This week brought two more “shock­ing” rev­e­la­tions of sex­ual offenses by promi­nent politicians.

For­mer Cal­i­for­nia Gov­er­nor Arnold Schwartzeneg­ger admit­ted to an affair with a mem­ber of his house staff, which pro­duced a now-​​14-​​year-​​old child. He and Maria Shriver had just cel­e­brated their 25 year wed­ding anniver­sary April 26 when the news came out. Rumors of infi­delity and sex­ual har­rass­ment had dogged Schwartzeneg­ger for years; Shriver famously defended him in 2003, call­ing him “an A-​​plus human being”.

Dominique Strauss-​​Kahn does the tra­di­tional New York City “perp walk”. Source: The Week (UK)

In more seri­ous alle­ga­tions, Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund head Dominique Strauss-​​Kahn has been charged with rape of a hotel maid (along with accom­pa­ny­ing charges of forced oral and anal sex­ual con­tact and false impris­on­ment charges) and is now await­ing trial on Riker’s Island. Strauss-​​Kahn had chal­lenged Ségolène Royal for the lead­er­ship of the French Social­ist Party prior to Nico­las Sarkozy’s even­tual 2007 elec­tion as French Pres­i­dent and was widely expected to run again in the next elec­tion cycle. In an ironic twist, it was revealed that Strauss-​​Kahn pre­dicted “le fric, les femmes et ma judeite” (“money, women and my Jew­ish­ness”) would be his undo­ing as a can­di­date for President.

Should we be surprised?

Unfor­tu­nately, the sex­ual exploits of politi­cians are so com­mon as to be expected, rather than excepted. Depend­ing on one’s polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion, one can rat­tle off a series of rather spec­tac­u­lar sex­ual flame-​​outs.

Lined up on one side of the aisle: Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton; for­mer New York Gov­er­nor Eliot Spitzer; his suc­ces­sor, David Pater­son; for­mer Sen­a­tor John Edwards; and nearly any mem­ber of the Kennedy family.

From the other side: Schwarzeneg­ger; for­mer House Speaker Newt Gin­grich; Sen­a­tor David Vit­ter; for­mer Sen­a­tor Larry Craig; any­one who ever lived at 133 C Street South­east (“the C Street House”).

Of course, this isn’t an exhaus­tive list. Politi­cians and sex go together, well, like cig­ars and fellatio.

Has it always been this way? The evi­dence strongly sug­gests “yes”. In a series of arti­cles for Psy­chol­ogy Today col­lected under the head­ing “Sex…Power…Scandal”, a group of authors have ana­lyzed the lat­est cases.

One of the series writ­ers, Laura Bet­zig, has writ­ten a book chap­ter called “The End of the Repub­lic” which gives a con­cise and accu­rate his­tory of the sex­ual indis­cre­tions of the Roman emperors.

Roman emper­ors mar­ried just one, legit­i­mate wife at a time; but they had sex with as many women as they could afford. Some of those women were free­born Roman cit­i­zens; but many of those women were slaves. Friends, fam­ily mem­bers, sen­a­tors, and his prae­to­rian guard brought free­born wives and daugh­ters to the impe­r­ial bed. And on the side, Roman emper­ors had sex­ual access to hun­dreds or thou­sands of slaves, whose daugh­ters and sons—ver­nae, or home­born slaves—filled Latin law, lit­er­a­ture, and the impe­r­ial civil ser­vice: the Familia Cae­saris.

Adult male sil­ver­back gorilla

This closely mod­els what has been seen in soci­eties of apes and mon­keys, pri­mates with which we share a com­mon ances­tor. For exam­ple, in goril­las, one “sil­ver­back male” con­trols a harem con­sist­ing of about a dozen females and his pre-​​pubescent off­spring. Young males, upon reach­ing puberty, are faced with a stark choice: either strike out on their own, or chal­lenge the sil­ver­back for dom­i­nance of the harem. It’s no coin­ci­dence that the term “sil­ver­back” has been applied to a cer­tain type of male who exerts his dom­i­nance in the arena of pol­i­tics or finance. In fact, reports of Strauss-Kahn’s attack sound remark­ably like a dom­i­nant male exert­ing force on a sub­or­di­nate female.

Which, of course, brings us to the basic prob­lem. Sex, pol­i­tics and power are inex­tri­ca­bly linked in human soci­ety and cul­ture. Given the ubiq­ui­tous nature of sex­ual con­quest in the polit­i­cal arena, per­haps it’s time to accept that politi­cians will roam, and merely ask that they leave unwill­ing women and chil­dren alone. We would do well to aban­don a false pre­tense of “fam­ily val­ues” and instead insist that all sex­ual encoun­ters by politi­cians take place between con­sent­ing adults.

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