Heart of darkness

Psst – is the coast clear? Any ladies present?

Who am I kidding? The Daily Duck is a more male-dominated environment than the Gent’s toilets during the half-time break in the Superbowl at the annual convention for America’s Top 500 CEOs.

So given that, check this article out, lads.

The other woman is, simply and crudely, a door left ajar, through which he almost certainly has no intention of passing. She is somebody different to shag, where the need to do so is driven not by an uncontrollably rampant libido but by a deeply located fear that This Is All There Is, the end of the line, and that the next stop can be only death...

...Sex with other women, he comes to feel, is all that stands between him and the grave and the general and widely ignored futility of the human condition. Men see this futility clearer than women because their lives are more obviously futile. That’s why so many of them top themselves, for no apparent reason. For a man, an affair is, almost always, nothing to do with the woman involved. It’s not really anything to do with sex, either. It ’s about life and death. And that’s it, nothing more or less.

...

It’s regarded as a terribly empty and insulting platitude, but when a man utters the cliche “it meant nothing to me”, he means it, completely. Women refuse to accept this, perhaps because they can’t imagine being in that situation themselves without some form of emotional attachment, but a man is more than capable of having repeated, regular, illicit sex — risking losing the woman he loves and the family they have spawned — with someone he can, quite possibly, barely stand to be around.

Back in the 1840s, The Times used to be nicknamed The Thunderer. Jonathan Gornall (aka Mircowave Man) seems intent on reviving the epithet single-handedly.

What do you reckon? Brutally honest, or just plain brutish?