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Obey the rules of adultery
ADULTERY is very much on all our minds these days. It seems to be causing surprisingly serious problems, high and low, and I have come to the conclusion that it's not just that people are breaking the rules. They don't know what the rules are.
To my astonishment we now have a support group in London for mistresses of married men. This is not an activity in which women should be supported at all, of course, but like everybody else they think they have rights, I suppose. I heard the woman who started it talking on the radio on Wednesday to the Marquess of Bath, a prominent rule-breaker - otherwise known as the Loins of Longleat and taker unto himself of lots of extramarital wifelets - who believes in being open about everything.
Clarification is obviously needed.
The problem is that the rules which work for middle-class adultery are not those which apply to the upper classes. The upper classes, obviously committed to their marriages by land, fortunes and titles, feel less threatened by adultery and are therefore less secretive within their own circle. However, having more money and addresses, they can easily arrange to be much more tactful and save the spouse's face.
Lacking these practical advantages, and more inclined to the romantic view of marriage, the middle classes are much more threatened by adultery; it is more difficult to ignore and more likely to lead to divorce. Forced to pretend it can never happen, they must therefore be completely secretive and should ideally avoid lovers within their own circle, which the upper classes, by contrast, prefer.
Trouble comes when a husband and wife do not share one or the other view. So the main rule of adultery, and of marriage, is to declare your conventions first, to avoid unnecessary disappointment. The second rule is that mistresses have no rights.
SOMEBODY was bound to say it, and somebody finally has, and in the Guardian, of course: one Will Hutton argued last week that the big salary increases that top executives award each other, and this sort of greed generally, must be blamed on the public school system. This is nonsense, and ignorant nonsense too. Obviously Mr Hutton has never crossed the Channel.
Of course it is disconcerting to meet people who earn more than pounds 500,000 a year, as I often did during the Eighties. And it is true that some -many - of the highly paid are grossly overpaid. That may be quite wrong - and it is stupid of shareholders to allow it. But there is nothing particularly British or public school about it. I can't say that I have ever been struck by an ugly rush of ex-state school boys hurrying to turn down these fat salaries when they are offered.
European executives regularly give themselves far bigger salaries than the British do, and in the absence of wicked elitist public schools and the British class system, they don't even feel apologetic about it. Self-serving cliques spring up everywhere: that is just a fact of life. In France it happens at the prestigious tertiary Ecoles, in the United States it happens at graduate school.
What is striking is that jobbery-for-the-boys is not, apparently, quite so blatant in England as elsewhere. The truth is that, for all their failings, the best English public schools are still the defenders of a truly liberal education, in the midst of the educational wreckage all around them.
FIRST we had Anita Hill. Now we have Sabino Gutierrez, the man who has just won a million dollars in damages for being sexually harassed by his woman boss.
Gutierrez, an employee of a hot tub company in Los Angeles - where else? - claims he was repeatedly kissed and touched up by the company's finance director, a glamorous mother-of-two, Maria Martinez, who often closeted herself in his office with him for the purposes of unwanted fondling. So menacing were her advances that he felt obliged to let her into his own house and make love to her there, against his will. The unhappy man was victimised in this way for six long years, until he got married and found he was suddenly passed over.
If ever there was a can of muddled worms, this is one. My heart goes out to people who are genuinely forced into the stationery cupboard for a good groping. But it should be recognised that allegations of sexual harassment can provide the incompetent with a ready-made excuse.
There is nothing more shameful (and treacherous to her own sex) than for a woman to take a man to an industrial tribunal with unfair accusations of sexual harassment to cover up her own failure - unless it is a man doing the same thing, when he makes himself even more ridiculous.
THE clothes designer Vivienne Westwood is the kind of thing this country does best; deathly pale, eccentric, anarchic and somehow rather dangerous, she is flying the flag for a louche originality that is peculiarly British.
However, I had not associated her with healthy living; as I know to my cost, her tight whaleboned bustiers are as much of a threat to the liver and lights as her stacked shoes are to the Achilles tendon.
How wrong one can be. 'I'm promoting cigarettes' she said recently on The Late Late Show, with a packet displayed prominently in her cleavage, 'as a reaction against puritanism, because puritanism can seriously damage your health.' And how right she is. Puritanism - pouring righteous indignation into the wrong causes and disapproving of those pleasures you don't yourself seek - can be very damaging to the health, and to the health of the nation too.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, May 23, 1993
