On a Dublin campus a poster of Tiger Woods hung unapologetically over the
recruiting stall for the college economics society, a promise of the life
possibilities awaiting economics students such as Woods himself. Was this
not a bit unwise, given the golfer’s troubles? “Are you kidding?” came the
reply. “For our target audience, he’s more attractive than ever.”
It’s true. For young men, and men who wish they were young again, Woods has
been living the dream, and then some. A super-athlete, famous, rich beyond
imagining, lovely wife and kids, and bedding every glamorous woman he could
lay his Nike gloves on? Sometimes two birdies at a time? Yeah, we’d have
some of that, please.
Okay, he’s in a bit of trouble now, but it’s nothing he can’t afford. And yes,
if you think about it too long it’s a little grim that Woods’s 19th-hole
women all seem to be porn stars and porn-star-alikes, but that’s a symptom
of the limited world of young men’s imaginations and young women’s
self-creation in 21st-century America. But what the hell, it sure looks like
fun.
And until such time as someone tries to make Woods a pathetic figure with some
nonsense about “sex addiction” (come on, desiring sex is in our top-three
biological imperatives) most men of my acquaintance will consider him a more
interesting, admirable figure than we thought he was before his 4x4 met a
fire hydrant and a tree.
I’m not entirely sure this response is limited to my gender either, though if
you analyse the sponsors’ behaviour they do seem to think that the lads are
all right with Woods, but women not so much. Thus Gillette, which sells a
lot of lady-razors, has backed off him, as have AT&T and Accenture,
companies that have to be alert to the concerns of mature women. EA Video
Games and Nike, on the other hand, companies whose core consumers are young
and male, have made the obvious choice to stand by their man.
In public, our admiration for Woods’s virility is sublimated in mostly
unprintable jokes. Sometimes it leaks out in sexist remarks like the one
Spurs manager Harry Redknapp made when denouncing his players’ party in
Dublin: “I wouldn't go out and get drunk, pulling some old slag. I’m not
that stupid. Even if you wanted to do it, somebody would catch you out.
Having said that, Tiger Woods didn’t do too badly.”
The former tennis star Boris Becker, who famously fathered a child in a London
linen closet, “sympathised” with Woods last week, and apparently couldn’t
resist a little grin about the “dimensions and frequency” of what the golfer
has called his “transgressions”.
Of course, most of us are grinning about Woods. But the agonising, moralising
and psychologising that has marked most of the serious published discourse
about him tells you how repressed and hypocritical we remain about sex, as
though some deep explanation were required for a rich, highly energetic man
who is constantly on the road, successfully seeking out many and varied
sexual partners.
Deep down we know better. We suspect that a random audit of other people with
a Tiger-like lifestyle would reveal similar peccadilloes. Musicians tend to
be more frank about it, like Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz, Martin
Scorsese’s documentary about The Band, revealing what his mentor Ronnie
Hawkins told him: “Well, son, you won’t make much money, but you’ll get more
[ahem, women] than Frank Sinatra.” Such insight is not provided only by men:
Joni Mitchell wrote songs of immense romance and pleasure drawn on her own
freewheeling love life.
I recall Leonard Cohen telling Dave Fanning in an interview that monogamy,
like celibacy, is a rare vocation, and you don’t need to hear many of
Cohen’s lyrics to realise that he never heard the calling. This does not
appear to cost him the support of female fans. Au contraire: the response of
the fairer sex to the likes of Cohen and Bill Clinton tells us many women
have no principled objection to being, as it were, “-ised”. Casanova and Don
Juan are synonyms, after all, for “lovers”, not “villains”.
Daniel Day-Lewis’s film, Nine, a dreadful remake of Fellini’s brilliant 8½
from 1963, presents unauthorised polygamy as, at least some of the time, the
mark of a serious and artistic temperament. Like Woods, however, Nine tries
to have it both ways. It stars an abundance of gorgeous women including
Penélope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman and Judi Dench. But whenever
one of them starts singing and dancing, she is usually surrounded by
scantily clad gym-bodied dancers, the embodiments of the film-director
protagonist’s serial desires in, again, the dully uniform 21st-century
version of what is desirable.
At the end of the movie — in a travesty of Fellini’s vision but an amusing
echo of Woods’s — Day-Lewis is “trying to get his wife back” through
bourgeois self-repression, including the making of a small domestic drama in
place of the sexy, clamouring chaos of his earlier films.
Trying to have it both ways is, of course, how society mostly manages to
function. The study that was reported to show that “all men watch porn” was
methodologically absurd, but probably points to an underlying truth: that
most of us, men and women, through willpower or lack of opportunity, keep
our sexual wanderings to ourselves, literally, in the realm of imagination
and lonely passions.
But sometimes the arbitrary regulations we place on sexual behaviour are just
invitations to messy breakdown. Seventeen-year-olds yes, but 16-year-olds
no. Opposite sex yes, but same sex no. Most men yes, priests no. Husband
yes, work-friend no. In Ireland, the combination of ingrained inhibitions
and alcohol, our favourite disinhibiting drug, can make the breakdowns very
messy. Is it any wonder that those misguided men in Listowel who lined up to
shake Danny Foley’s hand in a courtroom before he was sentenced for sexual
assault seemed to misunderstand a genuine crime when, for many, even
legitimate, consensual relationships need a drunken night to get them
started?
The Woods story is, in a way, another form of porn, another little voice that
says fantasies can come true. But does that makes our repressed reality
easier or harder to bear?
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