Clinton's Crisis: Politics Made Me Do It

There was a time, long before the age of John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, when world leaders didn't risk their careers surreptitiously pursuing sex. They pursued it openly and risklessly. The Roman biographer Suetonius had this to say about the Emperor Augustus: "His friends used to behave like Toranius, the slave dealer, in arranging his pleasures for him--they would strip grown girls of their clothes and inspect them as though they were for sale."

In ancient China, imperial gratification was a tidier affair. An Emperor in the Chou dynasty had 37 wives and 81 concubines. Harem administrators kept track of menstrual cycles, scheduling sex at each woman's peak fertility.

The anthropologist Laura Betzig, surveying these early civilizations, has rendered the Darwinian opinion that politics has often been "little more than reproductive competition"--men using power to better spread their genes. The Aztec King Nezahualpilli had more than 100 children, as did Ramses II of Egypt.

It is thus ironic that a leading brand of condom bears the Egyptian King's name, but there is an even larger condom-related puzzle. If Betzig is correct, then why, in this age of contraceptives, do politicians keep philandering? Where's the "reproductive competition" in a fruitless tryst?

The answer from evolutionary psychology is that men are still saddled with urges that evolved in our precontraceptive hunter-gatherer past. More sex with more females meant more offspring, so genes giving males a thirst for sex with a variety of partners (especially young, hence quite fertile, partners) flourished. So did genes inspiring men to pursue the social status that tends to attract partners. In a sense, then, the very purpose of the power that Presidents Clinton and Kennedy spent their life amassing was to expand their sex life. Can we really blame a guy for doing what's natural? There are two basic answers.

One is to say, while "natural" doesn't mean "good," it may mean "hard to resist." A male potentate's lust is not just stronger than most women can appreciate but also stronger than most men can appreciate. Few of us regularly encounter fawning, nubile women, laughing at our every joke, sighing at our every insight, curious about our every distinguishing characteristic. The temptation fostered by such adoration is "designed"--by natural selection--to be powerful.

And succumbing to it can be addictive. Such pleasurable neurotransmitters as dopamine, now implicated in drug dependency, weren't created by Mother Nature to boost cocaine sales, after all. Their natural function is to reinforce habits that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, such as eating and fornicating. Though few men share an alpha male's opportunities for sexual addiction, any smoker who has kicked the habit rather than die young, only to then fall off the wagon, knows the mighty logic that can make a presidency self-destruct.

Given the power of such biological forces, should we forgive the indiscretions of politicians? Maybe. But there is a quite different answer, also rooted in the human past.