What humiliation would you tolerate for a powerful and intelligent man?
an Anglo-Greek tragedy in 3 Acts
Something bizarre happened to me at a Westminster summer party last week. For therapeutic purposes, I have decided to once again write about the indignity and depravity of the Westminster dating scene. Forgive the paywall.
As I like to remind this sinful nation, I suffer from PTSD from my exposure to British sexual norms since moving here at the tender age of 18 from a pious Greek home. My parents were very relaxed about dating; my mom always encouraged me to have as many boyfriends as I liked (she was delusional about my sexual prowess from a young age). Still, as a family, we are very tame and unambitious in our hedonism, limiting our indulgencies to the culinary domain. I am a storyteller and future cult leader, so I am more adventurous and open-minded than the rest of my family, but even if I am walking into a sex club head-to-toe clad in PVC, I am still clutching my pearls.
Prologue
I freak out with the ease with which people kiss and tell in politics. On election night, I was approached by a man who I had never met before but who I knew because we go on the same TV channels. Within the first 10 minutes of meeting me and completely unprompted, he said he ‘shagged’ (I loathe this word, but it is what he used), a woman we both know and occasionally work with. The woman in question is successful and attractive, with about x10 the mating value of the man using and abusing his interactions with her for clout.
By the way, readers, the only man in Westminster who has seen me naked (salivating over my Mediteranean bikini pics on Instagram doesn’t count you Anglo-Saxon freaks!!1!!1) was 6’2”, blonde with blue eyes, a six-pack, a degree from Cambridge and a title as vain as an old boy on his third bag. So if any SW1 ogre ever commits the ultimate sin of exaggerating their experience in the Department of Hellenic Affairs unless they look like a chiselled cherub, please refer them to HR (me) to dispense their punishment (I will #MeToo the bastards like it’s 2020 and Hilary is still running).
Act 1
Anna Karenina opens with the betrayal of a loyal, loving wife, who is replaced by her children's young, pretty governess. Tolstoy tells us the husband, Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky, convinced himself that the wife, deep inside, knew what was happening and was happy with the arrangement, as she was getting what she wanted (children, intact home, respectability, resources), and he was getting what he wanted (sexual variety and a younger woman).
I am dangerously susceptible to flattery. Smarmyness repels most people, but it draws me in like a moth with a deathwish to the fire. In my line of work, this makes me a liability.
I started writing in Zest a little over a year ago, and it was a slow burn. My first subscriber was a guy I met one night at a ball and drunkenly followed on Instagram because he had the kind of face, voice, and mannerism that sends electricity through neurons of my brain that most men tuck into bed for a nap.