Been a pretty good few weeks for sex , celebrity and power gone awry. Arnie Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Ryan Giggs, and Sir Fred "the Shred" Goodwin. Politics, sport and banking, bonking where they will.
At face value you could see this as alpha males who simply have a sense of self-entitlement which says that once at the top, you can have anything you want, including any woman. The unifying factor in all of this seems to be lack of judgement. Because frankly at first glance what they did seems pretty stupid given who they are.
Arnie turns out to have had a child with his housekeeper right under his wife's nose. Both women seem to have been pregnant at the same time. And over the years the LA Times has published several stories of different women who claim harassment by the Terminator.
Then DSK seems to have had a serious amount of what's called "previous" too. There are plenty of women who have come forward to say that his behavior at best was inappropriate and at worst - well a lot worse. One woman alleges that she had to fight him off when she went to interview him. What he was up to turns out to have been an open secret in France.
Ryan Giggs, the Man U soccer star, has seen his public image collapse: positioned as a family man, he's been outed for an affair with a reality TV star. That takes the biscuit for tackiness. Giggs is the most decorated player in English football history, with 12 Premier League medals. Hats off and other items of clothing too.
Sir Fred the Shred, responsible for the biggest corporate failure ever in British history, appears to have been having an affair with someone who was a "senior colleague": speculation is rife that she was therefore on his executive board. Bonk buster takes on a whole new meaning.
So are all these cases evidence that sex and power go hand in hand?
Or is there something deeper at play in all these cases? Perhaps they all indicate some kind of Freudian desire to self-sabotage. Perhaps at some unarticulated level DSK didn't actually want to be President of France. Perhaps Ryan Giggs didn't believe his own spin and wanted it all to end: he's at the tail end of his soccer career as it is. Maybe Arnie wants a new kind of treadmill. And Sir Fred wanted to self-shred.
But there's always another point of view. The idea that they simply thought they'd get away with it. That their egos became so big, and their sense of humility so small, that they were out of touch with how normal people behave. Which suggests that they lost their sense of judgment. And that leads us onto another question. Where else did they show such lack of judgement? There are certainly more skeletons in all those closets.
