Heather Kennedy
WVoN co-editor 

February has been a good month for philandering men everywhere with the launch of the Alibi fragrance range. The perfumes have been cunningly designed to corroborate the best worn excuses of the unfaithful spouse.

A new innovation from South African strip club Mavericks, the range includes ‘My Car Broke Down’ (a heady mix of engine oil and burnt rubber) and ‘Working late’ (a subtle fusion of cold coffee and coagulated ink).

Now your red-blooded male can glut his voracious libido on an entourage of exotic women, and, after dousing himself in the magic elixir, slip home to his adoring wife without arousing suspicion.

Hang on all you cynics out there shouting “it’ll never work!” (not least because nocturnal office work isn’t exactly known for an aroma overpowering enough to allay the doubts of a woman probably well aware she’s married to a louse). The Alibi range is already a global smash, with men from Europe to the Far East chomping at the bit to place their orders.

Strip club owner and man behind the idea, Shane Harrison, confesses he never expected it to take off. But, he says, “Men seem desperate to get their hands on the stuff”.

It can only be a matter of days before Harrison receives the call from MI5, eager to harness the prototype for future high-scale sleuth operations.

So why isn’t Harrison more elated at his new found global notoriety?

Now the plot thickens. Rewind to last week and Harrison is up in court fighting to keep Mavericks open after accusations that he has been mistreating his dancers.

A South African high court ordered the Human Rights Commission to probe Mavericks on suspicion of inhumane employment conditions and links to human trafficking.

A Home Affairs report said Mavericks regards its workers as independent contractors rather than employees and requires them to pay the equivalent of £165 each night to dance. It should be noted this is the same practice used by strip clubs in the UK.

And what was Harrison’s defence? He claimed if they decided to cancel his permit, Mavericks would “go broke”.

We can only assume that High Court Judge Siraj Desai must have been reading the global news that day, awash with accounts of a certain strip club’s lucrative new perfume range. In response to Harrison’s claim that Mavericks was tottering on the brink of financial ruin, Judge Desai observed “it appears that there is no merit to this submission”.

As the world’s media was banging down Harrison’s door for an exclusive quote from South Africa’s answer to Hugh Heffner, our hapless entrepreneur was hiding behind the sofa praying they’d go away.

So what’s the moral of the story? If you happen to be a filthy rich strip club owner too greedy to pay decent wages and living conditions for your dancers, don’t try and dodge high court charges by pretending to be skint. Especially not if news of your club’s corporate success is splashed across the papers in the very same week.

I’ll spare you a tirade against the men who read about the Alibi perfumes and leapt to their laptops, credit cards in hand. These men are disguising such a crippling deficit of self-respect that anything I could say would pale in comparison to the little voice inside their own head when they close their eyes at night.

But I will say this; the success of the Alibi range has far more to do with male social posturing than it has to do with any genuine attempt to deceive a lover.

The myth of the all-conquering male libido is one shared between groups of men and we can see it in the boasting, fabricated banter of teenage boys and the men who travel in packs to strip clubs and brothels.

Back in the real world, statistics suggest that women are quickly catching up with men in the infidelity stakes. Whether this is because men have taken to slyly smothering themselves in the smell of engine oil to cover their transgressions, we can never know.

But the good news is that next time female readers meet a potential sexual partner who reeks, inexplicably, of photocopier toner fluid, she’ll know to run for the hills.