" I've looked on many woman with lust..."

“I've looked on many women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me”. These were the words of Jimmy Carter the former CEO of the United States.

I find it almost impossible to add on to his candid remark which may be universal about men. I felt comfortable reading Jimmy Carter’s comment because sometimes this unholy feeling creeps in, which will not from now on! And if any “man” chooses to deny or distance this comment as alien to his chemistry he must be “Janus – faced” and an incorrigible hypocrite. Well in a free world one can choose to be so or not and that should not bother anybody alarmingly.

“Ay, every inch a king. When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause? Adultery? Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery? No. The wren goes to’t and the small glided fly does lecher in my sight. ....”.  The bard has comforting words that certainly does not spell doom and pell –mell for those of us who see comfort in Jimmy Carter’s observation .

Could there happen to be a man amongst men who would not ever covet lustfully a woman who is not his lawful wife? 

It is also said (quote),”Passion is the evil in adultery .If a man has no opportunity of living with another man’s wife, but if it is obvious for reason that he would like to do so if he could, he is no less guilty than if he is caught in the act”. That was St. Augustine with puritanical religiosity of the early centuries.Which certainly forbade quite badly for the many who were St Augustine's contempraries as well as many of us.

The fact is that ‘coveting’ which Carter meant has to have a reciprocal action if it is not to end in a limbo. That brings us to adultery and which must have a respondents to call it so. I have not heard many women being candid as Carter was. Though disconcertingly for the prudish of the female sex, (there are still many around), the statements of Madhavikutty (Kamala Das) would be loathing. That lot among women would not even hesitate to call the late literary romanticist, Mrs. Kamala Das, lecherous and will eff and blind to damn her for bringing forth disrepute upon the female species.

Not many among women in our societies would speak openly about matters mentioned here. However it is only a common matter of logical deduction or inference that women are not a distinctly frigid species to not think as men do. It is true that social conditioning and morals laced and pickled in hypocrisy of ‘dos and don’ts’ taught while young play a dominant role in damming the rapids of biological exuberance.

It was quite some time ago and I was in casual discussion of “nothing “with an acquaintance of mine. Without deliberating, the topic of discussion moved into matters of man -woman relationship. Though we agreed that the moral fence is what pulls back the lecherous temerity in human beings, it is also precisely the matter that encourages jumping over the fence. We wondered if either of us could confidently state that these matters of moral restraints and dos and don’ts will stay in the next century. The word “adultery” may be consigned as an antediluvian word. Without any deliberate intent we moved into topics of our life before marriage and after, though we did not specifically broach on the subject of our personal adherences.She gave me the story of her friend who does not waste an opportunity to accuse her husband of misdemeanour, so that she could either be at ease with her liaisons outside or delude to feel satisfied that her acts  are tit for tat.

It was then that she did a sort of “Jimmy Carter”, when she said that she do fanatsise about other men in times of intimate moments with her husband (boyfriend), but has not found it enlivening. But she is not very fearful of maledictions from heaven or the taboos and conditoning associated with morality, because of her virtual escapades.A perfect victim for St. Augustine!

I wonder if the elements of priggish forthrightness will proscribe this post.