Power, entitlement fuel sexual misdeeds: experts
WASHINGTON — The list is almost too long to name. One-time US presidential contender John Edwards. Israel's former president Moshe Katsav. Golf superstar Tiger Woods.IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn has joined a…
WASHINGTON — The list is almost too long to name. One-time US presidential contender John Edwards. Israel's former president Moshe Katsav. Golf superstar Tiger Woods.IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn has joined a plethora of men at the pinnacle of power and the top of their game who have faced ruin thanks to a sex scandal.Many of them manage to shake off the allegations, and Strauss-Kahn, the powerful head of the International Monetary Fund, has denied all charges of sexually assaulting a New York hotel maid.But sexual pathology expert Sharon O'Hara says there are countless cases of men with an unquenchable appetite for sex who have let their compulsion for sexual conquest get the better of them."We see a lot of people who are bigwigs in Hollywood, and they often have, like tunnel vision," said O'Hara, who has treated sex addicts for two decades, and warns that at times such compulsion can cross over into criminal acts."It's got a sociopath quality -- 'What I want, I want, when I want it. And I've got all this power'," said O'Hara, who is the clinical director of the Sexual Recovery Institute (SRI) in Los Angeles."It's always about power and entitlement," she said.The intersection between sex and power again came into focus Tuesday, when movie action hero and former California US governor Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted fathering a lovechild with a member of his household staff.The years-long affair triggered the breakup of his 25-year marriage to Kennedy dynasty royalty Maria Shriver, in a scandal that reverberated across the United States.O'Hara described sex addicts and sex offenders as distinctly separate trouble groups whose dysfunctional behaviors sometimes overlap.But while sex addiction may be harmful only to the addict, "when there's somebody unwilling or when you're peering over bathroom stalls, then you're talking offender behavior," she said.Sex disorders expert Robert Weiss, meanwhile, said men at the pinnacle of power are particularly prone to behave in this way, and even wrote a book that deal
last modification 2011-05-18 16:45:27
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