Ooo-La-La…French Dalliance In The Age Of Omicron And The Zipped Sex Life Of America

The picture of the family of former French President Mitterrand standing solemnly by his grave – wife, mistress, and love-child daughter – was surprising for Americans.  Their presidents had had their affairs, but quietly and privately.  JFK’s serial affairs were not discovered and made public until well after his death, and although most of his admirers smiled knowingly at the news – of course such a young, handsome, virile man would have lovers – many others were appalled at the betrayal of his wife.

The ardent followers of Martin Luther King, man of God and a civil rights hero, reacted in the same way when it was discovered that he was a Lothario, a man of indefatigable sexual appetites.  Americans smirked at the horny doings of LBJ and Bill Clinton – sexual infidelity was one thing, bedding trailer trash was another.  One thing was common – the Protestant ethic’s moral censure of adultery.  Of course men wandered and tomcatted everywhere, but that didn’t make it right.

In the age of feminism such dalliances were taken not only as moral failures but as examples of a profound disrespect for women.  Ordinary men’s lapses, followed by predictable, abject apologies to complaisant wives and vows to reform, were as subject to censure as those of men in high positions.  It was men as a genus, as a biologically-determined and socially coddled species that needed outing.  Given this unfortunate natural hardwiring, the only recourse for women was to ridicule, marginalize, humiliate, and disregard them.

Since Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and a variety of backcountry, cornpone, hillbilly bimbos, Presidents have been on their guard and best behavior.  George W Bush, a born-again Christian had long ago swore off his profligate ways. Barack Obama was a man of principle and uxorious fidelity, and Donald Trump, accused of every miscreancy under the sun, was never accused of adultery.  He was too old, he disingenuously protested, and winked when he said that he had had his fun.  

Joe Biden is a man of moral principle, Catholic faith, old age, and in intellectual decline, so cinq à sept afternoon dalliances are the farthest thing from his mind.  If that weren’t bad enough, he is hostage to the progressive feminist Left, its Salem Witch Hunt No Means No movement, and persistent attempts to marginalize all men. 

So the loving ménage à trois of Francois Mitterrand, standing by his grave, is now completely off limits, verboten, and a sign of both women’s scurrilous fealty to abusive men and men’s incorrigible patriarchy. 

The affairs of another French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, were well-received in France.  Not only did he have affairs, but his then lover moved into the Elysees with him to no particular fanfare.  Sarkozy had other far more worrisome problems on his plate, and the public was growing increasingly restive and eventually did him in at the polls, but otherwise there was the usual oof nonchalance.

When the first wave of COVID hit in early 2020, nations were all concerned – the Europeans especially remembered the Spanish Flu, the influenza pandemic that took tens of millions of lives especially of the young and able – but each reacted in their own way.  Bella Figura, the Italian ethos of looking good and acting with culture, class, and sophistication was a natural brake to hiding behind closed doors.  It was unconscionable for Italians to surrender that inimitable social grace, charm, and savoir faire to a virus, no matter how threatening.  Italians always had had a dolce vita, morituri te salutant mentality.  The good life was not simply an ideal but a way of being, and nothing was going lock that down.  While government edict enforced some necessary preventive measures, Italians never stopped going out, especially to meet their mistresses.

For the French giving up what had become a male birthright – sexual affairs and the enjoyment of women – was unthinkable.  C’est la vie was an ineradicable part of the French cultural ethos. Unpredictable, unfortunate, uncontrollable circumstances always interfered with life’s agenda, but, what can one do but accept, incorporate, adjust, and move on.  The afternoon affairs of businessmen who visited their mistresses after work and before going home to wife and children; the skirts-up-in-the fields of la France profonde; the polite flirtations and proper sexual liaisons of the bourgeoisie; and the usual rutting of the aristocracy never stopped.

The conscientious Scandinavians, the orderly, disciplined Germans, and the entire Russian peasantry for whom vodka and sex were the only anodynes to Stalin gave up many things, but not sexual liaisons.  Everyone did it, and no one stopped.

In America COVID enabled the perfect moral storm.  Not only was the Puritanical, Cotton Mather, Salem puritanism still alive and well in 21st century America; but feminist progressivism with all its censure of male sexuality and focus on identity (gay, trans, etc.) rather than mutual sexual adventure and satisfaction had infiltrated and infected all segments of society.  Added to that, COVID was considered the coming Armageddon, the just deserts of a profligate, capitalist, earth-ignorant, individualistic society.  The existential threat to life on earth was real – COVID was a decimating, annihilating world event.

Progressives united for this life-or-death mission.  They continued to hammer away at men’s misogynist adultery but added viral contagion to the charge.  Sexual infidelity by its very nature – clandestine, serial, and certainly unprotected – was a prime vector for viral spread.  Climate change – progressives’ existential crisis of the moment – was put on the back burner, and all efforts were focused on the Corona virus and its frightening mutations.

For these moral activists the COVID crisis was a blessing in disguise.  Whereas they had been met with annoying diffidence on matters of climate change and environmentalism – their warnings about the end of the earth went unheeded – people were paying attention to their dismal predictions about Omicron.  They would willingly accede to government authority and power – the power to shut down public and private enterprise, schools, airports and train stations; the power to enforce compliance with federal authority; the power to legislate vast sums of walking-around money – and the American state would finally become what the Left had always wanted it to be, the provider of good, the arbiter of morality, and the one judge of behavior.

In the past few weeks since the first Omicron case was detected in the US, people have been overwhelming testing centers, hiding behind closed doors, triple masking, and beginning to scrub, disinfect, and fumigate like the old, first days of COVID.  And fewer and fewer men are stepping out.  Just as in the AIDS era, sex with an unknown, untrusted partner in the age of COVID could be death-dealing.  Needless to say casual intimacy, flirtation, and physical innuendo have been victims of this moral imperative.

Of course anti-vaxxers, fatalists, que sera sera Mexican immigrants, Italian Americans, and ghetto pimps have never been caught up in this righteous storm; so it is unfair to say ‘America’ is acting this way or that.  Yet puritanical, progressive, sanctimony and its generated fearfulness is the rule, and woe is to anyone who has heard the message and ignored it.

This too will end.  Some say that Omicron is the godsend – the mild variant which will turn the epidemic into an endemic, yearly flu-like disease easily controlled – and one can only hope.  Evangelist preachers, even in solidly red states, are pleased as punch with the new moral COVID-obligated sexual conformity.  They have been trying all along to get wayward congregants in line, and now the ground was fertile for reform.

Meanwhile the Italians and French keep up their dalliances and bella figura elegant affairs, accept Omicron for the inconvenience that it is but have refused to change too much.  Death comes to us all heroically or not, so better to die in a beautiful woman’s arms than locked in a dismal, scrubbed, dark bunker.