Truemors
Photo: Gary Hart & Donna Rice.
I've been around many powerful males, including politicians, and along the way I've noted the same characteristics this article outlines. Most of them, no matter how outwardly "family-oriented", exude an alpha male type of sexuality, hovering, there on the edge, waiting to be realized.
It's part of the charisma factor--and part of the sensation-seeking, risk-taking male psychology, according to these experts. They also point out the role that testosterone can play in female power-holders--but how it differs from that of the male brain.
Eliot Spitzer is the latest in a long, sad line of male power brokers who trip over their own appendage. Anyone remember a wannabe presidential candidate who challenged the media to "catch me" while protesting his faithfulness?
Gary Hart, photographed with Donna Rice on his knee aboard the yacht "Monkey Business" scuttled and sank his 1998 presidential campaign. Amazingly, the former Colorado candidate in 2003 considered another run for the Democratic nomination and ultimately for the White House.
Even more amazingly, a couple of weeks ago Hart, an Obama man, attacked Hillary Clinton. Not only that, but Hart, a graduate of Yale Divinity School, said that he was available to step into the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's shoes as Obama's spiritual advisor. He said it was a joke.
All par for the course, as these psychologists point out. Scandals come and go, but apparently hubris is indestructible.
We'll never know exactly what New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was thinking when he allegedly arranged a dalliance with a high-priced prostitute, risking the collapse of both his career and his family. Even he may not fully understand his own actions. But all too many powerful men can at least identify with him, because they've been there. Spitzer is simply the latest married politician caught with his pants down, a group so large that "pretty soon there will be enough of them to do a scientific study," says Texas psychologist Brian Gladue. Why do men with so much to lose take the chance that they may in fact lose it? Psychologists say they fit a profile: the traits that help them succeed at high-powered jobs are often the same ones that cause them to fail in their personal lives. NEWSWEEK's Mary Carmichael asked several analysts to put the typical philandering politician on the couch.
Gimme More: Many fallen politicians fit a personality type known as a "sensation seeker," defined in the early 1970s. Sensation seekers crave novel and intense experiences more than other people do, and, as part of that, they tend to have many sexual partners. "They get a bigger kick out of things," says Marvin Zuckerman, a pioneering psychologist and author of the 2006 book "Sensation Seeking and Risky Behavior." There's chemical evidence: sensation seekers have lower levels of monoamine oxidase A, which regulates the brain's levels of dopamine, the "pleasure" neurotransmitter.
Of course, loving life isn't always a bad thing: sensation seekers are often high-energy, high-functioning people. The problem is that they never seem to get enough excitement. "Their experiences have to be either very new or very intense, or both, or else they get very restless," says Zuckerman. "When things get monotonous, they have to do something else to increase their arousal." That's the flipside of finding pleasure more pleasurable: for sensation seekers, boredom is also more boring.
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