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Through the anecdotal evidence and inflamed, incoherent spewings of Broadsheet's usual posse of whiny male trolls, apparently.
Are the kind of women who get elected to office AND taken seriously (which rules out Sarah Palin) the sort who are likely to cheat, or be tempted to cheat? I suspect not, because women who in male-dominated fields have to work harder and be better than all the men to be taken seriously enough to succeed--it's the Jackie Robinson syndrome, and so they have to have clear heads and not even consider screwing up. I don't count Helen Chenoweth because she did not have her affair after running for office.
That's why the Lisa Nowak case sent shudders through so many of us: who knows how many male astronauts mess around on the side? But in the rare event that a woman screws up (and screws up spectacularly) she deeply embarrasses us and gives the Brightstars in this world plenty of feces to hurl at us, in spite of statistical evidence to the contrary.
The women who cheat often do so out of boredom and unhappiness and lack of self-esteem, not simply because they can. I'm not trying to excuse that behavior here, but a female politician can't afford to be bored, unhappy, or concerned about her sexual attractiveness, because that part of her brain is occupied, consciously and unconsciously, with a different concern, one that has to do with getting the same amount of respect her male colleagues get.
The bottom line is that we really won't know how women politicians conduct their private lives until they are common enough to no longer serve as lightning rods for judgments about women. Maybe when more women are powerful, more younger men will be attracted to power, and we will indeed see that female politicians are just as susceptible to temptation. But not until then.
