A Frenchman was walking in the funeral procession of his wife, with her lover at his side. Her lover cried bitterly all the way to the cemetery. At last, the husband said to him: Don't cry. I will surely remarry. In France, there is always a wife and a mistress. If a man marries his mistress, a new job would become vacant, and would soon be occupied by a new mistress. If Dominique Strauss-Kahn did not violate the age-old French traditions of marriage and extramarital affairs, we would not have heard anything about him except about his bid to secure a loan to rescue the Greek economy. However, Strauss-Kahn opted to appear nude to a maid who entered his hotel suite, even though he was the head of the IMF, which means he is rich enough to buy a king sized bed. The French then stepped forward to defend their depraved citizen, not his victim, with a majority believing that he was the casualty of a conspiracy. Many prominent journalists and politicians rose up to his defense, including the Likudnik philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who said something to the effect of that people are not all equal, which I understood to mean that the post of IMF chief gives its occupant the right to sexually harass and rape people. I also understood from his statements that both Levy and Strauss-Kahn were intruders to the French sex culture. I once found myself with Danielle Mitterrand, and I wanted to ask her about former President François Mitterrand and his mistress Anne Pingeot, and their daughter Mazarine. However, I opted not to do so to avoid embarrassment, while I estimated in my mind that she probably knew of her husband's infidelity years before Paris Match exposed the affair. We now also know that Valéry Giscard d'Estaing before him and Jacques Chirac afterwards both confessed to having many affairs, albeit they were all consensual. By contrast, Strauss-Kahn appeared like a monster. Recently, Tristane Banon, his second wife's granddaughter, said that he tried to rape her when she interviewed him in 2002, when she was 22 years old. Also, Piroska Nagy, an official in the IMF, said that her boss forced her to have an affair with him in 2008, and she took him to court because of this. Perhaps this explains his known pro-Israel stances then. He and his wife are both Likudniks, and Israel has lost with his downfall an ally who would perhaps have made it to the Elysee one day. A few dozen women have so far stated that Strauss-Kahn had raped them or attempted to rape them […] He certainly is not alone in this. Every day, I read about infidelity among celebrities, and the readers must no doubt have been following the details of the separation of actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver, as well as the news of his lovechild, and I read that there may be others. And in the United Kingdom, there is controversy surrounding Sir Fred Goodwin, the head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, who was found to have been in an affair while the UK government was pumping 45 billion pounds into the bank to prevent its collapse. Of course, there are dozens of other British celebrities, including world-renowned footballers, who obtained an injunction from the court preventing the publishing of their sexual, - not emotional-, encounters. However, the names are on the internet, on services like Twitter, for those who want to know. What do men want from women? I am afraid the answer is: an attractive body and half a mind. Men perhaps consider an attractive figure to be evidence of the stupidity of its owner. However, I find that these figures block men's minds. Hence, there are those who once said: My girlfriend left me, because she decided that there can be no future for us together, but at least I have my wife left. Perhaps the best affair is one with a school teacher, because if you make a mistake with her, she will force you to repeat it and correct it again and again. I once read about a wise woman who proclaimed she does not trust her husband with a beautiful young woman, not even for five minutes, even though he had been dead for ten years. Our neighbor from the days of my early adolescence is like her. I once heard her say she would not trust her husband with a ‘dead cat'. I write with confidence, because I and the reader are both faithful. But I will not pretend the reason is morality, but rather cowardice, and the adage goes, “a thousand times coward but none may he rest in peace”. One last word, really last this time. In every story about marital infidelity, I find myself on the side of the cheated wife, who always looks broken and devastated. Strauss-Kahn went one step further beyond insulting his wife and hurt their daughter, whom I saw in a photo with her mother outside of the court, and wished for the husband to be punished with life imprisonment afterwards. [email protected]
