Sometimes writing for a weekly newsmagazine means being willing to ask a dumb question. Writing Time‘s cover story this week on the sexual trespasses of Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and other powerful who did not happen to specifically get into trouble this week, Nancy Gibbs, one of the best to ever write in this format, asks the Duh-worthy question, “How can it be, in this ostensibly enlightened age, when men and women live and work as peers and are schooled regularly in what conduct is acceptable and what is actionable, that anyone with so little judgment, so little honor, could rise to such heights?”

Good question, Nancy–now why don’t you give us the answer? “By now social commentators have the explanations on auto-save: We know that powerful men can be powerfully reckless, particularly when, like DSK, they stand at the brink of their grandest achievement. They tend to be risk takers or at least assess risk differently — as do narcissists who come to believe that ordinary rules don’t apply. They are often surrounded by enablers with a personal or political interest in protecting them to the point of covering up their follies, indiscretions and crimes. A study set to be published in Psychological Science found that the higher men — or women — rose in a business hierarchy, the more likely they were to consider or commit adultery. With power comes both opportunity and confidence, the authors argue, and with confidence comes a sense of sexual entitlement. If fame and power make sex more constantly available, the evolutionary biologists explain, it may weaken the mechanisms of self-restraint and erode the layers of socialization that we impose on teenage boys and hope they eventually internalize. “When men have more opportunity, they tend to act on that opportunity,” says psychologist Mark Held.”

Delving into the deep secrets of this phenomenon is like delving into the mystery of why people like warm sunny afternoons. Even the most disciplined and moral of powerful people tend to try to get away with doing what they want to do, and because they are powerful, weaker people tend to permit them, if not actively encourage them. And when powerful people find themselves on thin ice, they invent high-minded moral reasons to do what they want to do. Ask Henry VIII, or Hitler, or Jack Kennedy, or Nixon, or Bill Clinton or Charlie Sheen. Everybody has his reasons. I need a son. I fear that I am going to die prematurely. The streets are in turmoil. I am a torpedo of truth.

What restrains them–if anything ever restrains them–are other people saying no. This, of course, is what must be killing Maria Shriver. People have known forever that Schwarzeneggar was a big, slobbering pig. As we reported it in Spy, one of his most effective pick-up lines was “Your bangability is very high tonight.” A lot of the most controversial of Heidi Fleiss’s business with the studios, as John Connolly reported in Us, was about supplying girls for Arnold. This couldn’t have been secret from Shriver, and it was certainly raised when he put himself forward for governor. Surely Shriver was an enormous help to his campaign when she publicly invested not only the credibility she had developed as a newscaster but the imprimatur of the Kennedys. “You can listen to all the negativity, and you can listen to people who have never met Arnold, who met him for five seconds 30 years ago, or you can listen to me.”

The peculiar circumstances of the Schwarzeneggar situation–the counterparty was not an ingenue or a stripper, but a member of the household staff–must be particularly galling to Shriver. The whle thing recalls the entry from the shrewd and perceptive Mary Chesnut, the premier diarist of the southern slavocracy. “Ours is a monstrous system,” she wrote at the start fo the Civil War. “Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad. This only I see: like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children–& every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in every body’s household but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think. . . . Alas for the men! No worse than men every where, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be.”

It is convenient to believe that men are different than women, or that rich men are different than the rest of us poor schlubs. It is comforting to think that bad behavior is somehow lodged in an easily idenitifed “other” that we can see and condemn. But the truth is that none of us is perfect. We are all sinners. Most of us do most of what we think we can get away with, and it is only the prospect of getting caught that restrains us. And that includes making up excuses and rationalizations for those people on whom we depend for emotional and financial security.

Two very interesting, fairly contradictory stories about young men, have recently appeared.

In Slate, Mark Regnerus says that while young men are struggling in the world, especially in contrast with young women, they are still finding it fairly easy to bed young women. “We keep hearing that young men are failing to adapt to contemporary life,” writes Regnerus. “Their financial prospects are impaired—earnings for 25- to 34-year-old men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971. Their college enrollment numbers trail women’s: Only 43 percent of American undergraduates today are men. Last year, women made up the majority of the work force for the first time. And yet there is one area in which men are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual relationships.”

Regnerus says that if women were more fully in charge of their relationships, “we’d be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, longer relationships, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on. Instead, according to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (which collects data well into adulthood), none of these things is occurring.” Instead, men are geting what they want–easy sex with no commitments.

Regnerus says it’s a matter of supply and demand. Although sex in consensual relationships commences only when women decide it can, women are just not demanding much. Regnerus cites several reasons: the proliferation of porn, the availability of birth control, the lowering of social constraints on sexual activity. “The price of sex is low, in other words, in part because its costs to women are lower than they used to be.” But just as important is the “growing imbalance between the number of successful young women and successful young men. As a result, in many of the places where young people typically meet—on college campuses, in religious congregations, in cities that draw large numbers of twentysomethings—women outnumber men by significant margins. (In one Manhattan ZIP code, for example, women account for 63 percent of 22-year-olds.)”

The idea that sex ratios alter sexual behavior is well-established. “Virginity is more common on those campuses where women comprise a smaller share of the student body, suggesting that they have the upper hand. By contrast, on campuses where women outnumber men, they are more negative about campus men, hold more negative views of their relationships, go on fewer dates, are less likely to have a boyfriend, and receive less commitment in exchange for sex.” Women are agreeing to sex earlier in relationships, or even without relationships; Regnerus found that 30 percent of encounters “don’t involve romance at all: no wooing, no dates, no nothing. Finally, as my colleagues and I discovered in our interviews, striking numbers of young women are participating in unwanted sex—either particular acts they dislike or more frequent intercourse than they’d prefer or mimicking porn (being in a dating relationship is correlated to greater acceptance of and use of porn among women).”

And yet, despite this available sex, young men are still not happy; in fact, they’re angry. So says Kay Hymowitz, author of the new book Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys. Writing in The Daily Beast, Hymowitz says young men are angry because women are demanding equality everywhere, except when it comes to romance. “During the last few years researching this age group, I’ve stumbled onto a powerful underground current of male bitterness that has nothing to do with outsourcing, the Mancession, or any of the other issues we usually associate with contemporary male discontent. No, this is bitterness from guys who find the young women they might have hoped to hang out with entitled, dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling—and did I mention gold-digging?. . . .Women may want equality at the conference table and treadmill. But when it comes to sex and dating, they aren’t so sure.”

Hymowitz points to a condition she calls gender bait and switch. “Never before in history have men been matched up with women who are so much their equal—socially, professionally, and sexually. By the time they reach their twenties, they have years of experience with women as equal competitors—in school, on soccer fields, and even in bed. They very reasonably assume that the women they are meeting at a bar or café or gym are after the same things they are: financial independence, career success, toned triceps, and sex. That’s the bait; here comes the switch. Women may want equality at the conference table and treadmill. But when it comes to sex and dating, they aren’t so sure. The might hook up as freely as a Duke athlete. Or, they might want men. . .to pay for dinner, call for dates . . .and open doors for them. A lot of men wonder: “WTF??!” Why should they do the asking? Why should they pay for dinner? After all, they are equals and in any case, the woman a guy is asking out probably has more cash in her pocket than he does. . . . Men say they have no choice. If they want a life, they have to ask women out on dates; they have to initiate conversations at bars and parties, they have to take the lead on sex. Women can take a Chinese menu approach to gender roles. They can be all “Let me pay for the movie tickets” on Friday nights, and “A single rose? That’s it?” on Valentine’s Day.”

Can both of these views be true?

Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks. I believe this deserves three vas and a voom.

Maybe it was all the snow, but whatever the reason, yesterday produced an unusually bounteous crop of sex news.

In an article in The New York Times on the connection between food and sexual arousal, reporter Sarah Kershaw discussed a study conducted by the Smell and Taste Research Foundation in Chicago. “In one small experiment on sexual response to food scents,” she writes, “vaginal and penile blood flow was measured in 31 men and women who wore masks emitting various food aromas. This was the study that found men susceptible to the scent of doughnuts mingled with licorice. For women, first place for most arousing was a tie between baby powder and the combination of Good & Plenty candy with cucumber. Coming in second was a combination of Good & Plenty and banana nut bread.”

Meanwhile, over in Slate, Hanna Rosin was wondering whether Tiger Woods was, clinically speaking, really a sex addict. “One of Woods’ Las Vegas ladies described him as a sex addict who relentlessly pursued women. But that doesn’t mean he was one. Woods’ current mistress count—18 over six years of marriage—does not by itself meet the clinical definition, without knowing how many encounters he had with those women or what else he was up to. The first question [sex addiction expert Marty] Kafka would ask Woods, he says, is: How often did he have an orgasm? By the accepted definition, seven times a week consistently for six months would signal a problem.” Consistency, in this case, is apparently not a virtue.

And in Foreign Policy, David Kenner informs us that Saudi Arabia has refused Pakistan’s proposed ambassador. “Despite having served for years as a distinguished Pakistani diplomat, Akbar Zeb reportedly cannot receive accreditation as Pakistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The reason, apparently, has nothing to do with his credentials, and everything to do with his name — which, in Arabic, translates to `biggest dick’.” You would have thought that this would have come up before.

On the website Women Talk Sports, an unsigned blog protests the cover of the current Sports Illustrated, which is all about the Winter Olympics, for showing the beautiful and gifted skier Lindsay Vonn in “a sexualized pose.” Seems hard to argue that this is more of a sexualized pose than a skiing pose; a better case could perhaps be made for this photo from SI’s new swimsuit issue.

Finally, Huffington Post founding editor Roy Sekoff appeared with novelist Jackie Collins on The Joy Behar Show, and I guess as a result of his personal investigation into the John Edwards sex tape, was able to confirm that former senator, who in his disgrace can apparently be left with no shred of dignity intact, is physically well-endowed. Old media has had its low moments, but it’s hard to think of an editor of what aspired to be an influential publication going on TV and delving into that particular topic.