No need to even try listing them all (Swaggart, Haggart, Spitzer). We all know the look they get when they're trying to appear dignified and honorable while they grovel and apologize for privately doing what they have publicly deplored and denied (Sanford, Vitter, Clinton). We've all heard their stories too many times before (Foley, Craig, Edwards). All men, all with their tails between their legs like whimpering currs dragged to the wet spot on the carpet (Hart, Giuliani, Kilpatrick). Tammy Wynette could have been singing about any of them: "After all, he's just a man" (Condit, Packwood, Livingston).
What all these men share is a strange and explosive combination of the advanced intelligence needed to accrue significant power and the pathetically stunted emotional development that allowed them to drift into (or actively seek) their own demise in erotic hypocrisy. It's worth thinking about this from two angles:
- What does it say about our society that we create people with such disjointed personalities? Emotionally, these men are like the guys who spend all day at the gym, working solely on their upper body, so they end up looking like lobsters. Where's the balance? How, for example, does a guy like John Edwards develop so much intellectual sophistication without even enough emotional/sexual sophistication to detect the obvious manipulations of a Rielle Hunter?
- What does it say about our society that we seem eager (some of us, anyway) to choose these men as our leaders? What is the interplay of their appeal as leaders and their personal hypocrisy? Would too many of us turn away from a politician who was openly and unapologetically imperfect? Is this what Obama was getting at when he refused to say he'd definitively quit smoking at his recent press conference?
In a blog post, Paul Krugman points to a crucial difference in how liberals and conservatives see this kind of sexual hypocrisy, explaining why it is that Republicans seem to be more forgiving of their transgressors than Democrats: "Where liberals see gross hypocrisy, conservatives see men doing the Lord’s work — which partially excuses their own failings," writes Krugman. "Liberals think that a man who has an affair is worse if he preaches moral values; conservatives think he’s better. You might say that as they see it, if he interferes with what enough other people do in bed, it doesn’t matter what he does himself."
But back to who these men are. We all know them: they run companies, hold great prestige and power but are like children when it comes to women. They marry women they don't love, sleep with women they shouldn't, tell laughable lies (Appalachian Trial!). Sure, women make mistakes too, but in this, they seem a million miles ahead of men.
