The public knows what it takes to forgive a Tiger

“We know what it takes to be a Tiger,” Accenture’s advertisements at Heathrow airport were proclaiming only last weekend. But the company was then already pulling its ads with Tiger Woods, after the adulterous golfer had become the subject of an American-led but global witch hunt. “So many people feel let down by his behaviour,” mourned Time magazine. It seems that while people can cope with climate change, war and economic collapse, they go to pieces when a golfer they have never met commits adultery. They should get real. It was entirely predictable that contemporary America’s masculine ideal should run headlong into contemporary America’s taboo on adultery.

In most countries today the role of masculine ideal is filled by athletes. These young, strong, rich winners pocket society’s biggest endorsement deals. As masculine ideals they are also, by definition, the men most attractive to women. Gorgeous women throw themselves at Woods. People who go a lifetime without receiving an offer to commit adultery are now persecuting someone who might get several invitations a day.

It so happens that my wife is an expert on adultery. She wrote Lust in Translation, a study of infidelity around the world. The book lays out the problem for any masculine ideal who attracts women in the contemporary US: namely, the outsize taboo on adultery. This taboo began strengthening in the 1970s, probably because the US was then becoming the first country to suffer an epidemic of divorce. With American bedrooms so disorderly, moral policing got stricter. In a Gallup poll in 2006, Americans rated adultery as worse than polygamy or human cloning. So the masculine ideal in the contemporary US must attract women yet never stray.

Woods is now being punished. As in any witch hunt, society is affirming its core principles against a transgressor. Future historians will study the current frenzy as an American attempt to ward off adultery.

The good news for Woods is that there is a contemporary American ritual of exoneration, too. He doesn’t need to be burned at the stake. Instead, he will almost certainly copy the script followed by previous transgressors such as Bill Clinton and the basketball player Kobe Bryant: the “confession cure”.

This ritual probably originated with the thousands of marriage therapists who opened businesses in the US in the 1970s. The idea is that if a spouse wants to atone for adultery, he must make a public confession, ask forgiveness from everyone he can think of, and then engage in a public “healing process”, helped by a paid therapist. Of course this ritual rests on an older Christian script: sin, confession, absolution.

President Clinton, writes my wife, “used this more modern script as a guide for expiating the sin of extramarital sex. He might as well have been following the steps laid out by the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. Perhaps he was.” The president even went on tour to apologise to supporters, telling them: “I have no one to blame but myself for my self-inflicted wounds.” Bryant later reran the ritual, apologising to various interest groups, and, crucially, crying in public with his supportive wife.

This ritual is now so established that “marketing experts” are popping up in the media to tell Woods to hurry up and just follow the script. They dismiss his admission on his website – “I have let my family down” – as insufficiently self-flagellating. His decision to leave golf for a while is a start. However, he still needs to affirm in public that adultery is worse than human cloning.

Then everyone will forget his sins. Clinton left office with approval ratings of 66 per cent, a record for a departing president. Bryant’s replica jerseys are now the bestselling in basketball. All Woods needs is an expensive spiritual adviser to manage the ritual. I can be reached at the e-mail address below.

simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com