Last week, Laura Schlessinger showed us again what a PhD in physiology has taught her about what makes people tick. Here is her take on what drove former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to cheat on his wife, Silda, with high-priced hookers:
“When the wife does not focus in on the needs and the feelings, sexually, personally, to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like her hero, he’s very susceptible to the charm of some other woman making him feel what he needs,” the popular psychologist and radio personality said.
Schlessinger admitted she was speaking from ignorance: “I do not know anything about their personal lives,” she said, but she insisted that when men cheat it is because their needs are not being met:
“The cheating was his decision to repair what’s damaged and to feed himself where he’s starving,” Schlessinger replied. “But, yes, I hold women responsible for tossing out perfectly good men by not treating them with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need.”
If she can make shoddy analyses based on nothing more than a hunch, so can I: Sounds like Laura Schlessinger may be projecting. We can only wonder what needs she was trying to meet in 1975, for example, when she agreed to pose topless for her boyfriend, Bill Balance.
A more realistic view is that while some men stray because they and their partners have grown incompatible, perhaps about a third of the species just can’t keep their jimmies in their pants. The “needs” of these guys, the Hugh Hefners of the world, are insatiable. They are hard-wired to seek greener pastures, no matter how lovely the yard they’re in may be. The fact that so many of these men are rich and powerful is incidental. The fact that the divorce rate hovers around 50 percent (and is even a bit higher among evangelical Christians) is strong circumstantial that hound-dogging is a common practice up and down the social strata — from auto mechanics, plumbers and dry-wallers to doctors, lawyers and accountants, and governors, senators, presidents and kings — and even the occasional preacher.
To blame the women these “womanizers” marry for not being able to quench their unquenchable needs is just the sort of crackpot shame-centered analysis that has made Dr. Schlessinger a national laughing stock.
People don’t “grow incompatible”. They grow bored and get tired of the commitment. They see millions of others giving in to their weaknesses without consequence and say “why not me?”
Human men are hardwired to “spread their seed”, so keeping marriage vows can be hard. What has to happen is that the man must understand the consequences of cheating before he cheats. Society keeps removing the consequences of bad behavier. So bad behavier is on the rise.
In SPitzer’s case, it is most likely egomania.
BTW: Your Dr. Laura ‘has no room to talk because she was stupid when she was young’, is a cheap shot that doesn’t deserve more than a moment’s notice. And it certainly does not make your assertion more correct. It only makes you look lame.