It's only natural, Dave - ask any baboon

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD

There's a fine line between normal and creepy at the best of times, none finer than the position of David Letterman, who's been caught out doing what men and women do in every workplace from Levin to Vladivostok.

The horizontal tango happens, yes, at Christmas parties, but also at company retreats, after dinner, before lunch, on the desk, under the boardroom table, by the copying machine, in the loos, in the cloakroom, and out by the garbage cans. It's as old as infidelity itself.

Forestalling an attempt at blackmailing him over his role in this universal truth, the TV talk host has confessed, telling his late-night audience of testifying to a grand jury, "all of the creepy things that I had done... The creepy stuff is that I have had sex with women who work for me on this show."

The audience didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I did. I laughed. There but for fortune go so many men I ever knew – and so many women – if we but knew.

And the weirdest thing is that Letterman's would-be blackmailer is an award-winning TV producer, a man in a better position than most to know this truth and to yawn a world-weary yawn, showing his tonsils and amalgam fillings in all their glory.

America is the land of the confession, and after all the schadenfreude and the inevitable laughter, Letterman will be forgiven.

We, however, are the island of pretend, where we say nothing like this ever happens – hey, but if it did we'd have a law against it.

A law to cover human nature? If only we were entirely sure of what that is. My theory is we're not greatly different from animals.

Watch a group of them in a zoo and they're all sniffing each other in embarrassing places, humping, sleeping and fighting, just like we do.

A workplace is much like a zoo: people are forced together there in much the same way, at random. And before long they engage in all of these activities, probably in the same sequence.

The person they thought was hideously unattractive becomes, over time, not only bearable but irresistible. The major difference between baboons and us? Aftershave, perfume and underpants.

To be more precise, we resemble the baboon in all but outward appearance and IQ.

We have the same essential dominance and submission behaviours, hopefully more subtly presented: after all, fertile females of our species parade in similar ways to young female baboons, waving their butts about to attract ever-interested males.

Somewhere in the baboon pack there's always an old silverback, bigger and tougher and therefore more desirable than the other males, and to be his missus for five minutes is the height of female baboon aspiration.

And so it will have been with the silver-haired Letterman, who is both the highest earner and the star of his own show.

It's not about his being handsome, which he is not, but about his being dominant. He will never have lacked for tango partners. No successful man ever does, not even at 63.

You want to know the key difference between baboons and women? Female baboons are more discriminating.

At least the dominant baboon is visibly bigger, which female baboons read as better, but women are nothing like so particular.

They'll tango with short, fat, balding bosses; nasty philandering bosses with pregnant wives and five kids under five; bosses with no brains, one leg and an eye patch, and even with politicians.

And otherwise intelligent, interesting women will waste their entire lives devotedly going through the eternal dance steps for no better reward than being publicly ignored.

The mystery is not the Lettermans of this world, who are being boringly male and trying it on, but the women, and any creepy behaviour is equally theirs, whatever ardent feminists choose to assert. These concubines of the workplace don't have to do it.

Nobody twists their arms, or threatens their jobs. They co-operate willingly, in some tucked-away corner of their brains believing that they are The Chosen One. That is nature's joke.

Watch the plainest woman in the office, the women with outwardly happy marriages, the tall, the short, the fat, the thin, the old and the young.

They're all potentially up for it, and especially in television, where researchers in my time all seemed to be selected on their looks.

And so the conveyor belt continues, and Letterman's wife is upset, suspecting nothing in all the 20 years of their relationship, blind to the realities of stardom and her husband's personality. And I believe her.

Nothing like this has ever happened before, husbands never lie. And, oh, I'm Scarlett Johansson.

- © Fairfax NZ News