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Earlier this month during the Eliot Spitzer kerfuffle a married blogger[**] who writes a lot about her experience with and appreciation for infidelity Ms Inconspicuous of The Seduction of Infidelity had a cool point about why, especially, powerful, successful men cheat.

I think it’s because, really, though they may appear to have everything to lose, they have less to lose overall—or less risk in being caught. I’m no stranger to the concept that the most financially successful partner is the one that often is the cheater—even Yahoo! News picked that up at one point. Why would that be? They could lose their wives, kids, etc., in a divorce settlement—essentially everything. First off: a successful person, at the heart of the matter, has the skills to offset the bad press of an affair. At the very least they can rebuild their lives and recoup their costs. Secondly, how many wives or husbands would stay by their spouses—stand by them in a press conference, even—because they’ve provided a comfortable lifestyle to which they have become accustomed?

She said it here.

Ms Inconspicuous’s point makes sense on its own: the more wallpaper you can afford the less you worry about needing some to paper over a scandal. But I thought it works very well with a post about successful men and affairs this evening from Amanda Marcotte’s of Pandagon

The most likely explanation, albeit the least conducive to essentialist sexist arguments, is that there are simply a lot less female leaders. Women do, after all, cheat almost as much as men, and so if every adultery turned into a sex scandal and representation was 50/50 in the halls of power, we’d see an equal number of women getting outed as adulterers. But I’m not going to dust off my hands and call it a day with that, because I think the Newsweek article does make a good point about the qualitative difference. Women have been outed for garden variety adulteries, but with men, it’s often about sex with prostitutes, interns, grooming the next younger wife while the current one is sick with cancer, etc.

Read the quote in context here.

What I especially appreciate is that neither Inconspicuous or Marcotte are buying the “men think with their little heads” theory of infidelity, or, once again, the “men have sociobiological imperatives to spread their seed as widely as possible” theory, both of which might also explain why, despite roughly equal numbers of men and women in affairs, men have more spectacular flameouts: society in the form of scolding non-feminists and anti-feminists, and even scientists make all kinds of excuses for us that say, in effect, what do you expect? (And, after all, gung-ho sloganeering notwithstanding, people in general are extraordinarily good at rising only to expectations. And so if you expect men to be unable to resist cheating, well, that’s what you’re going to get. But I digress…)

Instead of making excuses the two bloggers assemble the case that it’s not just a matter of having no power to stop themselves, it’s a matter of them having enough power not to bother.

(For the record after making her case for power over mere horniness Marcotte takes her argument further into the realm of masculine entitlement and paying for the appearance of dominance. I’m not exactly disputing her further arguments so much as saying I was already convinced before she gets there.)

[Attribution updated. —fl]