What's The Difference Between Flirting And Harassment? - Money

It seems ironic that hundreds of men endowed with the aphrodisiac of power, as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called it, would now be on Jeffrey Epstein's list. 

Epstein  and Ghislaine essentially pimped for the likes of Larry Summers and Bill Clinton when these men could have had any woman they wanted.  

Kissinger himself, poster boy for aphrodisiacal power, a fat, ugly man who advised presidents, bedded sophisticated Georgetown matrons and Hollywood starlets with little more than a 'come hither'. 

So what were these Epstein men thinking? Alright, an orgy is not an affair.  A bacchanal is not a tryst, a saturnalia, or a cinq-a-sept. Few men can resist the temptation of a Great Gatsby sexual jamboree, a Roman carousal on a hyper-libidinous scale.  A party with no limits, a halcyon of pleasure.  

Apples and oranges, mutually exclusive. Men of power want and can have both - the thrill and satisfaction of seduction; and an Eyes Wide Shut sexual convention.  Which is why the allure of politics in high places is so appealing.  Sexual abandon is a perk of office, even in today's censorious times.  

No one should care who sleeps with whom in Washington, but the zeitgeist demands responsibility, fidelity, and accountability everywhere. ‘If he cheats on his wife' said many women about President Bill Clinton, 'then he will cheat on the country'. 

Of course as the French well know, this is nonsense. They have perfected the afternoon affair, accepted if not welcomed mistresses, courtesans, and consorts.  Former President Sarkozy kept his mistress in the Elysees Palace, and Mitterrand's mistress and illegitimate daughter wept at his grave alongside his wife and family. 

Former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, caught in flagrante delicto with a high-priced call girl in the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington, admitted all, but added that he was simply too busy to pursue an ordinary affair.  His electorate didn't like him cheating on his wife, period, and roundly removed him from office. 

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, international financier and principal contender for the Presidency of France, was accused of engaging in prostitution, especially commercial bacchanals. When pressed, he denied guilt or complicity, saying, 'How was I to know they were prostitutes?  All women look the same with their clothes off'. 

Getting back to the individual affair - a man of wealth and power with a younger, beautiful woman - it takes two to tango, complicity is a given, and involvement is a matter of equilibrium, a delicate balance. 

There is one irrefutable truth in life - men are born with a predatory sexual instinct and never lose it till the day they die.  Woman are born with a similarly irrefutable and irrepressible need for protection and care.  What creature is more vulnerable than a pregnant woman and the protectress of her children?

While feminism has unhooked the yoke of servility from women's necks, their hardwired desire to get something out of a relationship - collectibles, a savings account, joint ownership, baubles - has never disappeared. 

A woman who understands men's vulnerability to feminine allure and who is practiced in using her wares for commercial advantage, becomes a man's equal without the trappings of feminist flag-waving. All of Shakespeare's women run rings around their male suitors, play them for fools, entice, trap, and secure them for pride and profit.  Things have not changed since the days of Elizabeth I and likely never will. 

Modern feminist censure has attempted to give legal protection to what had always been a rite of passage - men's unwanted advances.  Savvy women forever have known how to deflate a male ego and send the fool scurrying for cover. They have known when and how to avoid dangerous circumstances, and have always understood the idea of an enabling environment, or as the Catholic Church used to say, ‘the occasion of sin'. 

Prescriptive behavioral algorithms ('Is it OK if I touch you there...are you sure...may I kiss you...?) are silly, unnecessary, and ignorant. Yet, thousands of gullible, uxorious men and fanatical women have bought them hook, line, and sinker. 

Left to their own devices, women will encourage the advances of a rich man and brush off those of a pest.  Why waste one's time? 

Callous, cynical, misogynist? Hardly, just a matter of facts.  A man in a sharply tailored Armani suit, million dollar Rolex on his wrist, and Lamborghini parked at the curb is simply far more attractive than Arnold from Accounting or the boy next door.  'Gold digger' is an abusive, ignorant term.  Of course women are looking out for Number One. When have they not? Why wouldn't they prefer Mr. Lamborghini to Mr. Prius?

Under ordinary circumstances, a woman alone at a table approached by any man Jack would brush him away like a pesky fly.  His advances would be thought harassment. If Mr. Lamborghini were to approach the same table, the woman sipping her martini would invite him to sit down.

It is naive to assume that supply and demand, the hardcore of economics, does not apply socially.  Who doesn't appraise opportunities for self-interest? What marriage is not contractual?  There are always rules, both written and unwritten, which govern marital relationships.  Cooking vs washing up, coming home at night, slippers by the fire...codicils change over time, but are always present. 

Indecent Proposal is a movie starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore, the story of a wealthy, charming, attractive man who offers an impecunious, married, honest and faithful woman a million dollars for one night with him.  There it is in a nutshell - the essence of sexual favors.  What's one night with this beautiful man on his yacht under the stars, dreamily sipping champagne and welcoming his romance and sexual attention?

Of course she accepts the proposal, and the story has a Hollywood ending, but the lesson is clear.  Just as Othello said to his judges after admitting his guilt for murdering Desdemona, 'I did this for you', saving you from yet another treacherous, duplicitous, deceitful woman. 

Posthumus in Cymbeline is no different in his misogyny, and the play has some of the most hateful, vengeful verses of any of Shakespeare's works.

Unfair perhaps and deserving of the universal opprobrium of audiences; but women hold the hole card - they are the only ones who know for sure who is the father. The Saudis have taken this to heart with a vengeance, burkas, chastity belts, dark dungeons, and all the rest. 

In other words, yet another example of sexual contract - exaggerated perhaps, anathema to many, but with more than a grain of salt.  It is not that women cannot be trusted; it's just that they will, like men, always follow their own self-interest. 

One never needs to ask what is the difference between flirting and harassment. The answer has been as clear as day since time immemorial - money.