(no subject)
Every few years, the media churns out a story along the same themes as those explored in Friday's Globe & Mail: "Why are Canadian sex scandals so tame?"
The Brits have married MPs resigning in shame after three-in-a-bed gay romps, local politicians resigning in shame after being caught engaging in a practice colloquially known as "dogging", cabinet ministers fucking in their offices, and an early-90s clusterfuck involving just about every single cabinet minister engaging in sex all the time with everybody always.
The Americans have Senators arrested for engaging in airport-bathroom sex, politicians taken down over inappropriate relationships with pages, representatives groping and sexually harassing staffers, presidents most certainly not having sexual relations with various women, governors caught in prostitution rings, and, most recently, a married congressman taken down due to clumsiness with the Twitter machine.
Italy famously has Silvio Burlusconi (he of the "Bunga Bunga" parties and the fondness for "meeting" women at strip clubs and making them into cabinet ministers), the French have both Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Prime Ministers who keep entire second families, even Singapore has its share of jiggery-pokery.
As for Canada, we've got... well. We actually do have some sex scandals. Remember when back in April it was revealed that Jack Layton had been getting massage-parlor handjobs? Or Maxime Bernier's Hell's-Angels ex-girlfriend? Back in the 70s, the Liberal Solicitor-General forged the signature of his lover's husband on her abortion paperwork, while if you go back even further, an East German spy was fucking half the Diefenbaker cabinet.
What gives, though? We've certainly had our share of lurid and ridiculous sex scandals, bearing in mind that we have about 1/10th the population of the US and about 1/4 as many politicians as the British. The Australians have had virtually no political sex scandals, so we actually seem to have had a decent number.
Do Canadians just not care about their politicians' sex lives? It's a possibility, but Torontonians might remember Adam Giambrone resigning from the mayoral race after it was revealed that he'd been seeing a 19-year-old for "private sessions" on his office couch. If a relatively mild sex scandal [Giambrone was unmarried] can torpedo a popular candidate, then it seems disingenuous to suggest that nobody cares.
Do Canadians expect their politicians to be screwing around, reducing the shock value and interest in these scandals? Probably not a bad expectation, although this answer feels instinctively unsatisfying. (And I surely can't be the only one who doesn't want to picture Ignatieff allowing female staffers to "wax his eyebrows", so to speak.)
Do Canadians have a more mature and sophisticated attitude than most towards human sexuality? (More mature and sophisticated than the French? Really?)
What's up, guys? We have the scandals, so why does nobody notice or care?
The Brits have married MPs resigning in shame after three-in-a-bed gay romps, local politicians resigning in shame after being caught engaging in a practice colloquially known as "dogging", cabinet ministers fucking in their offices, and an early-90s clusterfuck involving just about every single cabinet minister engaging in sex all the time with everybody always.
The Americans have Senators arrested for engaging in airport-bathroom sex, politicians taken down over inappropriate relationships with pages, representatives groping and sexually harassing staffers, presidents most certainly not having sexual relations with various women, governors caught in prostitution rings, and, most recently, a married congressman taken down due to clumsiness with the Twitter machine.
Italy famously has Silvio Burlusconi (he of the "Bunga Bunga" parties and the fondness for "meeting" women at strip clubs and making them into cabinet ministers), the French have both Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Prime Ministers who keep entire second families, even Singapore has its share of jiggery-pokery.
As for Canada, we've got... well. We actually do have some sex scandals. Remember when back in April it was revealed that Jack Layton had been getting massage-parlor handjobs? Or Maxime Bernier's Hell's-Angels ex-girlfriend? Back in the 70s, the Liberal Solicitor-General forged the signature of his lover's husband on her abortion paperwork, while if you go back even further, an East German spy was fucking half the Diefenbaker cabinet.
What gives, though? We've certainly had our share of lurid and ridiculous sex scandals, bearing in mind that we have about 1/10th the population of the US and about 1/4 as many politicians as the British. The Australians have had virtually no political sex scandals, so we actually seem to have had a decent number.
Do Canadians just not care about their politicians' sex lives? It's a possibility, but Torontonians might remember Adam Giambrone resigning from the mayoral race after it was revealed that he'd been seeing a 19-year-old for "private sessions" on his office couch. If a relatively mild sex scandal [Giambrone was unmarried] can torpedo a popular candidate, then it seems disingenuous to suggest that nobody cares.
Do Canadians expect their politicians to be screwing around, reducing the shock value and interest in these scandals? Probably not a bad expectation, although this answer feels instinctively unsatisfying. (And I surely can't be the only one who doesn't want to picture Ignatieff allowing female staffers to "wax his eyebrows", so to speak.)
Do Canadians have a more mature and sophisticated attitude than most towards human sexuality? (More mature and sophisticated than the French? Really?)
What's up, guys? We have the scandals, so why does nobody notice or care?