Men Behaving Badly

Try not to be annoyed with the way this post is riddled with quotation marks.

A friend of mine and I were recently trying to reconcile the amoral lives led by the mobsters on The Sopranos with the fact that we like the characters. We "know" they're "bad" but we pull for them anyway. For some reason, the first issue we tackled was the rampant adultry.

"In the absence of an objective and definitive morality, instinctual inclinations perhaps should be looked upon as moral so long as they do not harm others. As such, it is not “bad” that each and every "made" guy on The Sopranos keeps a goomar. In their social circles this seems to comes with the territory. Many of the mob wives even acknowledge and seemingly accept the inevitability of the goomar. Therefore, it is both the result of an instinctual urge to get laid constantly and an accepted social construct.

By 'instinctual inclinations' I refer to the 'moral' implications of our instincts; the primary instincts being to live and reproduce/get laid. While the bonds formed between family and even friends can be seen as a natural extension thereof, requisite monogamy cannot….unless you’re religious or a pragmatist to the extent that you believe the traditional familial structure to be necessary for macro-social stability."

Basically, we were exchanging emails in which we were tring to rationalize polygamy....which I think is funny... spending company time trying to rationalize Tony Soprano's massive, adulterous libido.