Man-eating US and the raging Tiger

A white woman going after a black man with a golf club is somehow kosher. But ponder the ethnic reverse? Siddharth D Shanghvi examines...

It’s way past midnight. A woman discovers her husband is doing the cheats on her. During a blow up and drag down, she hurls her cellphone at his face, getting him in the chompers. He flees in his Cadillac only to jam right into a fire hydrant. His wife wields a golf club as he’s stuck in the car, breaking the back windows. Perhaps this is neither about Tiger Woods and Elin Noredegren nor is this a Terry McMillian potboiler spoiler (remember when Bernardine in Waiting to Exhale lighter fluids her husband’s car?) But, admittedly, the similarities are undeniable.

I told my friend S that a woman could go after a man with a golf club, and no one was tossing around the words ‘domestic abuse’. S looked sceptical, believing that this was really a private matter between a husband and wife. I pointed to the reverse: if a man took on a woman with a golf club, couldn’t she hear the police sirens already? My friend won the argument when she said this was not about boys or girls but the acceptable ways to treat people.

A white woman going after a black man with a golf club is somehow kosher. But ponder the ethnic reverse? When O.J. Simpson was tried for allegedly murdering his wife, the horror of his trial in America had all converse resonance of the Emmett Till Trial. (In the 1950s an all-white jury acquitted the murder of a black teenager, Till, at the hands of two white men, a case that added fuel to fire of the Civil Rights Movement sparked off by Rosa Parks.) In the O.J. Simpson case, decades later, a black man was tried for murdering his white wife. He was acquitted. The verdict divided a nation.

With Tiger Woods and his white wife, Elin Nordegren, the scenario is not as severe. After all, no one was murdered. It’s been almost acceptable -- even comical — for a white woman to chase a black — or mixed race, as Tiger famously said on Oprah — with a golf club. But if a black man were to hurl his phone at a white woman, then hunt her down with a golf club as she lay powerless in a car smash, the cops would have slapped more than just a traffic ticket.

Yet, neither race nor gender raised their politically correct heads in a case that saved American tabloids from going bust this winter and set off a twitter of internet jokes. (Sample: Heard of Nike’s new motto? Just do me. Of course, it remains to see how long either Nike or Elin hang on to this Cheetah.)

Elin Nordegren has every right to be mad at her husband. Not only is he a douchebag philanderer, he also writes some skanky text messages. (Remember what your grandma said about not bonking a bloke who can’t spell?) What sends my eyebrows north is America’s tedious and naïve relationship with sex -- and the morality that underscores its public discussion. First, there was all that gupshup of his talking dirty in bed. Quite frankly, did you expect him to quote the Kabbalah? Then there were those steamy Middle America whispers over all that wanton hair-pulling (no doubt, the wife said: “You want hair pulling, peanut, I’ll give you some hair pulling”).

Many Europeans, particularly the French, find such ‘scandals’ a big yawn. At Francois Mitterrand’s funeral, his wife Danielle and their two sons stood alongside the ex-president’s longtime mistress, Anne Pingeot. In Italy, President Silvio Berlusconi was making naughty with a hooker in Rome as Barack Obama was being sworn in. I guess that’s one comment on what Europeans think of Americans.

Same-sex couples are even more bored since many of them have institutionalised open relationships. With Tiesto humming in the backgrounds, two boyfriends could often be discussing the phallic failings of last night’s studmuffin. In sections of San Francisco, Tiger’s total of ten (but, hey, counting!) sizzlers could be chalked up as so pathetically meager to warrant a collection drive, and all his girls would be filed under the neat label of Wonder Bread Clones. The exemption of monogamy from marriage in Europe and in the unions of same-sex couples might not make such couples last any longer than those who choose commitment. But, boy, does it save a lot of folks from a lot of lies.

It’s equally plausible the nationwide outrage over one man’s womanising is how America sublimates its own moral failures. After all, President Obama feels no compunction accepting a Nobel Peace prize in the same month he sends out a further 30,000 young men out on field, to kill and to be killed, in a war that has practically defeated the American economy. Can such conceited displays of outrage stand in for a nation’s collective collapse of morality in times of war?

Siddharth D. Shanghvi is the author of The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay.

The views expressed by the author are personal.