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Of all the questions swirling around the sexual assault accusations against Rep. Eric Swalwell of California—how did these claims not come out until now? How many more women will step forward? Did congressional leadership know?—there is one that won’t stop popping into my mind: What in the hell was he thinking?

And, fine, one more: Politically ambitious men are still out there sending dick pics?

The accusations against Swalwell are serious, and range from abuse of power to rape. One woman, Lonna Drewes, says Swalwell drugged her before raping her in a California hotel room. Another former staffer says Swalwell forced himself on her, despite her saying no and attempting to push him off; on a second occasion, she says she was heavily intoxicated and woke up naked with Swalwell, with no memory of the night before but could tell they had had sex. Yet another woman, who met Swalwell online, told a similar story: hotel, drinking, blackout. A fourth, Ally Sammarco, was in touch with Swalwell online, she thought to discuss politics; instead, he sent her nude photos.

In light of Drewes’ drugging accusations and what we know about serial sexual predators, the multiple women who say the assaults occurred after a night drinking with Swalwell left them with significant holes in their memory feel potentially even darker. And there are other patterns as well. Many of them were in contact with Swalwell online. Many say he sent them unsolicited sexual messages and images, often via Snapchat, which automatically erases messages.

Swalwell has denied what he called a “serious, false allegation” against him but has admitted to “mistakes in judgment,” and said he “must take responsibility and ownership for the mistakes I did make.” He is resigning from Congress but has vowed to fight what he claims are lies.

In an earlier video statement, Swalwell said he specifically denies the sexual assault allegation (at the time the video came out, only one assault allegation had been made public). Reading between the lines, it seems Swalwell seems to be admitting to inappropriate behavior (affairs and having sex with subordinates and women he met online) but not criminal acts.

But even if Swalwell’s version of events were to be true—and just to be clear, several of the sexual assault allegations are well-corroborated by diligent journalists, and Swalwell has presented no evidence that the women are lying—he still seems to have had the spectacularly poor judgment to have had multiple affairs and to send dick pics to women he sought to sleep with. And he’s not an anonymous creep on the internet; he’s a 45-year-old elected member of Congress running for governor of California. The guy ran for president! And still, when presented with an attractive woman on social media, he seems to have thought the appropriate response was, “Here, look, this is my penis, and also photographic evidence of the of wildly inappropriate behavior that will end my career and leave me in permanent disgrace.”

Obviously, the dick pics are the secondary story here. The sexual assault allegations are the most serious ones, and they deserve—and are getting—most of the focus in news reports; I hope they are fully investigated by Congress and the relevant law enforcement agencies.

But the dick pics tell their own story: the brazenness, the lack of dignity, the fact that Swalwell must have had some storyline in his head where he sent nude images to women who were not his wife and somehow never got caught.

Swalwell is not the first politician to have a dick pic deflate his career. Anthony Weiner was famously felled for his dick pic dysfunction, after he accidentally tweeted a picture of his erect underwear-covered penis to a female follower. He claimed he was hacked; who could even say if the dick in the pic was his? After more pictures emerged, he apologized, left Congress, cooled off for two years, decided to return to politics in a run for New York City mayor, and then continued to send dick pics under the pseudonym Carlos Danger (one recipient was Sydney Leathers, not a pseudonym). He got caught again, apologized again, lost the race, left the public eye again, and … continued to send dick pics, including one with his toddler son in the bed next to him. He eventually went to prison for the lewd messages he sent to a 15-year-old girl, his wife left him and married a Soros, and he is now a registered sex offender. None of this stopped him from running for a 2025 City Council seat in New York (that the dick pic–obsessed and apparently inexhaustible Weiner lost the election to a man named Harvey Epstein is enough of a linguistic coincidence to make this atheist consider the existence of God, or at least the concept of nominative determinism).

Humiliation by dick pic is now such a cultural trope it’s made its way into episodes of Homeland, Law & Order: SVU, and Succession. Perhaps Swalwell thought he was just a left-wing Roman Roy, looking for a Gerri to receive his photos and tell him what a slime puppy he is. Perhaps he forgot the culmination of that particular storyline, which was Roman accidentally texting a photo of his penis to his father.

To be clear, dick pics are the least of Swalwell’s problems, and the accusations against him are not the stuff of late-night TV jokes but of serious crimes and of the exploitation of his power and position (not to mention shocking disregard for his wife and children). But there is something about the psychology behind the dick pic that makes Swalwell seem all the more deranged. Women are not exactly famously enthralled by unsolicited photos of men’s junk; men have to know that the typical response to getting such an image is not “wow thank you so sexy I love it” but “omg eeew.” The impulse to send them seems to stem not from a desire to seduce but to subordinate—less mating dance than dominance ritual, a way to push a woman’s boundaries and see what she’ll tolerate.

Feminists have long observed that rape is less about uncontrollable sexual urges than it is about a desire to control, humiliate, and subjugate women. There is of course a sexual element to it too, insofar as it is a crime that uses sex as a tool of violence, and the men who commit it often (although far from always) derive sexual pleasure from it. But rape does not happen because a man simply got so turned on he could not control himself.

Democrats May Have Finally Learned How to Deal With Their Worst Instincts. This Senate Race Is Proof.

Dick pics, it should go without saying, are in a different universe than rape. But a man who sends unsolicited images of his genitalia to women who have given no indication they desire such missives is also not a man who is simply too horny, or simply too forward, when it comes to courtship. When the man sending the photos is politically ambitious, well-known, and married, it signals something in addition to an impulse to demonstrate to women that you have the upper hand: It signals total impunity. It might have been a belief that he wouldn’t get caught. It might have been a belief that no one would believe his accusers. It might have been a belief that none of them would ever come forward. It might have been that #MeToo was over, Donald Trump was back in office, and the brief moment when you couldn’t use your power to harass and abuse women seemed to have passed. Whatever was behind it, Swalwell seems to have believed he was above the consequences that have befallen so many a sexually incontinent man.

Or perhaps he was subconsciously looking for a way to blow up his own carefully constructed life.

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I am far from the first to observe that men like Anthony Weiner and the fictional Roman Roy seem to have both compulsive needs for public approval and humiliation fetishes. Whether that’s Swalwell’s story too is less clear. Weiner and Swalwell have repeatedly sought higher office; both of their lives were driven by naked ambition; and both sent sexual photos to strangers and near strangers, for what? Maybe it was an extension of that apparently insatiable desire for admiration—for some men, perhaps votes and endorsements and political influence aren’t enough; they need random women to approve of literally all of them. Maybe it was an extension of the same desire for power that makes a man run for governor of the world’s fourth largest economy and for president of the United States. Maybe it was the underbelly of all of the bravado and power-seeking—some desire to counter all the validation with the humiliation of knowing that, deep down, he’s just a revolting little worm.

Whatever the bizarre and complex psychology of the dick pic, the judgment question remains: What was he thinking? My guess is Swalwell would say he simply wasn’t. But that’s too easy a cop-out. Men who don’t think about their actions don’t nearly become governor of California. They just think that, whatever their actions—and particularly whatever their actions toward women—there won’t be consequences.

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