Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is the hottest first lady in the world — a title that comes with obvious benefits, but embarrassing downsides.
Paris publishers, Flammarion, have announced a book deal with Besma Lahouri about Bruni-Sarkozy that promises expose all the dirt on her personal character and private sex-life. Bruni-Sarkozy’s history of being a party girl — she dated Mick Jagger in her younger years — has her lawyers bracing themselves for the book’s release.
“The principal story is about a fast-living adventuress with an obsession with wealth and fame,” says a publishing source.
This comes only one week after an Iranian newspaper called Bruni-Sarkozy “a prostitute” for writing an open letter to Sakineh Muhammed Ashtiani, the Iranian woman who was sentenced to death by stoning earlier this summer.
“Why shed your blood and deprive your children of their mother?” Bruni-Sarkozy asked in the letter. “Because you have lived, because you have loved, because you’re a woman, and because you’re an Iranian? Everything within me refuses to accept this.”
Bruni-Sarkozy has clearly “lived and loved” quite a bit herself.
It’s hard not to compare this French political sex-scandal with our own. In the U.S., our politicians make headlines on almost a daily basis for cheating on their wives, fucking prostitutes, and prepositioning young White House aides. We hear about the sex-lives of gay senators, straight presidents, state governors, and so forth. But they’re all males.
What we do not hear about is the sex-lives of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin.
I’m afraid I’m underinformed to make a real feminist argument here. But I do have some humble observations for why this asymmetry exists.
First, there are fewer women in politics. While true, this accounts for very little since every year more and more women enter American politics, and the headlines about their sexual lives stay at nil.
The second reason, in my opinion, is that most women are quieter cheaters.
Hillary Clinton would not have come all over her intern’s outfit unless she knew she could control him enough to keep his mouth shut. Condolizza Rice’s cell phone would never have contained nasty sexts that could be leaked because she’d have erased them the moment they made her hot.
Sexual nature is just as powerful in men and women, but women have avoided the reputation of diabolical cheaters. I’m not entirely sure why, but I will say that most of my female friends seem to possess an awareness of consequence that verges on paranoia when it comes to their personal lives — something that nearly all of my male friends lack.
The other reason is similar, but more public. Culturally, our perception of successful men is that they’re hornier, aggressive, and more likely to cheat than their female counterparts.
I don’t know the origin of this stereotype, but I hypothesize that it has something to do with men being stronger. They’ve always been able to get away with brazenly acting out their sexual urges without getting hurt. It makes sense that being weaker caused the female gender to evolve in a Darwinian manner: generally, women seem to be better secret-keepers and more emotionally manipulative than men.
Back to Bruni-Sarkozy:
France and the U.S. share some things in common, but how we view women is not one of them. France famously loves its women. Powerful female leaders in arts and politics have graced France’s media headlines for centuries longer than America.
Just this year, the French parliament motioned to ban burqas in public, a garment that President Nicolas Sarkozy is emphatically against. “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” he said at the time.
French men have always seemed to understand women’s evolved emotional capacities. Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who became famous in Paris also served the French military as a spy during WW1. Women’s suffrage originated in France in the 1780s and 1790s almost 150 years before it made its way to the U.S.
Then why does America only harpoon its male leaders for their sex-lives? Was Bruni-Sarkozy just less discrete about her sex-life than most women? Or is there more to it?
I think that greater respect for female leaders also comes with greater consequence. Marie Antoinette’s fate was one of the most famous political deaths in Western history. When Mata Hari was found to be a double agent, she was assassinated by a French firing squad.
Assassination of character is another of these consequences.
Female American politicians stay mysteriously clear of sex-scandal headlines. I think we should take a moment to agree that it’s not because they’re sexless, unscandelous people. I think they have evolved to become better secret-keepers, and I also think that the public doesn’t look for their discretions the way we seek out political scandal in men. We almost don’t believe that Hillary Clinton gets laid at all.
If we insist on making our political figures’ private lives our business, maybe we’ll be able to gauge our acceptance of women as leaders (be they Palin, Clinton or whoever), by how willing we are to expose their sex lives.
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