Thursday, April 08, 2010

Cast the first stone at Tiger Woods?

As we all know and have heard for many months, Tiger Woods was found to have cheated on his wife with possibly over a dozen women. The public reacted very strongly with outrage. Many of Tiger's numerous sponsors, such as Gillette, Accenture, GM, and AT&T among others dropped their sponsorship of him over this.

Obviously what Tiger Woods has done is certainly immoral. A marriage bond should not be broken and a married man should not sleep with other women. There should be unity within a family and this is broken when a man commits adultery.

However, I believe there is also a strong double standard. If you remove Tiger's wife from the picture, then most people would see nothing wrong with what he did. In fact, he would be honored as a manly man that others ought to mimic. He would be put on a pedastal. Other people who have been successful with many women have been held up as examples. Having one partner after another is seen as perfectly acceptable and good.

In fact, many commercials, no doubt from some of Tiger's previous sponsors, show men involved in sexual relationships with women they've just met or multiple women. The implication is that if you use their product, you too can be awesome like them. Look at commercials for razors. There's always a guy who's about to shave with a random girl nearby, who he appears to have slept with overnight. And she doesn't seem to be his wife or even committed partner. Commercials imply you will "get more action" and more girls if you choose their product.

But then when a man does what the commercials promote, he's totally despicable. a subhuman. It seems like the only crime in our society is "cheating". Sure, have sex with a hundred random women, but the minute one of these "relationships" overlap, you are a immoral monster. I'm not saying what Tiger did was good, I'm just saying there's a double standard.

Immorality is not dependent on how people feel about something. It's as though people are upset because his wife feels bad. What if his wife said she didn't care if he had sex with dozens of women? I assume no one would criticize Tiger anymore. So the main thing, if not only thing, people are focusing on is how Tiger is making someone else feel. People are not saying what he did is objectively wrong, they are just saying he hurt someone emotionally. Perhaps we ought to strive for greater levels of purity in general.

I agree that this is a worse situation than a typical "player" who goes from girl to girl. This involves a family and children. My point is that we shouldn't be casting the first stone, simply because we arranged our sexual trysts in a slightly different order.

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