Sordid

Well, this is a headline you don't see every day:

War and pissoirs: how the urinals of Paris helped beat the Nazis 

Unfortunately, most of the article is about how the Paris "pissoirs" came to be installed and then widely used by men for illicit sexual encounters.   I find that very surprising, given that I would have thought that the open air design of these things, whereby you can see who and how many are using the facility, would have meant that this protected them from such use. 

But there you go.

It is interesting that the opening anecdote is this:

At 11pm on 6 December 1876, policemen patrolling the Champs-Élysées discovered a well-to-do bourgeois in a public toilet, engaged in what they described as “indecent exposure” with an 18-year-old labourer. The older man, it turned out, was the prominent Catholic politician Eugène de Germiny, a bastion of the reactionary right who railed against the government’s secular tendencies and advocated a society based on family, religion and a return to monarchy.

The press immediately called out Germiny’s double standards. Despite his protests – he claimed his adventure was merely “research” – he became a magnet for satire, his political opponents making much of his hypocrisy. The writer Gustav Flaubert described the scandal as a “comfort that encourages the will to live”. Germiny was sent to jail and went into exile on release.

That put in mind of certain high profile "family values" Republicans in America caught out in toilets or with male staff over the years. 

And on the straight sex scandal side, this recent one shows another Trump supporting Republican with low grade morals:

Mr. Hunter is accused of spending more than $200,000 [of campaign funds] on personal expenses. The indictment, which was released last year, detailed spending on lavish family vacations to Hawaii and foreign countries, large bar tabs, and grocery purchases for his family. 

Mr. Hunter was also accused of using campaign dollars to fund several extramarital affairs between 2010 and 2016, including one with a member of his staff. Prosecutors also alleged that the congressman, a Republican elected to represent a Southern California district in 2008, attempted to pass off some of those expenses as charitable contributions to veterans.

Until Monday, Mr. Hunter had remained steadfast that he was innocent of the charges, at one point calling it a “deep state” conspiracy. Despite the allegations, Mr. Hunter won re-election to his seat in November 2018.