Take a man - we'll call him Adam Giambrone - with a blossoming political career and a steady partner who looks A-1 in her pearls on the stage beside him, both of which he risks for a dalliance with another woman.
Up pops the question: Why are men so stupid?
It's a complex answer, although the phenomenon is as familiar to psychologists and sociologists as each morning's sunrise. It's not biology, they say. It's brain wiring.
It can start with the fact that men with A-type personalities are attracted to politics.
And what pushes alpha men is the idea of success, the idea of winning - whether it's winning votes or winning women; it's a psychosocial compulsion. To win, alpha men are inclined to take risks and they rarely if ever think they're going to get caught.
"With the rush of adrenalin and testosterone, the cliché in this case is true, that they think with their dicks," said psychotherapist Andre Stein, who specializes in treating men.
Psychiatrist Thomas Verny put it more delicately: "They leave their brains behind and they're being led by their lower chakras. And they act stupidly."
Look at the list. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton. Former presidential candidate John Edwards. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer (his case was a little different; he paid for sex). Prince Charles. And on and on.
Mr. Giambrone, a Toronto mayoralty candidate and chairman of the Toronto Transit Commission, has said his indiscretion involved only playful text-messaging with university student Kristen Lucas, 19 at the time and now 20.
He has apologized through his campaign manager for a lapse of judgment. He has apologized for his behaviour's impact on family, friends and partner Sarah McQuarrie, who has said she'll stand by her man.
Ms. Lucas, apparently a scorned woman seeking redress, has been widely reported as saying she and Mr. Giambrone became lovers and that he told her Ms. McQuarrie meant no more to him than good optics for his political career.
Which is decidedly not good optics if true, but, on the positive side for Mr. Giambrone, social scientists by and large feel the young voters he's targeting will be less judgmental about his behaviour than older voters.
Mark Gaspar, a master's student at York University doing research in sexual behaviour and risk, said Mr. Giambrone's behaviour won't phase younger people at all. He said Mr. Giambrone had come across as a "real person, a more relatable person," by admitting to what he'd done, and even his dalliance by text-message enhanced his relatability to the age demographic he's courting.
At the same time, Dr. Stein thought Mr. Giambrone wouldn't get a lot of applause from young women. And University of Toronto sociologist Sarah Knudson, who is doing her doctoral dissertation on sex experts and their self-help guidebooks, put it more strongly: She thought young women would be disgusted.
"Probably the guys, too," said Ms. Knudson, who is 26. "They might think that it reflects poorly on them as a gender - and I would hope that it would."
Dr. Verny stressed the notion that what pushes the type-A personality is the idea of success. "Part of that is conquering women. It gives them a sense of achievement. It's very self-esteem boosting. And many successful men have incredibly low self-esteem - like many beautiful women. They need a lot of boosting."
For that reason, he said, they invite risk into their lives, play risky sports, inappropriately court women. "They have to work so hard at success because they don't feel it."
Said Ms. Knudson: "Much as it's instantly easy to blame them for this, I don't think much is being done to culturally encourage men who are economically and political successful, but emotionally stunted, to develop those skills."
Ms. Knudson also thought men underestimate women's power to retaliate when they feel badly treated.
And women? The overwhelming majority of women take a different view of risky sex, said Dr. Stein.
Rather than using sex as men do - to soothe themselves or to celebrate - "women engage in collecting evidence," he said.
They add up their partner's plusses and minuses, and if the minus factors outweigh the plus factors after five or six years, "they feel that they've earned an affair."
Editor's Note: Men can be brain-dead on other things, too. Like spelling. The statement above that Mr. Giambrone's behaviour won't bother younger people would have made more sense if it had said "faze" not "phase." -- Michael Valpy