a dirty ditty, or:

 the peril of office parties that spouses also attend

 

i meet a handsome man

and see his outstretched hands
then i see his red sea eyes

 and part my bondaged thighs

 for his unfamiliar, liberated land 

we all know someone who has either committed or who is currently committing adultery. if we don't know them personally, we definitely know of them.  i would hazard to say that it's a pretty common practice, though frowned upon by many (reminds me of the line in a film about masturbation on planes not actually being illegal, just frowned upon).   anyway, for some reason i'm thinking about adultery today and have written a little limerick about the terribly terribly serious subject, a subject that people tend to take very personally and become quite upset about--one more to add to the list of topics that should remain off limits when with the prim, faint of heart, or the easily inflamed.  limericks are, by definition, short little things (usually 5 lines with specific aa/bb/a rhyme scheme) that are bawdy in nature, and more:  they violate taboos).  adultery, though usually a violation of cultural taboos, is more complicated than that. 

today adultery is understood to be the same as sexually cheating--upon a marital or otherwise-committed partner of the domestic and/or sexual variety-- and people abhor being cheated, and don't like their stuff to be contaminated (adultery also relates to purity).  men cheat on women, men cheat on men, women cheat on women, women cheat on men.  but long, long ago, somewhere around the the time that the term became one commandment of the ten that christians try to remember, it was a term having less to do with morality (as it is typically understood today), and rather more to do with property rights.  of men.

women were, of course, considered chattel.  as such, if a married woman had sex with any man other than her husband, that man was committing adultery and was the primary offending party, as he was stealing and sullying another man's property.  a married man having sex with an unmarried woman was stealing from the woman's father, and was required to make restitution for vandalizing, basically--the adulterer had rendered another man's daughter spoiled goods, in terms of future marriageability.  an unmarried man having extra-marital sex with an unmarried woman was really having pre-marital sex: when caught he just paid the dowry and then married her--though this was not necessarily a situation less egregious or more simply solved than the others:  this man may not have been what the father considered a reasonably attractive bidder in the auctioning off of his good--thus, this son-in-law was condemned to living a lifetime with a man he had robbed.   but really:  poor, poor women.  all they wanted then was some spicy fun with someone they were actually attracted to for one reason or another.  

i wonder about the ways that women today are still enslaved---regarded as the property of some other bigger entity.   around the world, women are "protected" from their freedom of sexual choice (by the institution of legislation or adherence to custom--i can't stretch the definition of protection to include harming someone who is in violation of the norm) by their paternalistic partners or their paternalistic governments or their paternalistic religious doctrines--.  i am for some reason focused today on the ways that women are still annexed bodies of the power-holding male structures under which we (women) all move (no pun intended).