Broadwell. All In. Older Men, Younger Women: the American Reaction

The Phantom is not getting any younger.  When he listens to the outrage over David Petraeus it is not enough (by a long shot) to make him wish America was more like France, but at least it makes the Phantom realize, we might learn something from the French.

The general impression is that the French are more blase about marital infidelity--older men falling into bed with younger women, c'est la vie.  Easy enough to understand--the older man wants to be reassured he is still young, attractive and in the game; the psychology of the younger woman is generally assumed to be the attraction to power. 

Intriguingly, when you hear American men sounding all sophisticated and liberated about this, if you ask, well, how would you feel about your wife having an affair with a younger man? You see the man swallow hard and there is at least a beat of pause there.

Yes, there is the whole notion of "vows" but really, that promise is a fantasy, and don't we all know it? 

No, the real offense is the harm done the long term wife.  

Presumably, no man enters into this sort of affair without saying to himself, "She'll never know. What she doesn't know, won't hurt her."

The offense, is he was willing to take the chance.

The women I've heard inveigh against Patraeus have no sympathy for him.  I do. I find it curious the same women who have no sympathy for the general have great sympathy for the drug addict, the alcoholic, other self destructive people, for the violent criminal even, who was abused as a child and is a child himself. But for this man who has risen to the heights of power, no sympathy.

This is a psychology, the psychology of the woman without sympathy, which is fascinating and should be explored. Of course, the obvious explanation--these women  see this sort of behavior by any man as a threat to the hold they have on their own security--may pertain. But, I suspect, there is more to it. Post menopausal women sometimes simply have given up on their own bodies, on sex and they see their men have not, and they see the wealth, the home life, the family they've built over the years in peril.

Then there is the case of the old goat DSK, the French former head of the World Bank, who apparently attacked a chamber maid in his hotel, and cavorted with twenty somethings, or maybe teen age girls at parties in hotel rooms in France. Somehow, the images attached to all this fall into the category of "I don't even want to imagine that scene."  What drives men over sixty toward these young women? Intimations of mortality?  The sense of time travel--I'm back with young women, I must still be young, or at least not about to die?

Fran Townsend, on CNN, a fetching forty herself, a former Bush White House security adviser, said, "If you're in the CIA and you haven't had an affair, you're not in the CIA."

Somewhere between Fran and the thunder from the pulpits is a zone of understanding.