The external resources and opportunities are facilitatory conditions to provide nurturing grounds for scaffolding knowledge development, particularly, in liberal, rational, and critical thinking capacity, in addition to the internal/personal endeavors or talents. These either necessary or sufficient cultural-economic-social capitals in enriching an intellect, you don't find in Albert Camus' situation which makes him special. For, class matters, in his unique case.
Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in a working-class
neighborhood in Mondovi, in French Algeria. His
mother, Catherine Hélène Sintès Camus with one ear deaf, was of Spanish-(Balearic) descent. Camus's father, Lucien Camus, a poor French-Algerian agricultural worker died in the Battle of the Marne in
1914 during World War I. Through his life, Camus never knew his father. He was a second-generation French
immigrant to Algeria.
In Oliver Todd's new biography - Albert Camus: A Life, he reveals that this slum kid, Camus, at the age of 43, became the second-youngest Nobel Prize winner, who was also an obsessive womanizer.
Most of us recognize the moral high ground that Camus stands for in fighting against social injustice. He articulates and revolts against any kind of oppression, or whatever disrespects the human condition. His legacies left in the novels and philosophical essays (e.g., The Stranger, The Plague, The Reflections on The Guillotine, The Guest, Jonas or the Artist at Work, The Fall, The Rebel...), are still read, studied and influential today. In 1960 Camus was killed in a car accident, leaving behind two unpublished novels, The First Man and The Happy Death.
Though the term "manizer", might have not been officially created, yet, the word, "womanizer", is quite popular in the recent on-growing sensational court cases. Depending on the nature of protagonists' gravitas, this old question can be asked again: Do personal affairs (particularly, related to marital, sexual events) affect the great achievements which are beneficial to mankind, such as those of the Super-Nova Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell; the superstars Elvis Presley, JFK, etc. ; the secondary stars of the rest of the social-cultural icons, and the "morality" they believe in?
Here is another article with more info regarding "Brilliant men always betray their wives" - by Telegraph Reporters, 13 JULY, 2006. My input begins at the end of this article.
"Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872-February 2, 1970) had four wives and numerous affairs. CREDIT: REX FEATURES
Einstein's affairs should surprise no one, says Desmond Morris. It is all in the genius's genes.
So Albert Einstein, did not, after all, spend all his waking hours chalking up complex symbols on a blackboard. According to letters newly released this week, he devoted quite a bit of it to chasing the ladies. And with considerable success.
To many, the idea of Einstein having 10 mistresses does not fit the classical image of the great, remote genius. Why was he wasting his valuable time with the exhausting business of conducting a string of illicit affairs - affairs that would cause havoc with his family life, damaging especially his relationship with his sons? The answer is that he, like many other intensely creative men, was over-endowed with one of the human male's most characteristic qualities: the joy of risk-taking.
Every creative act, every new formula, every ground-breaking innovation, is an act of rebellion that may - if successful - destroy an old, existing concept.
So every time a brilliant mind sees a new possibility, it is faced with a moment of supreme risk-taking. The new formula, the new invention, may not work. It may turn out to be a disaster. But the man of genius - such as Einstein - has the courage to plough ahead, despite the dangers, both on and off the intellectual field. Not that Einstein is by any means an isolated instance. Indeed, far from being the exception, he is closer to the norm where great men and sex are concerned.
During a presidential visit to Britain, John F. Kennedy once shocked an elderly Harold Macmillan when he complained to him that if he didn't have sex with a woman every day he suffered from severe headaches. Kennedy was insatiable and impatient. He was reported to make love with one eye on the clock and to be through with a girl as soon as he had had sex with her in three different ways. If possible, he preferred two girls at once and seduced almost every young woman he met, from starlets to socialites, secretaries to stewardesses. Oh yes, and not forgetting strippers.
But then the compulsion in dominant males to take the highest of risks - a compulsion that seems to be innate - is one that dates back to prehistoric times. Our arboreal relatives, the monkeys, simply fled up into the high branches when danger threatened and, while feeding, all they had to confront was a fruit or a berry. But when our early ancestors came down to live on the ground, they had to give up scampering aloft to escape and also had to face dangerous competitors and prey when turning to meat-eating as a new way of life.
To become successful hunters required a new personality trait - bravery. If the primeval hunters were to survive as carnivores they had to be courageous and take serious risks. The females of the tribe were too important to expose to these dangers - their vital reproductive role ruled them out. But the males were expendable. If, inevitably, a few of them were killed, the others could easily maintain the reproductive rate of the still very small tribes. So it was the males who evolved into the pack-hunters who would become genetically programmed as risk-takers and whose job it was to bring home the bacon.
Today, going to the office or the factory, or working on the farm - the modern equivalents of the ancient hunt - are far less hazardous, but the deeply ingrained urge to take risks still remains. Proof of this comes from the fact that men today are much more accident-prone than women. Throughout life, women are less likely than men to die of a violent accident. By the age of 30, males are 15 times more likely to die of an accident than females. For special males - the most adventurous ones - there are two choices.
Either they can engage in risk-taking of the physical kind - join the SAS, get launched into space, or trek to the South Pole -or they can explore new ideas, create new art forms or invent new technologies and thereby change the way we all live. Men with brilliant minds, whose creativity brings them enormous success, sometimes find themselves in a curious situation. They are so highly rewarded by society for their achievements that they are unable to limit their curiosity to new problems in their special fields. It starts to spill over into other areas.
Novel sexual experiences, for instance, suddenly seem irresistible. It is not the mating act itself that is so important - that varies very little. It is the thrill of the chase and the excitement of a new conquest that drives them on. Once the conquest has been made, the novelty of the affair soon wears off and another chase is begun. Each illicit episode involves stealth and secrecy, tactics and strategy, and the terrifying risk of discovery, making it the perfect metaphor for the primeval hunt.
Aiding and abetting these erotic adventures is the fact that the fame, power and wealth that these especially brilliant men have received as rewards for their achievements make them very attractive figures to the opposite sex. They may have a face like an angry hippopotamus but, thanks to their high status, they somehow manage to ooze sex appeal, much to the disbelief and dismay of the handsome failures who carry out menial tasks for them.
The great philosopher Bertrand Russell, who for all his undeniable intellectual brilliance could never have bedded a woman on looks alone, was described as suffering from ''galloping satyriasis". He claimed he could not see a sexual partner as sexually attractive for more than a few years, after which he had to make a new conquest. He had affairs with a long line of women, a few of whom he later married. They included a young secretary, an MP's wife, the daughter of a Chicago surgeon, a researcher, an actress, a suffragette, several teachers, the wife of a Cambridge lecturer and his children's governess.
His private life was described by one biographer as ''chaos of serious affairs, secret trysts and emotional tightrope acts that constantly threatened... ruinous scandal''. This was risk-taking of the highest order.
Picasso was also a sexual glutton, described by a friend as being obsessed with sex. There was a long procession of women in and out of his life: Fernande and Eva, Olga and Marie-Therese, Dora and Françoise, Alice and Jacqueline, and many more. He was quoted as saying: ''There's nothing so similar to one poodle dog as another poodle dog, and that goes for women, too.''
Similarly, his great friend, Gauguin, abandoned his family and moved to Tahiti where he was able to indulge in his passion for sexual adventures by welcoming a different local girl into his hut each night. Sometimes, he had as many as three in one night. And he continued his sexual odyssey even after his body was visibly disintegrating from syphilis that killed him.
That genius of the cinema, Charlie Chaplin, was an even more active sex addict, capable, he said, of ''six bouts a night''. Whenever he was bored he would set about seducing a girl. He had four wives (three of them teenagers) and an endless procession of mistresses, some of them alarmingly young. His greatest thrill was the prospect of deflowering a virgin. When one of his virgins became pregnant at 16 he was forced to marry her. That marriage lasted only two years, during which time he enjoyed the company of five mistresses.
As a young man he visited brothels, but later was attracted to talented and important women and managed to seduce a cousin of Winston Churchill's, the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, actresses Paulette Goddard, Mabel Normand, and Pola Negri, and William Hearst's girl-friend Marion Davies. However, his sexual risk-taking eventually led to his downfall and he was driven out of America as a '' debaucher'', his legacy forever tarnished.
But then men with great talent or power, from Elvis Presley to Bill Clinton, Toulouse-Lautrec to John Prescott, will, it seems, more often than not put their careers or family lives in jeopardy in order to satisfy the primeval hunter's thrill. It is, sadly, simply a by-product of the human exploratory urge, and one of the prices we - and wives the world over - have to pay for being the most innovative species on the planet."
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The above writing focuses on smart, brilliant men with supreme stamina embedded in risk-taking behaviors to seek females for satisfying the joy of hunting thrills. Beyond this bio-genetic reality, here is another way to look at it - from more than one sex-gender perspective - and my own explicit and implicit biases might not be avoided.
In reality, it is not always a one-way desire or intention of the shining males. These successful men, whether earning their prestige, power, wealth from brawn-brain, genetic-endowment, and/or heritage/legacy, can also easily become the targets of certain females (though, not so many as the male counterparts) with hypergamous/hyper-relational purposes and ambition, as if these counter-seekers are not fully blindly-awed, over-enamored by the dazzlingly mystified demi-gods. Socialites, on the other hand, may pursue a circle of the multiplied effect for fame, vanity, or opportunities. The well-known "Groupie Phenomenon" is another example, originating from the fan of a particular musician, celebrity, or musical group, who follows the star or band around, usually in hopes of getting more attention and interaction. Thus, the groupie is young women who hope to establish a relationship by offering sex to their fascinating males.
Philosophy and social psychology provide some insights to decode part of these human psyches from the perspectives of the Halo Effect, the Cult of Personality/Hero-Worship, Inferiority-Compensation of the death anxiety, and the defense mechanisms of Identification and Projection. In a real-life example, you might hear about the enamored fans who would not want to wash their hands accidentally touched by their demi-gods during the screaming, howling events, such as by the Beatles. When turning from the revolutionary desperado into the National hero, Mao Zedong was elevated into a demi-god status. Even during his old age, many charming Chinese women wished to get any meager chance, offering sex to satisfy the elderly political icon's favorite needs. They felt that was the supreme glory, honor, and pride to serve a man like a god. Other familiar cases are Charles Manson, the religious cults of James Jones' People's Temple, David Kerosh's the Davidian Branch, and the rest of famous tragedies in which, females tended to be the worshipers, or hypnotized into love trance to serve sex to their male gods. In these specific human conditions, morality/deontology as a code of conduct might require the interpretation from a particular philosophy, religion or culture. Among myriad branches of the modern science of morality, these phenomena are closely tied to the concepts of sociocultural evolution. Some evolutionary biologists, for example, sociobiologists, state that "morality is a product of evolutionary forces acting at an individual level and also at the group level through group selection." Some of them argue that the set of behaviors that constitute morality evolved largely "because they provided possible survival or reproductive benefits". Thus, humans evolved "pro-social" emotions. Heroes model righteous behaviors, promote positive psychology and satisfy the mass' imagination (though, hero-worship, most of the time, ends up in mere illusions).
The sexual appeal of females (the intellectual seduction of women does happen, but rare), to resist, is futile in most males' cases, partially, due to the bio-genetically ordained fact in males. Here is a long list of these events, since Alexander Hamilton to present:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_sex_scandals_in_the_United_States Will you be wondering this is just a tip of an iceberg?
Familiar facts of the bio-evolutionary research, sexual and mating patterns, the male tends to seek youthful and sexually attractive females. As to the female who selects robust, resourceful, and protective traits of males is due to the ramifications of the womb if the courtship behaviors are intended. Surely, males with wealth, power, status, like tigers with wings (如虎添翼), have more abundant assets and at-hand access to the desirable females than those who don't. Nevertheless, when females with certain bargaining chips, such as beauty, charms and the rest of male's favorite qualities, plus ambitions, the capturing acts are simpler than that of the males. A proverb goes this way, "Male chases female, like climbing a rugged mountain, while female to male, grabbing a piece of lace. 男追女隔重山, 女追男隔層紗". Historically and cross-culturally speaking, many successful families tutelage their young male offspring to be cautious toward the "gold diggers" or "fame-wealth-power-opportunists" who meticulously seek for "ready-made" success through males' build-ups when a time, fewer females got the opportunities to earn their own glories, while simultaneously, they encouraged their daughters to be hypergamous for advantageous conditions. The movie "Crazy Rich Asians", though fictional without avoiding a great amount of exaggeration and stereotypes on Asian cultural traits, it does tell some truth in this regard.
Voluminous cases show how slim the opportunities are for the common yet talented, ambitious, career-oriented, not to mention the plain female in fighting for a morsel of success under the male-dominant world throughout HIStory. A few opportunities are given to a small group of privileged females coming from prominent families with a well-educated upbringing, who tend to own a renowned husband, high-up parents, and/or established, well-to-do grandparents with an economic-politically resourceful lineage. The other opportunities happening to females, frequently occur in the entertaining and business enterprises where sex as the bargaining chip in the Quid-Pro-Quo silent transaction, female's gods-given-irresistible-tool is luring and oftentimes, works. The double-standard practice of the ubiquitous gender ideology supporting institutional hidden codes, on one hand, nurtures super/male's insatiable risk-taking behaviors, on the other hand, it also provides room for female's submission to the sexual exploitation.
Another fact shows when females possess power with which they are enabled to reverse the traditional norms of sex and gender thinking and behaving. For example, the harsh gender roles imposed on conservative Asia, the first empress Wu (武則天, 624-705 c.e.) of the Tang Dynasty, not only changed the politico-economic rule based on the cultural context at that time, but also reversed sex, gender, and family structure. She personally owned as many as she wanted of the male concubines and ruled as cruel as their counterparts, not different from the deeds of a typical emperor. Her daughter went even wilder than she, and Wu's daughter-in-law intended to replicate her dynastic mode, yet, failed, though. These extremely rare, capable women wielded tremendous power which, nevertheless, was derived either from powerful husbands, fathers, or mothers.
This is one of the main reasons explaining the subsequent dynasties, stringently reinforcing the exclusion of female royals in involving their males' politics. In the civilian households, the mother-in-law is always on high alert to guard against her daughter-in-law's influence on her sons and grandsons. This mother-in-law vs. daughter-in-law conflict is rampant in most of the genderized families throughout History. Ironically speaking, how women become the executioner of gender oppression! As the saying goes, “When people have been oppressed for so long; they become immune to it. They sometimes see oppression as an alternative means to oppressed others.”
Though in the 21st century, more females than males attend colleges and more jobs (ya, 79 cents per dollar of male) are available to females than ever before, still, some females look for luck or quick success via beneficial marriage or relational advantages to climb up the social ladder, whether intentionally, subconsciously, or necessarily. Conversely, we also find, though less, the reverse courtship and mating patterns in males who seek mature, resourceful, and successful females to be their partners or spouse-to-be. Indeed, sex, marriage, and family, are the immediate factory of the power generator, the most essential social institution among economy, politics, religion, education, health care, media, and technology, prevalent throughout human history - from the Monarchs to the civilian households.
In the social exchange theory (Thibaut, Kelly, Homans, Blau, and Levi-Strauss) - based on the capacity of rational calculation, stating the social behavior in the interaction of two parties engages a cost-benefit analysis to determine risks and benefits. Social exchange theory suggests that these calculations occur in various types of relationships: romantic, friendly, professional, and ephemeral. Social exchange theory claims that if the costs of the relationship are higher than the rewards, such as time, efforts and/or money invested in a relationship and not reciprocated, this could lead to psycho-economic imbalance. We know some marriage, or relational issues end in hostility, separation, divorce, abuses, abandonment, even into violent homicides when the gives-and-takes, or exchanging features appearing fissure, then widening into an unbearable imbalance, each side feels being victimized based on each one's unconscious calculation.
Regarding those successful men with tremendous power, fame, and/or wealth in the above-attached article, definitely, possess the Super Upper-Hand in rendering the risk-taking behaviors and the potentially unexpected and dysfunctional consequences. Their exchanging behaviors have a much higher degree of Freedom and Power than those of their counterparts who tend to be powerless, but not without having their own motives consciously or unconsciously. For example, in the recent sensational legal cases of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, they kept many females under control, who have myriad reasons to remain silent. It took a long period of time to expose their misconduct and even longer time for them to be convicted.
In short, another article regarding sex, gender, and power-structure would be a good sequel to this writing.
Wealth, power, and status act out human History! Sex/Eros, instinct, and emotion are the vital undercurrent of the species' thriving energy. "Man's world in accordance with the Life Instincts, in the concerted struggle against the purveyors of Death", Marcuse wrote, in his Eros and Civilization (1955). However, like the absolute power inviting corruption, with the excessive fame, power and/or wealth in the risky-sexual adventures tend to generate high prices to pay if prosecuted and convicted - as a proverb goes from Laozi " 天網恢恢, 疏而不失 - Though, the heaven net is cast loosely, nothing cannot be caught", or " 夜路走多了, 終會遇到鬼 - He who enjoys working things out in the dark, may not avoid the visit of the ghosts ". Some super-stars can be overwhelmingly above the Law, while others, in the long run, got caught, such as Al Franken, Bill Cosby, Bill O'Leary, Charlie Rose, Eliot Spitzer, Harvey Weinstein, James Rosen, Matt Lauer, Tavis Smiley and the rest in the growing long list.
From another perspective, if these men were not wealthy nor powerful, or just a Joe-six-packs, perhaps, females, media, and legality are less likely to cling to them for no immediate or indirect benefits or values. The outliers of Homo Sapiens lead the protagonist roles of human dramas which, in turn, need trivial roles, the commoners, and audiences as their background. Thus, a show can be completed.
"Industrialization demanded erotic austerity?" Or, just be mundane and safe? Maybe because of being the six-pack-joe, they are also less likely to attract certain seductive distractions and temptations that stimulate the high-risk takers' desire to play the most sensational hunting game. Perhaps, someday, a universal reversal of the gender role playing might happen to alter the current realities – with an opposite or different version of the game?
Now, returning to the onset of this writing, in real life, there is a non-Camusian type of womanizer who is also narcissistic, disguising themselves with a multi-faceted superior-inferior complex:
