society would greatly frown upon. Whether frown upon or not, can we really escape from our promiscuous, evolutionary past? Maybe this is the source of all our worldly frustration...we are escaping from our true nature.

One cheeky author wrote: "The first infidelity is this infidelity - Can you be unfaithful to what you are?"  Although the science on this is far from being conclusive, I think we are here for a purpose, even in the language of sexual conquest and partnership. We have evolved from being a generally polygamous society to one that is predominantly monogamous for a yet-to-be-fully-understood purpose.

Maybe it is to put a brake on population explosion. Maybe it is because of our more manicured sense of moral intuition. Maybe it is the result of the liberation of women from being seen as a chattel (thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife along with the other barnyard animals) to being independent, powerful individuals with equal rights as their male counterpart. Well, maybe will always, for now, remains as just "maybes."

But my sympathy is with the 44 men - more so for those whom many of their close ones have described as acting "out-of-character". Or maybe it is the fact that they have been acting "in-character" that unwittingly caused them to be targets of the much undeserved media lynching.

Either ways, these hapless bunch, who have a sweet tooth for sex like every other men I have come to know, will just have to face the music for what they have done in this morally delineated society of Singapore (sometimes I don't know which is the greater punishment: the possible fine and/or jail sentence or the public shame?)

So, after all is said and done, Is sexual fidelity an illusion? The answer to this question largely depends on what culture you are born in.

Considering that about 98% of men and 78% of women fantasize about having sex with another who is not his or her spouse, adultery is sometimes only an opportunity away.  In the roman times, the bride has to sleep with the majority of the men on her wedding night.

In the Shia Muslim tradition, married men can enter into a physical relationship with another like a car rental for a preordained time period. These marriages can last for a few minutes to a few years.  In certain harvest festivals, in the present Trobriand islands (Papua New Guinea), young women roam the island to literally "rape" men outside their villages and some purportedly chew off the poor men's eyebrow if they do not satisfy them.

In Swaziland, the king is viewed by his subjects as uber-male to be emulated. The king, who is in his forties, is legendary for his sexual conquests. Every year he chooses a  new bride from among tens of thousands in a topless giant festival. He once, in an act of uber-self-righteousness, banned girls under eighteen from having sex at all.

However, he broke his own self-imposed ban by selecting a seventeen year old girl as his ninth wife. Alas, he fined himself one cow. If this had been the justice system locally, we would have at least expected 44 cows making their way to the subordinate courts.

Last but not least, in some intuit societies, it is considered rude not to offer your wife to a visitor for a night.  Can you now not see how fungible, subjective and adaptive the concept of fidelity is? To the Russians, it is not adultery if it is just a beach resort fling. To the African, drunkenness is an excuse for adultery. And to the Japanese, it is okay if it is paid sex. In my profession, I have even heard my clients telling me that extramarital affairs become "adultery" only when one's spouse finds out.

From what I have written thus far, one would come away with the impression that monogamy is a socially "white elephant" concept.  Well, although to many, monogamy is regarded as an "unnatural phenomena," I have seen and read about many couples who have stayed faithful to the end. My in-laws are just an example that springs to mind.

There is nevertheless something enchanting, beautiful and heart-lifting of a love that lasts for a lifetime. I guess this quote says it well, "The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one."  For me, my marriage has been anything but smooth. Still, it is an anchor in my life, a ballast for my happiness.

My 12-year union has produced three children and there is no greater joy than to watch them grow up and have families of their own.  Natural or not, rare or not, monogamy works for me and I will work at it against the counter-current of my own nature because it is this inspiring quote from JRR Tolkien that keeps me at it, "The real soul mate is the one you are actually married to."

I guess life and everything about it is a choice and I have made mine 12 years ago.

Cheers!