Within the last four months two public figures have been exposed using the internet to send pictures of their bare torsos to young women for prurient purposes. From the reference points of worldview and politics they were very different men: one was a secular Jewish liberal democrat and the other a protestant conservative republican. Yet, they also had much in common—they were both married, 46 years old, in excellent physical condition and two of the 29 members of House of Representatives from the state of New York.
What are the odds that 7% of the New York Congressional delegation would engage in the same inexplicable self-destructive behavior within a four-month span? As coincidences go, it seems pretty unlikely, particularly given how much these men had to lose. Perhaps the best explanation lies not in the what these men seemed to share, but in what they seemed to both lack: male friends. I remember thinking the same thing during the Lewinsky scandal—where are this man’s buddies, the guys who stand behind a man when he is broken? More importantly, where were they when the man was first considering, and then engaging, in the behavior that would ultimately (and inevitably) bring him low?
I guess these are rhetorical questions. These guys had no friends to stand behind them when the poop hit the fan because they had no friends in the first place. Men get caught engaging in inexplicable behavior when they have no friends to whom they have to explain their behavior before they engage in it. If, when first caught up in some crazy fugue state of lust and confusion, one of these congressmen had disclosed to a friend his intent to e-mail a naked a picture of himself to a college girl, that friend probably would have stopped him. At least he would have tried. Even downstream a bit, when the scandal was breaking, a friend would have encouraged the man not to try to cover it up, because it is the cover-up that compounds the initial misdeed with lying.
