Prominent men ruin their lives every single day.
How?
They ruin their lives with enormous sex scandals splashed all over headlines, in media outlets, dripping off tongues of gossip. If not in your hometown, then in somebody else’s nearby.
From early on, history recorded illegitimate sexual assignations and their ruinous consequences–stories such as Helen of Troy, to the six wives of King Henry the VIII, through the affairs of President Bill Clinton, and the ongoing sex scandals of Catholic priests. The list is unending. Social media, with its viral messaging, only increases the disaster quotient. In 2022, we saw how quickly Queen Elizabeth stripped her son, Prince Andrew, of his royal title after accusations of sex with a minor.
Why do men, especially prominent men, continue to self-implode like that? Haven’t they watched others do exactly the same thing. Why do something so wildly destructive?
The question fascinated me for years–because of my own experiences and because the scandals keep getting way worse–excuse my grammar–way, way worse.
In the 1970’s, sexual freedoms and women’s rights catapulted into the social network, stretching limits, breaking boundaries. People experimented with everything from sex, to drugs, to yoga, tofu, and living styles. Pregnancy could be managed by a pill; Roe vs Wade gave women a choice to keep or terminate pregnancy, AIDS was years in the future, and antibiotics still worked magic. During this wild decade I joined the USA workforce. My lifelong study of sex, particularly in the workplace, began then. I’m still at it.
The idea for this book started in 1992. So is it still relevant?
I point to the #MeToo movement and say the problem is more alive and well today than when I started writing 20 years ago. Look at Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Cosby, Jerry Sandusky, Bill Clinton, Mark Sanford, Donald Trump, the Catholic priests (not the nuns), and thousands more. In all this time, we haven’t devised healthy solutions. Mostly, we punish, suppress, or hide.
Why did I write this book?
Besides being a can’t-put-it-down read, The Scandal Clause is a platform for discussion—about power, work, sex, money, values, relationships, and gender intelligence.
The question is: can we create respectful, constructive commentary about the changing roles of sexuality in our current day lives–especially in a place where we spend up to 10 hours a day together?
I hope so, because that’s the real reason behind what made me write this book.