Read: Jeff Bezos brings the receipts

For plenty of people, though, the details of high-level political backbiting aren’t the headline here, or at least not the only headline. Why was someone like Bezos, who has such an enormous and singular public profile and who’s known to be canny and relentless, lured in by the base, risky pleasures of taking dick pics?

According to researchers, the smart and powerful probably aren’t any less prone to sexting than the rest of us. Human history suggests that you can’t intellectualize your way out of being horny, no matter how much you’d like to.

Like most sexual behaviors, sexting can be healthy or harmful, depending on the context and the people involved. By all indications, Bezos’s sexts were consensual and reciprocated by Sanchez, and those kinds of exchanges have become a very common part of early-phase intimate relationships, according to Michelle Drouin, a psychology professor at Purdue University Fort Wayne. “It’s a way to establish intimacy with a partner, to tell them you’re having sexual thoughts about them, to convey sexual plans that you might have with them later on,” she says. “This is all part of the normative sexual experience now.” According to research by Drouin and others, more than 80 percent of young American adults have sent or received an explicit message or photo.

Most of the research on digital sexuality concerns adolescents and college students, but another area of sexting study might be more closely applicable to Bezos’s relationship with Sanchez: cheating. Drouin says that the structure of sexting lends has helped make it popular with those stepping out behind a partner’s back; it happens more frequently in these situations than between long-term, committed paramours. “Your cheating partner is not usually the person you go home to every night,” Drouin says. “It’s a way to express sexual desire at a distance in a way that can be hidden a little bit.”

Not only was Bezos in a new relationship and rumored to be cheating on his wife, which are a set of circumstances in which sexting is common, but he’s a man in America in 2019, which means that, on a cultural level, sending a dick pic just isn’t the scandal it was even a few years ago. Scores of celebrity nudes have been leaked by hackers, and so many regular people have tried and enjoyed sexting. For a person with even a modicum of cultural power, the risk (if it was even considered in the moment of dick-pic reverie) could seem negligible. “It adds a dimension of normality to him. Billionaires send sexts just like the rest of us,” Drouin says.

Which isn’t to say that sexting has no cultural risks, because it does. Consensual nude photos are still frequently repurposed to harass people—especially young women—which is a remnant of the fading cultural attitudes that likely made AMI think it might be successful in bending Bezos to its will. In the past, for instance, evidence of repeated extramarital sexting was used to derail the promising career of the politician Anthony Weiner.