Foolish Sex

Whether or not you believe that exonerated French Socialist politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn coerced New York City chambermaid Nafissatou Diallo into performing an unwanted sex act (and I happen to believe he probably did), there is no doubting that what happened in the hotel room had disastrous consequences for the horny septuagenarian. Among these were having to resign from his powerful post as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, severe personal embarrassment (even given his wife's public claim of indifference towards where her husband puts his penis), and the likely end to their joint dream of his becoming the first Jewish president of France. This last development is also due to other females who have come forward after the New York incident with accusations of Strauss-Kahn having harassed them sexually. One of these accounts, by novelist Tristane Banon, has made Strauss-Kahn the object of a second criminal investigation, this time in France.

Strauss-Kahn is obviously not the first, nor is he even the newest, example of a prominent male politician done in by his inability to keep it in his pants. Several examples from American politics come to mind, of which the most recent is the case of just-married Democratic Congressman Andrew Weiner, who gave up a promising political future in New York after it was revealed that he sent unsolicited and for the most part unwelcome sexually explicit texts and photos to several females. While the Weiner case is atypical, in that his gratification appeared to be mainly masturbatory (he apparently never had direct contact with any of the women who received his messages), disgraced New York Democratic governor Eliot Spitzer and almost-impeached former Democratic president Bill Clinton are examples of politicians who took a more traditional (but, unlike Srauss-Kahn, clearly encouraged) route to political/ sexual catastrophe. Spitzer, who had to resign his office after he was caught sending a large wire transfer to pay for a prostitute, had, like Strauss-Kahn, to give up his (or more likely his family's) dream of his becoming a first Jewish President. Clinton managed to survive an impeachment attempt, but he put himself, the country, and his loved ones, through many months of grief, as a result of his risky dalliance in the Oval Office, with the college student intern, Monica Lewinksy.

All four of the priapic politicians named thus far are on the progressive end of the political spectrum, but conservatives are equally likely to commit career "suicide by sex." Examples are Larry Craig (the Republican Senator from Idaho who propositioned a cop in a Minneapolis men's room), Mark Foley (the Republican lawman from Florida who made advances to young Congressional pages) and Mark Sanford (the Republican South Carolina governor who bizarrely disappeared for several days to romance his "soul mate" in Argentina). All of the examples discussed thus far involve politicians who engaged in a pattern of behavior that had (in hindsight) a very high likelihood of being eventually exposed, with severe unwanted consequences for their reputations and careers.

All of these were men of at least average, and in most cases, well above-average, intelligence, which leads one to ask the obvious question "how could such smart people have behaved so stupidly?" Cognitive psychologist Robert Sternberg in fact used that as the title of his edited 2002 book, which was an attempt to explain why people of average or above average intelligence do foolish things. As the book grew out of a conference held around the time of the Clinton-Lewinsky mess, many of the authors, including Sternberg himself, used the Clinton sex scandal as a case study. A striking limitation of those chapters which attempted to explain the sexually foolish behavior of former president Clinton (a man with an extremely high IQ, for sure), is that none of them addressed all of the factors that contribute to sexual misconduct. For example, there was no place in Sternberg's analysis for biological contributors to Clinton's conduct, of which the most obvious is sexual arousal (how can you discuss horny behavior in males without discussing what it is that makes them horny?). Nor was there discussion of a second biological factor that I consider even more germane to understanding Clinton, and that is his well-known chronic state of sleep-deprived exhaustion. Clinton has said that "every mistake I have made occurred when I was tired" and it is possible he had workplace BJ's in mind when he made that statement (it was late in the evening when Monica famously snapped her thong.) Exhaustion is a factor that contributes to many if not most dumb behaviors, as psychologist Roy Baumeister explains in a forthcoming book on will-power and its diminution.

Psychologists tend to focus on one or two factors that might explain a particular behavior, but it is my belief that there are four broad factors that cause people to behave foolishly and, if they are lucky (or smart), non-foolishly. The two factors that are generally mentioned are what I term "cognition" and what I term "personality." The other two factors that are generally not mentioned are what I term "situations" and what I term "affect/ state" (of which the aforementioned lust and exhaustion are examples). The four factors, or actually the three factors other than situation, bear some resemblance to Freud's "structural" theory (cognition=ego; personality=superego; affect/state=id) which may be why I, a non-psychoanalyst, was invited to be a keynoter at a psychoanalytic meeting on politician sexual misconduct a couple of years ago.

My model can be considered broadly psychodynamic, in that any given behavior can be explained-even if not always exactly predicted-as resulting from the confluence of these forces coming together (either reinforcing or counteracting each other) in response to a particular environmental challenge. Of course the factors are transactional (providing feedback) and not just interactional (independently additive) in that the presence of one factor may enhance or diminish the motivating role of another factor. A common example of this is when a strong feeling such as lust or hatred causes whatever cognitive risk-awareness an individual might have in a cooler state to fly out the window.

So, using this model, here is my take on Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The situational factor was that a bird of prey (a female, and a relatively powerless one at that) was unfortunate enough to come into his field of vision. If not for that he likely would have gone ahead with whatever he was planning on doing when Ms. Diallo accidentally walked in on him without his clothes. Cognition probably played little role here, as Strauss-Kahn is obviously smart (although not as smart as everyone thinks; as a young man he flunked the entrance exam for the ecole nationale d'administration). As such, he likely knows that forcing one's attentions on women, even chambermaids, has inherent risks. On the other hand, he has apparently done this so many times with impunity that perhaps he has come to discount those risks. Personality is a biggie here, as jumping on women appears to be a deeply ingrained schema that Strauss-Kahn exercises quite frequently and that has come to take on a life of its own. Part of this personality constellation is his apparent delusional belief that at age 70 he is still a lothario, and that women are likely to find his advances irresistible. Finally, there is the Affect/ State factor, in this case reflecting that Strauss-Kahn obviously was in a sexually needy and aroused state, perhaps (as some have suggested) because he had taken a little blue or yellow pill.

Politicians, like athletes, may have stronger sex drives than other men, as suggested by motivational psychologist Steven Reiss in his analysis of the Eliot Spitzer fiasco. Many (most?) politicians also possess a strain of narcissism, as reflected in the humorous definition of a male politician as "someone who when he wakes up in the morning cannot remember if he had a good crowd or a good screw the night before." Whatever the explanation, dishonorable men like Dominique Strauss-Kahn deserve whatever infamy their foolish behavior eventually brings them.

Copyright Stephen Greenspan