The Vance Affair

 

Vance

It seems to me there is something wrong with how we are looking at the General Vance affair. It takes two to have sex. This was a longstanding consensual relationship. Why is it all his fault, and the other party, Major Brennan, a victim? There is an obvious injustice here.

The argument, no doubt, is that there was an imbalance in power. He was illegitimately trading power for sex. But why is this wrong, yet it is okay to trade sex for power, as the woman was doing? Why is one immoral, and the other admirable?

Since sex is rather easy to obtain in our present society, I doubt Vance was even doing that. More likely trading power for intimacy, for an emotional bond, for the illusion of being loved. And how much power did he actually have over his “victim” in the relationship? Given that society at present always blames the man, the woman has absolute control: if she did not get what she wanted out of the relationship, she could blackmail him at any time. As, it seems, she ultimately did. Apparently, she was recording his phone calls.

While paternity tests show that one of Brennan’s two children is Vance’s, these same tests show that a second, that she claimed was his, was not. In other words, we also discover she was not being faithful to the relationship, and was trying to get him to pay support for a child who was not his.

Apart from who is to blame, or more to blame, in this case, this is all an illustration of why it is best to avoid sex in the workplace. Traditionally, we did this by segregating the sexes. Now by integrating the sexes we have opened a hogshead of worms. Given human nature, there is now no way to avoid these exploitative relationships and special dealings. The problems of influence peddling, sex peddling, and blackmail are probably also reasons why homosexual sex was traditionally frowned on: it introduces the same problems.

Brennan