if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu

Dear Leader’s viceroy is certainly at liberty to conduct his social life as he wishes and if he adheres to the same rules that governed his dining habits fifteen years ago about not eating unchaperoned with a woman that’s not his wife (which is quite a specific Venn diagram)—construed from the quote “if there’s alcohol being served and people are being loose, I want to have the best-looking brunette in the room standing next to me”—it’s his business.
It’s fine even if that betrays a strange idea about what goes on in restaurants and a very conservative, traditional view of gender and identity politics. Infidelity shouldn’t be the default. It stops becoming a choice, however, when that attitude prevents him from meeting one-on-one with a female counterpart, lawyer or aide. The boys’ clubs of business and politics never went anywhere and his superior is a sexual predator, granted, but harbouring such stringent rules for dealing with half of the population disengages and takes opportunities away from us all.