Jensen Huang, Marc Antony, And Older Men With Younger Women - A Man's Birthright

When Bill Baxter went in for his yearly physical - well, not exactly yearly since at his age what ails him would either improve or do him in, so why find out before the time came? - Dr. Sherman said, 'You're in fine shape, Bill, heart of an athlete and prostate of a young man'. 

'Numbers don't lie', replied Bill, a man who ordinarily never paid attention to actuarial tables, IRS life expectancy projections or Treasury Department expectations for bond maturity.  He had always been a come-what-may kind of guy, taking life as it, mining its treasures, putting up with its frustrations, and accepting tragedy; but now, suddenly, someone had flipped the channel.  He was no longer looking at the future with any enthusiasm and was spending more and more time dwelling on the past. 

What bothered him most was his sexual insignificance.  God's greatest irony was to create men with a lifelong interest in sex, but to afford them only a few short decades to do something about it. 

Jensen Huang, former CEO of Nvidia, one of the world's biggest companies, was no different.  He was an  older man after all, subjected to the same divine irony as any other.  Wealth, intelligence, influence, and renown are are not insulating material  There is something primal about it all, something hardwired in men's brains.  We were meant to spread our genes far and wide, sexual Johnny Appleseeds, always restive, hungry, and on the prowl 

Bill Baxter had had his share of lovers in his life - the delicious Sultan's princess, Emriye; the Kashmiri queen, Usha, the silky orphan from Soweto, and many more.  Color was no bar, nor continent, nor anything.  

Former French presidential candidate Dominque Strauss-Kahn, a known womanizer, when caught in flagrante delicto with a harem of prostitutes, he famously said, 'How was I to know they were prostitutes? All women look the same with their clothes off' and for him this was the truth. He was not just eclectic in his taste, he was indiscriminate.  Any woman would do, any kind, any color, any class. 

Julius N'gomo, president of a central African republic, was impressed by Strauss-Kahn.  'He's like us', N'gomo said referring to African men's birthright, a woman a day while caressing the Nubian beauty at his side.

N'gomo and his palace retinue had laughed when American President Bill Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky came to light.  What on earth was the leader of the free world doing with an intern sucking his dick under the Lincoln desk?

'It all depends on what is, is', the President testified to Congress, insisting, 'I did not have sex with that woman'; and N'gomo perfectly agreed. What went on with Monica Lewinsky was indeed not sex at all, and a real president would have fucked her properly on the table, in the Presidential Suite, in the rose garden, and in the war room.

Which leads to Jensen Huang featured in an AI send up with his young beautiful Chinese paramour and spy against a background of his scowling battleax wife.  Every man seeing the photo thinks the same thing. Oh, to be Jensen Huang. 

This thing about younger women gets worse as men age. The Coleman Silk character in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain is having an affair with a much younger woman.  His friend and colleague calls him on it, saying she is not of the same background, education and culture, and more importantly she is being shadowed by her schizophrenic, dangerous ex-husband. 'She's nothing but trouble, Coleman', he says. 

 

Silk pauses, reflects, hesitates, but then replies, 'Granted she's not my first love, and granted she's not my best love; but she's certainly my last love.  Doesn't that count for something?'

In Coleman's case it very much does.  A respected man wrongly accused by colleagues at the college where he teachers and was dean, prematurely widowed, and angry at the system which caused his disgrace and his wife's death, finds solace, comfort, satisfaction, and renewal in his relationship with Faunia Farley, janitor, cleaning woman, and milker at a local dairy. 

It is an old story, older men who leave their wives for or have an affair with a younger woman. There is something inevitable about a man's desire well into his elder years.  Konstantin Levin, Tolstoy's character in Anna Karenina notes God's greatest irony - to have created an intelligent, sentient, creative, insightful, humorous soul, granted him but a few decades on earth and then consigned him for all eternity in the cold, hard ground of the steppes. 

 

A more severe irony is that this same God created men with a lifelong desire for women, but granted them but a few decades to satisfy it.  The longer a man has to fulfill his sexual desire, the luckier he is. Few men whose virility persists well into advancing years do anything about it, either so set in their ways, hopelessly married, or somehow faithful to the idea of fidelity. 

Jensen Huang is by no means old, but again, take a look at his wife - he's old enough to know better, and sitting on billions he knows he can afford to do anything he wants.  Sexual desire for a lithe, beautiful, adoring young thing can addle the most brilliant brain.  

John F Kennedy, the American president so admired by Julius N'gomo because not only did he have his woman a day, a la Africano, but the likes of Marilyn Monroe, also got caught in flagrante delicto with an East German spy.  Rather than out him, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made a deal - go slow on civil rights, and I will keep my mouth shut; and by the way, the next time be carefwho you fuck. 

There is a certain entitlement that goes with wealth. If you have millions - or billions in Huang's case - you can pay off anyone.  So look at it from Huang's perspective.  He already has more money than he can ever use, youth is fleeting and ephemeral, and although he might be out Nvidia's door, many others will open for him the very next day. 

The Sultan of Izmir, grand pasha of the Ottoman Empire, master of a harem of twenty young women from Azerbaijan to Palestine had written in his memoir:

She came to me in flowing silk, a delicate flower, an Arab princess worthy of Cleopatra and Nefertiti but without their worldliness. She was as innocent as the morning dew, as nubile and desirous as a maiden, a sheer delight. 

And the next night came Usha, olive-skinned beauty from the Levant, dressed in satin, covered with pearls and jewels from the Orient

And the next night came a blonde star, a green-eyed daughter of Alexander the Great from the hills of Mathura...

So why was Jensen Huang any different from the Sultan of Izmir. Oh, yes, patriotism - in his sexual delirium he weakened America's chip competitiveness. Nothing was more important than feeding that need. We've all been there.  Moral rectitude, bank balance, opprobrium, censure all have zero meaning in the face of that desirable, ineffably beautiful, lithe, youthful prize sitting before them. 

Perhaps the most famous and disastrous love affair between an older man and a younger woman was that of Marc Antony, Triumvir of Rome, and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen.  So besotted was he, so completely seduced by her and 'the sybaritic East'  that he let her lead his insurrectionist navy against the young Emperor Augustus.  She betrayed him, the Battle of Actium was lost, and Antony disgraced. 

Why should Mark Antony – in his early 50s at the time of this love affair with Cleopatra (old certainly for Rome of 41 BC but also for Shakespeare’s England) – behave any different than older men in general?  Antony’s colleagues, Philo and Demetrius, talk of his “dotage” in the first line of the play.  Octavius refers to him as the “old ruffian”. Enobarbus calls him an “old lion”. 

Yet Cleopatra seems not to have aged at all since they met ten years before; but only added to her youthful beauty and sexuality. Therefore, not only was Antony the lover of a beautiful younger woman, but one who could, at the end of this life satisfy all his life’s fantasies, and desires – all of which become more important when the reality of them is only a thing of the past. 

So, cut Jensen Huang some slack. He did what all men do or want to do.  He is not an outlier, but part of the mainstream; and oh, yes, Elon Musk will hire him and the two together will make trillions and remake the world in their image.  Not bad for a serial adulterer.