Politicians and Their Libidos

Enough is probably being written about John Edwards right now, but I did enjoy one woman's meltdown in response to an Ellis Henican Newsday column with the resonant line "we must stand in fear and awe at the power of the human libido":

I'm sitting here asking myself one basic question: "Why bother getting married?" Now I'm questioning the institution of marriage. What is the point? If a man cannot control his libido, why does he get married? Stay single and screw around with whomever you want. If you can't keep your zipper up, why do you marry? You know yourself better than any potential spouse does. If your libido is THAT strong, what is the point of getting married? Are women THAT delusional and desperate? Do we believe marriage automatically means that a man will be faithful, and if he is not faithful, it is somehow "our" fault, because we did not "keep him from straying"? These are the kinds of questions I'm asking myself after reading this article. It also makes me sure I never want to marry anybody. After reading this article, I wouldn't trust a man enough to marry him.

You're quite right not to, sister! Anyone who has read a popular evolutionary biology book such as Helen Fisher's Anatomy of Love and compared its observations to their own experience of life would sensibly reach the conclusion that marriage isn't a workable model for many men. For those men, it's not the conceptual incoherence of the institution that's at issue (see discussion a few posts back); it's the inadequacy to their masculine nature.

My own father was very much a case in point. He got married and had children because that was what society expected of him as a young man coming of age in the Fifties; not because it answered any dictates of his nature. The result was that my mother suffered, we kids suffered, and I'm sure that in his way he suffered too -- although he did make his escape and led the high life thereafter. (My mother and his chief girlfriend -- on whom he of course cheated in turn -- became friends and allies in a way that begs to be a movie script someday. The story has a juicy racial angle too, because my parents were white but all my dad's girlfriends were black. He was the self-appointed White Stud of Newark, New Jersey, which led to all kinds of complications.)

We want our politicians and business executives and other male leaders -- the alpha males with the strongest libidos -- to be good husbands and family men, but by and large it's just not in them. Either we change the model or we keep going through this. That said, I do not in the least excuse John Edwards or Bill Clinton or Eliot Spitzer or Mark Foley, etc., etc., for their idiocy and arrogance. You cannot get away with this stuff anymore, guys: that should be patently clear by now. You cannot exist in the public eye and expect to pursue any "private pleasures" at all. The surveillance society exists for you, too; especially for you. Still want to enter national politics? (Why would anyone?)