Whose Business Is It?

Private indiscretions are one's personal events, and as such to be kept personal, unless the individual in question deliberately invites public scrutiny. Most people - other than those in the public eye with 'celebrity' status who may enjoy the notoriety that accompanies multiple indiscretions because they feel it enhances their rogue status - would prefer to keep such things under wraps.

Fact is, though, when you're a public figure there will always be those in the media whose scruples are as compromised as the people whom they stalk.

And then there's that large question: if one is a public figure does one forego privacy? Not, perhaps, necessarily. But when errors of judgement are revealed in one's personal life leading to the conclusion that judgement may be equally impaired when making decisions impacting to a large degree on the well-being of others, say in the matter of a politician with the responsibility to act in the public interest, then perhaps so.

Even though individuals - particularly, but not necessarily only men - may feel entitled and/or empowered because of their achieved public status to prowl about for sexual gratification outside the confines of monogamous marriage or partnership, there is an awareness that such behaviour stands outside the confines of generally-sanctioned public morals. Best kept tight to the chest, and reveal no suspicious behaviour.

On the other hand, people in high political office often succumb to hubris of a type that convinces them that they are invulnerable, that their elite position and the public regard they imagine is due them will more than adequately shield them from prying eyes, while in fact, the reverse is true. The public will always be curious about the private lives of those in public view. The higher they stand, the greater the curiosity.

And when it is revealed, as it so often sordidly is, that those who revel in public pronouncements in favour of "family values" - and who so often bring their personal particularly outraged sense of censure down upon those who stray from those values - have betrayed their own families' trust, then public disdain, derision and disgust knows no bounds.

Yet here comes an industry anxious to grow and to identify 'legitimate' ailments which only they are capable of healing, whose professional pronouncements have the effect of convincing the public that shameful displays of infantile self-availment are not the result of lack of restraint and personal values, but rather a medical problem.

In one fell stroke they provide an acceptable 'excuse' for lapsed morals and a growing opportunity for themselves in enhanced services offerings.

The esteemed professionals who are hard at work on the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, to which every 15 to 20 years new socially-forgivable pathologies are added have now deemed juvenile sexual adventures in multiple serial partners is an illness, a mental illness capturing the frailties of people incapable of restraining their urgent desires.

The syndrome of sexual adventurism may now be understood as being recognized as a psychiatric disorder; "hypersexuality". An exceptional and unavoidable need to indulge in sex, leading otherwise intelligent and capable individuals toward seeking sex-fulfillment with a growing number of partners to fully satisfy their priapic need.

Psychiatrists are working feverishly to mount a defence against many types of atypical behaviours of the undisciplined, unbalanced self-availers among us. Rape as a result of unaware sleep-walking is one of those. Murder as a result of temporary hormonal imbalance another.

It's a nice crutch for those incapable or unwilling to restrain their baser instincts, and a very nice advantage to an ever-growing discipline hungry for an increasing number of clients. Free enterprise at its finest.