French would-be president Strauss-Kahn, the Arnold and a Weiner demonstrate a possible connection between severity of sexual improprieties and how close they are to alcoholism.
An alcoholic, a child of an alcoholic, and a fool: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Weiner
Although alcoholism explains most misbehaviors, it doesn’t explain them all. The more severe and the greater number of misbehaviors, the higher the likelihood alcoholism is involved directly or indirectly; the fewer and less severe the misbehaviors, the lower the likelihood. Three recent cases involving politicians may offer some evidence that the degree of vileness of misbehaviors, including sexual ones, depends at least in part on whether the connection to alcoholism is direct, indirect or non-existent.
Early in my research when I learned that about half of compulsive gamblers are alcoholics, I hypothesized the same is probably true of the sexually compulsive. As I wrote in How to Spot Hidden Alcoholics: Using Behavioral Clues to Recognize Addiction in its Early Stages, there is hardly a more effective non-violent way to wield power over others than via sexual exploitation. Therefore, it makes sense that more addicts than non-addicts engage in serial adultery and Don Juanism; the testimony of recovering addicts supports this theme. As the number of conquests increases, so too does the likelihood of alcoholism.
Along the same lines, I have found that as sexually-oriented behaviors worsen, the more likely an addict is involved. Rape is the most heinous act of a sexual nature and, as is true of other felonious behaviors, the odds of its commission by a non-addict are near-zero. Hence, assuming the veracity of the accusations by a New York maid, alcoholism is the best explanation for her attempted rape by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and the person who was likely to have become the next president of France. In addition, I believe the odds of alcoholism increase when behaviors worsen over time, which they have apparently done. In a letter to a law firm, Piroska Nagy, an IMF staff economist whom Strauss-Kahn pursued until she agreed to an affair in 2008, wrote “Despite my long professional life, I was unprepared for the advances of the managing director of the IMF…[and] I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t.” She added that Strauss-Kahn was “a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command.” In the meantime, the media treated him like a hero for giving vast sums of other people’s (read: taxpayers’) money to bankrupt and corrupt countries like Greece, which is another efficient way by which to wield power capriciously, the near-exclusive domain of alcoholics.
I also hypothesized that many if not most of the non-addicted half of compulsive gamblers and the sexually compulsive comprise children of alcoholics, who compensate in their own ways for psychological, emotional and intellectual abandonment by an alcoholic parent. The compensation can take productive form, as in overachievement, but also destructive form, as in groping, adultery and the use of prostitutes for sex, but which in the aggregate are not as awful as those committed by alcoholics. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is seemingly not alcoholic, was raised by one. In a June 2003 interview he said that his father, Gustav Schwarzenegger, “smacked us around. In general, the drinking and physical abuse were high.” According to Wendy Leigh of London’s Daily Mail, Arnold’s mother was “terrorized by his father, an alcoholic,” which could explain Arnold’s apparent contemptuous, crude and sadistic attitude towards women, as well as fathering a child with his maid, Mildred Patricia Baena, right under the nose (and, according to reports, in the bed) of his wife, Maria Shriver. “Those who knew [his dad] say he routinely drank two litres of wine in an evening. ‘Very often he drank so much that he didn’t know where he was,’ recalled a colleague. Arnold, his mother, and elder brother, Meinhard Schwarzenegger, were the victims of Gustav’s drink-induced rage.” (Meinhard inherited their father’s alcoholism and died from injuries sustained in a wreck while driving under the influence in 1971, a year before Gustav’s death.) Leigh’s accounts of Schwarzenegger’s transgressions are so disgusting it’s difficult to distinguish Arnold’s misbehaviors from those of an alcoholic. However, as far as we know, he’s never committed rape.
There are some for whom alcoholism, direct or indirect, may not explain atrocious behaviors. It’s apparent that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) is a non-addict and I can find nothing to suggest a parent is an addict (although it wouldn’t be shocking). To have sent explicit photos of himself, some lewd, to at least half a dozen women via Twitter, is unusual. To do so after having married Hillary Clinton’s bodyguard, Huma Abedin, less than a year before, is appalling. To do this when subject to blackmail as a United States Congressman is frightening. That this surfaced at the same time his wife announced she is pregnant with their first child is horribly sad. To do all of this while stone-cold sober is extraordinary. However unlikely, it can happen. Substance addiction only explains about 80% of humanity’s ills, woes and dysfunctions. We can only shake our heads at the other 20%, dumbfounded.
Most addicts, once clean and sober, commit few if any immoral or felonious behaviors. Children of alcoholics, when properly treated for severe codependency learn that the alcoholic parent acted horribly because of damage to the human part of the brain, the neo-cortex. This awareness makes it easier to overcome character defects and adopt healthier ways. Those who are neither addicts nor children of addicts would seem to me to be much more difficult to treat. With alcoholism and codependency, at least we know where to begin. With neither, I have no idea. It almost makes one long for alcoholism.
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