Mental Polygamy

‘Apni girlfriend ke saamne doosri ladkiyon ko kaise dekhein!’ thus teaches a stupid soft-drink ad on TV these days where the boy fools his girlfriend by pretending to criticize the dress of the girl he was actually staring at for other reasons. The soft-drink makers claim that this brainy idea was because of the drink. That’s preposterous by itself but is besides the point. The ad is probably viewed, laughed or scoffed at and brushed aside. But no one realizes that it depicts a very male phenomenon. I call it ‘Mental Polygamy’. Would the ad have the same effect if it said, ‘Apne boyfriend ke saamne doosron ladkon ko kaise dekhein!’? I doubt it very much. Though, strictly speaking, ‘polygamy’ means being married to multiple women at the same time, to me all extra-marital adventures are as good, or I should say, as bad as polygamy.

Boris Becker once infamously said, ‘Men aren’t made to be monogamous,’ after his wife divorced him for alleged extra-marital affairs. So, are some men polygamous by instinct? The civilization of our society has perhaps forced all men to stick to one partner through marriage, but then there have been people like Tiger woods. Then there are Strauss Kahn, Shane Warne and Shiney Ahuja- people who come immediately to mind. Then there are daily incidents of rape and other sexual assaults against women. It’s never the other way round. This is not to say that women are never polyandrous, but they are far few and in between. Women may change partners, but, unlike the men, they are seldom in multiple relationships at the same time. And while such women are readily labeled as ‘sluts’, the men are awarded titles like Casanova and Playboy. Also, the reason behind a woman’s sexual overtures may not be strictly sexual. Sometimes women give away their bodies outside their marriage in quest for true love and affection. But I’ve never heard of a man having reluctant physical relation with a woman to win her love. As the famous Indian sexologist Prakash Kothari has proclaimed, ‘Men give love to women to get sex; and women give sex to men to get love.’ In olden days, Kings used to have harems full of wives and concubines; never did ever a queen have a ‘male harem’. We have heard about the existence of ‘gigolos’, but for all practical purposes, a ‘sex worker’ anywhere in the world is assumed to be a woman. Prostitution isn’t the oldest profession in this world without a reason. A particular religion allows the man to have four wives, not vice-versa. Do not all these facts point to something very obvious?  So, are all the men who have been faithful to one partner all their lives really monogamous in their minds? I don’t mean to get offensive here but I don’t think so. How many of us ‘monogamous’ men do not drool over the sexy dancer in an item song? How many of us monogamous men would refuse to view a readily available ‘hot’ video? If a man stares at a woman, or even views her ‘obliquely’, he’s very unlikely to be appreciating her hair. If this is not mental polygamy, then what is? I dare say more men are mental polygamous than there are not.