The news that former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger fathered a child out-of-wedlock with a member of his household staff ten years ago comes at an interesting time, swift on the heels of the very public arrest of the head of the IMF on suspicion of sexual misconduct in an expensive suite at the NYC Sofitel.

While Schwarzenegger's timing of the release of his statement with the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn might have been coincidental, inevitable comparisons will be made, from late night hoohas to plum political blogs.  And yes, even here.  

Because for as long as I can recall, and longer, men have been, to be blunt, behaving badly.

While this isn't exclusive to the political arena, or even to the world of celebrity, it certainly gets more press there.

Men have been chasing chambermaids around bedrooms for generations. It just didn't used to be the subject of a tweet.

Schwarzenegger's disclosure, the dropped shoe of the recent joint announcement with his wife, journalist Maria Shriver, that they were separating, and Strauss-Kahn's current controversial detention, are just the latest in a litany of sexual misconduct stories and lend weight to the notion that this is not a single class or party phenomenon. Schwarzenegger, while he might have married into the very Democratic  Kennedy dynasty, is a Republican, and the IMF chief is a Socialist (one who rents $3000-a-night hotel suites, but a Socialist nonetheless).  More recent discomforting disclosures have come from the once beknighted Al Gore and John Edwards, former darlings of the Democratic Party.  The champion of family values himself Ronald Reagan was not without blemish, and we'll likely never know if Jimmy Carter lusted after women anywhere other than the confines of his Georgian heart.

Bill Clinton's pecadilloes have come to define the genre, with his helpmate the current Secretary of State self-cast as the ultimate in standing-by-your-man.  We winced at Elizabeth Edwards' martyrdom and watched with discomfort as political wives from Silda Wall Spitzer to Jenny Sanford suffered from the sidelines.

Few seem to be immune.  One generally doesn't have to cast their net much further than their own close circle of family and friends to find a noteworthy but generally less public example.  Family trees rumble with ancestors whose mothers were the house servants and whose fathers remain unnamed.

For their part, both Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn have participated in the public arena with personal reputations that would generally fall under the umbrella of men behaving badly, where words like "groping" like to dwell.  They descend from generations of frat boy Mile High Club jocularity, testosterone not always in check, once encouraged, now a risk, a risk to their personal lives and their professional ones.  Political careers have a way of tanking in the wake of such press and morph into careers in press, punditry or public service, if not public shame and scandal.

Few of us will ever forget the moment Bill Clinton returned the gaze of a reporter and said, with supreme conviction, "I did not have sex with that woman," a defining moment in the history of public sexual misconduct.  History will retain the photo of Gary Hart on the Monkey Business and the name Monica Lewinsky.

My husband was fond of saying that one should never do anything they didn't want to see appear as a headline in a newspaper the next morning.   I lived long enough with him to realize that even the most perfect of men is not without risk, and have observed others long enough to realize that we are still raising generations of them.

This morning, these are your headlines.  Men behaving badly.  News at eleven.