Exonerating Woods

Tiger Woods has returned to golf after a break of twenty-two weeks. His multiple infidelities had led him to issue a public apology and announce an indefinite break from golf in December last year. His series of extramarital affairs were imputed to his addiction to sex. Back home, in late December, N D Tiwari, Andhra Pradesh’s then governor had to resign from office following a sex scandal and accusations of extramarital affairs. Gustave Flaubert’s canonical novel Madame Bovary (set in an altogether different country and century) portrays the downfall of its protagonist, Emma, after multiple and perhaps inevitable extramarital affairs.

Infidelity and extramarital affairs are not uncommon in any society and have never been so. In fact, they are more widespread and prevalent around us than we all think and reckon. Marriage is a vow of faithfulness to one’s spouse and infidelity, which is the breaking of this vow, is condemned by all and sundry. But, is infidelity in matrimony all that morally sick? No, perhaps the question that needs to be asked is: Are human beings genetically programmed to be not inconstant?

Everybody who has spent a normal adolescence with multiple flings or innumerable infatuations or has ever felt like getting intimate with someone else during his or her years of ‘faithful’ marital or love life knows in his or her heart that the answer to both the above stated questions can not be in positive. And, I reckon, it would not be wrong to assume that the ‘everybody’ of the last sentence is actually every single one of us.

Now, if human beings are not genetically monogamous, doesn’t that make the vow of lifelong monogamy that marriages basically are inhumane? After all, they require the participants to negate a cardinal aspect of their nature, which is anything but not brutal and, above all, severely asphyxiating. And why shouldn’t it be so? After all, conventionally speaking, marriages are the backbone of the holy family structure, which in turn is the backbone of the perhaps one of the most brutal forces possible: Society

After this, it can be safely concluded that marriages are fundamentally one of the most flawed institutions erected by mankind precisely because they seek to freeze the inconstant and ever changing human nature in consistency and invariability. And, in this light, not only Tiger Woods but all Tigers and Emmas who live among us become victims of our collective crimes and therefore deserve nil punishment.