Like Bill Clinton, she dallied with someone who looked up to her as a mentor. As with the Appalachian Trail-walker Mark Sanford, her lover was a “family friend.” As with John Edwards and Tiger Woods, there was money involved, and advisers were trusted to serve as intermediaries. Like Larry Craig, who voted consistently against gay rights before being accused of soliciting sex in an airport men’s room, Robinson described homosexuality as even worse than “sexually abusing innocent children,” even while she was sleeping with a teenager.

Yet any attempt to paint these similarities as a perverse sort of victory — women are every bit as unfaithful and hypocritical as men! — quickly runs up against the more important differences. What happened after the Robinson news broke tells us much about the stricter standards, more rigid labels and stereotyped judgments we apply to women.

In all the millions of words written about dozens of cheating male leaders, for instance, very few were devoted to puzzling over what might seem a relevant question: Why would a young woman want to sleep with a much older man? Yet it’s this age difference that is seen as most titillating about the Robinson scandal. Whether you find the idea of a woman with a man 40 years her junior unnatural or empowering, that thinking is based on the assumption that men remain attractive as they gain in clout and in years while women do not. Monica Lewinsky was 22 when she began her affair with the president (only a few years older than Mrs. R.’s barista, Kirk McCambley), but the age difference was well down on the list of facts that kept critics and comedians so busy. Can you imagine the reaction if Hillary had been sleeping with a man that same age? Or Nancy Pelosi?

Image Credit... Source: Rasmussen Reports, June 2009

The aftermath of the Robinson affair is also distinguished for its depth of self-flagellation. There was no pro forma press conference, with its boilerplate mea culpas and its winking undercurrent of a man strutting his stuff. While Robinson’s husband has said he supports her, there were certainly no visuals of him standing demurely, in the cuckolded-husband equivalent of sweater set and pearls, by her side. There was a written statement instead, filled with anguish and self-loathing. True, Sanford got all mushy about his “soul mate,” and Edwards admitted to an outsize ego, but only Robinson went on about her aberrant behavior, revealing “severe bouts of depression which altered my mood and personality” and which caused her “to see plots where none existed.” Then she described attempting suicide when her husband found out. It’s hard not to watch the Robinson fallout and get the message: Men who cheat are weak, while women who cheat are out of their minds.