Fish & Chips: Using High-Tech Tools to Learn More About FishOh God, give it a rest already with this whole Tiger Woods infidelity outrage. For crying out loud, don’t you know? Everybody cheats: We cheat on our taxes, we cheat on our résumés, we cheat on our facepage entries for age and weight and, yes, we have cheated—or are about to cheat—on our husbands and wives.
According to the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 45 to 55 percent of married women and 50 to 60 percent of married men “engage in extramarital sex at some time during their relationship.” And that’s just those who admit to it. If you add 15 percentage points for those who are lying, 15 for people who would cheat but can’t—because they are too ugly, dumb and smelly to seduce somebody other than their ugly, dumb, smelly spouses—you’ve got a 85-90 percent chance that normal people in normal situations cheat.
“We wanted to believe he was above the fraudulent fray,” wrote sportswriter Jay Mariotti on Fanhouse.com, “true to his family values, good and wholesome enough to help shape the world well into the future.”
Hey, Jay, are you daft!? You put the world’s future in Tiger Woods’ hands? Well, I say, thank God his wholesome image has been tarnished. Because it was a fraud. Wholesome images are always a fraud. There are no wholesome people, only wholesome reputations. And now that Tiger has shanked his, it means there’s less pressure for the rest of us to live up to a lie. It’s time for the cheaters of the world to come out of the closet. Stand and be counted! Let everyone see how normal and natural it is to cheat. Let them see that cheating is human nature and there is nothing wrong with human nature. Let them know that maybe, just maybe, what is wrong is this unreasonable demand to be ever-faithful when every grain of your humanity is screaming, “Get some strange! Get some strange!”
Fidelity is so ’80s. Vows are for saps. Marriage is an eternity. Monogamy was never meant to withstand that kind of monotony. It’s unrealistic. That’s why I propose that all marriages should have an Infidelity Mulligan for every five years of wedlock. That’s one affair for every five years of bondage—er, marriage, which I truly believe will help keep boredom at bay and be useful as a marital negotiating tool: “Honey, dear, baby—how about a two-hour hot-oil and full body massage in exchange for an extra Infidelity Mulligan?” If that isn’t win-win, I don’t know what is.
Of course, we are drifting into dangerous waters here. Guidelines must be established so as not to critically injure the marriage. Naturally, the rules would be slightly different for each spouse:
Mulligan Rules for Men (stepping out on wives):
1. Condoms Mandatory.
2. One Night Stands Only (emotional or romantic connections are prohibited. No returnsies).
3. No Friendsex (unless her friend is super hot and promises to keep her mouth shut).
4. No Sugar Daddying (purchasing expensive gifts for your mistress, such as jewelry or breast enhancements, is expressly forbidden. That money should be spent on cleaning and cooking appliances for your wife).
5. Ménage à Trois Management (if you manage to pull off a complicated Ménage Méneuver and convince the mistress to join you and the wife in bed, then it’s not really cheating, and the mulligan is restored).
Mulligan Rules for Women (stepping out on husbands):
1. Condoms Mandatory (two condoms are required: one by him and one giant, nonoxynol-drenched, 5-foot body condom to be worn by her).
2. Penis Inferiority Respect (size of lover’s penis must be considerably smaller than husband’s).
3. Re-Sanitization Procedure (every home should have a Marital Re-entry Decontamination Shower and Fumigation Chamber to eliminate any germs she may have picked up).
4. Sugar Daughtering Permitted (wife may receive expensive gifts from lover, especially big-ticket items, such as automobiles or jet skis. Breast enhancements are acceptable too, provided the husband chooses the shape and size).
5. No Lover Bringing-Homing (bringing home a lover for a three-way is not acceptable, unless the lover is a woman, in which case, um, yeah, that’d be OK).
6. No Oral.
7. No Anal.
8. No Vaginal.
9. No Land Dwellers (wife may not have sex with any of your friends, nor her coworkers, nor neighbors, nor, for that matter, anyone who lives in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia or Antarctica. Basically, she may not have relations with any man who lives on an occupied landmass. She may have sex with an Eskimo from the Arctic ice shelf, on the ides of January, on an iceberg—populated by a flock of agitated penguins—if that’s the sort of thing she goes for. Perv!).
Write to ed@edwindecker.com (to receive his mulligan) and editor@sdcitybeat.com. For graphic images of orgiastic penguins, visit www.edwindecker.com.
