Girls will be girls. Or not

Catherine the Great was a woman with an extravagant, exacting sexual appetite. During her 34-year reign, she had a host of young, well-trained lovers—many of them soldiers—who were paid handsomely for sating her, and were often rewarded with plum positions on her court. They myth of her libido has endured and serves as a reminder of our fascination with powerful, sexual women: will they stop at nothing?

The question is, as another round of public sex scandals unfolds, where are these women today? The confessions of Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson—the man who, on the same day he replaced Spitzer, admitted to past affairs—pale when compared with tales of the Russian empress. Now, political scientists scratch their heads when asked to come up with a female equivalent for the men.

There have been only a handful of minor scandals involving women in public office in America, and most of them have been due to love affairs, not casual—or commercial—liaisons. In 1989, when Sue Myrick was running for re-election as mayor of Charlotte, N.C., she confessed to having had a relationship with her husband while he was still married to another woman in 1973. (She went on to win the election.) In 1998, shortly after US Rep. Helen Chenoweth, a Republican from Idaho, began airing anti-Clinton advertisements insisting “personal conduct does count,” she admitted to having had a six-year affair in the 1980s with a married man. In 2004, state Rep. Katherine Bryson of Utah was caught with a lover on a surveillance camera. (Internationally, one notable standout was an escapade in Taiwan, where tapes of politician Chu Mei-feng having sex with a married lover were leaked in 2001. She apologised and resigned.)

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