Creepy Male Scientists Play ‘Hot or Not’ With Petraeus’ Mistress and Wife
Days after the media broke the scandal now known as the “Petraeus Affair” in 2012, professors at the University of Michigan projected pictures in their classrooms of General David Petraeus’ posing separately with his wife of 38 years and of his much younger lover, Paula Broadwell, and asked their students to rate statements like: “I don’t blame General Petraeus for having an affair”, “General Petraeus was a victim of his circumstances”, and “It is unrealistic to expect powerful men to remain faithful.”
This academic curiosity, it appears, was motivated by media reports at the time that described Mrs. Broadwell as “toned” and “very attractive” and Mrs. Petraeus as “ordinary” and “frumpy”. In short, the question these professors hoped to answer was, are powerful men with less fuckable wives to be held to different moral standards when it comes to marital infidelity?
And who better to ask than a captive audience of early-twentysomething university students?