You could be forgiven for feeling weary over the downward spiral of the middle east conflict. Here is something to lighten up the mood: Brilliant men always betray their wives, a headline at the Telegraph says.
In a nutshell, it’s in the geniuses’s genes. “The man of genius has the courage to plough ahead, despite the dangers, both on and off the intellectual field.” Last week’s release of Einstein’s letters has reignited the debate as to why brilliant men are prone to conduct a string of illicit affairs at the risk of causing havoc with their family life and damaging their professional career.
In modern times, the most adventurous males have two choices. Either they can engage in risk-taking of the physical kind such as joining the SAS, getting launched into space, or trekking to the South Pole, or they can explore new ideas, create new art forms or invent new technologies and thereby change the way we all live.
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Novel sexual experiences, for instance, suddenly seem irresistible. It is the thrill of the chase and the excitement of a new conquest that drives them on. Once the conquest has been made, the novelty of the affair soon wears off and another chase is begun. Each illicit episode involves stealth and secrecy, tactics and strategy, and the terrifying risk of discovery, making it the perfect metaphor for the primeval hunt.
As far as great men and sex are concerned, JFK was perhaps an exemplar.
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During a presidential visit to Britain, John F. Kennedy once shocked an elderly Harold Macmillan when he complained to him that if he didn’t have sex with a woman every day he suffered from severe headaches.
The great philosopher Bertrand Russell, who for all his undeniable intellectual brilliance could never have bedded a woman on looks alone, was described as suffering from ‘’galloping satyriasis”. He claimed he could not see a sexual partner as sexually attractive for more than a few years, after which he had to make a new conquest. His private life was described by one biographer as ‘’a chaos of serious affairs, secret trysts and emotional tightrope acts that constantly threatened… ruinous scandal'’. This was risk-taking of the highest order.
Is illicit sex the only way to satisfy the primeval hunter’s thrill? Or simply a by-product of the human exploratory urge? What would the post-modern feminists say?