Sex is the most intimate act but it is governed by strict public norms. Politicians often exploit these norms. After all politics is performed by individuals with skills but also vanities and failings.

Politics and sex employ the arts of seduction and conquest. Both assure the survival of the organism they serve: life itself or the state. Successful politicians are by definition successful predators. Their skills turn against them.

They crave success and must seduce all who come before them - from voters, colleagues and foreign leaders to interns and pages. At some point, however hard they may try to deny their own nature, something gives.

Given the power that they enjoy and the loneliness of daily, public political battles, it is no wonder that politicians may give in to the temptations that all of us face at some time or other.

The spectacular blowups of public figures will always highly entertain the rest of us. The protagonist of the moment functions simultaneously as a tragic hero and comical buffoon. Politicians' personal disasters strike us as the revenge of the gods for vanity and hypocrisy. They also highlight the humanity that politicians share with the most humble voter.

The question of whether Americans are obsessed with sex and politics, therefore, betrays an American obsession with Americans.

For someone who is not an American but who shares in its technological delights (which allow weblogs to unite us across the globe), it is intriguing to see on the one hand the unbridled hedonism evidenced by the universal availability of pornography alongside almost unlimited personal freedoms, and, on the other hand, the cartoonish Calvinism of those seeking the votes of the American people. It is a situation ripe for great personal catastrophes played out on the public stage.

Americans ought to get used to the fact that the people who lead them share the strengths and weaknesses of all people. Exposing the hypocrisy of public pretense underlain by personal license will always be entertaining. Just think of the ancient Athenians who could watch, without shame but with pleasurable vindictiveness, the comedies of Aristophanes, which lampooned their society and their leaders with hyperbolic displays of their sexual foibles. At the same time, the Athenians demanded seriousness and dedication from those who dared to lead. The Athenians could deal with sex as the force of nature that it is without this luring them from the serious issues facing their leaders and their societies. Sex was in politics, but politics was not all about sex.