Washington Post Sports Writer Likens Tiger Woods' Infidelity to Bank Robbery

Thomas Boswell, a sports writer for the Washington Post, is agonizing over the possibility that Tiger Woods will win the Masters. Boswell says that a Woods victory would come too quickly after his recent sex scandal:

If Tiger Woods wins the Masters on Sunday after all the damage he's done to golf, I plan to rob a bank on Monday; maybe then I'll win a Pulitzer Prize.

Will the madness ever end? Robbing a bank is a crime; there are always victims; it inherently involves force and coercion. Having consensual sex is not a crime; neither is it coercive or violent.

Bowell's article is riddled with platitudes and moralizing.  Boswell also lets the reader know that he feels that Woods disappointed him.  Well, I feel let down by people in the media (like Boswell) who should know that "heroes" are products of social construction and that no one is infallible under any complex set of social norms. Boswell was a fool to allow the squeaky clean narrative around Woods to convince him that Tiger only had sex with his wife. Boswell (and many others) was woefully naive.

Also, Boswell's article, like the Woods scandal itself, reveals America's silly and contradictory uneasiness with sexuality.  There are so many other things besides having consensual sex that Woods could have done to anger me. The sex thing really does not impact me at all. It strikes me as an issue for him and his family to address and analyze.

But in the United States, people like to pretend that most sex is dirty. To Boswell, having sex outside of the traditional heterosexual marital setting makes Woods flawed and unworthy of future accomplishments and praise. Dirty sex is like committing a violent crime.  At the same time, however, Americans are avid consumers of sex and sexual imagery. This country's bipolar cultural treatment of sexuality is dizzying -- and riddled with hypocrisy.

See also: Oh the Hypocrisy: Augusta Chair Rebukes Tiger Woods.