Sex Scandal Stats

Always willing to serve the people’s right to know—and what with scintillating sex-scandalous news stories springing up like Spring right now (although what we’ve seen hereabouts is unrelenting rain), I thought I’d do my duty and bring you the stats! I bring them to you courtesy of Wikipedia, that benefactor of mankind. I am an actual financial contributor to it, by the way. What I’ve done is to count the cases Wikipedia lists by period and bring them to you, appropriately enough, graphically.

The first of these shows scandals at the federal level and by historical period. The periods are not the same length, to be sure. 1776 to 1899 is 124 years, the 2010-2011 period is less then two full years. But I’ve normalized these so that, what you see is average number of scandals per annum.

Just look at those bars rising with time! Do we credit the media? Population growth, growth in population density (as in nothing propinqs like propinquity), is it a decline in morals or a increase in shameless self-display? We shall never know.

And this is, as the second chart shows, not a federal achievement. The state and locals are doing just fine. In effect, in 2010, the S&Ls were particularly randy, scoring a scandal victory by certainly more than a nose-length.

I’ve only modified incoming Wiki-data in two cases. In 2011 I added the single case of our IMF Chief's alleged episode, headline news today; and in that same year, for the S&L category, I’ve added, by way of a terminator, the revelations from California. My source is here, specifically two lists cited at the end of the See Also heading.