The XX Factor: What women really think.

Sanford vs. Spitzer

Is It Wrong to Feel Sympathy for Eliot Spitzer?

I have a strange fascination with Eliot Spitzer. There, I said it. It's true. I suppose that's in part due to the fact that when Spitzergate roared its way into the headlines, I was running a project in which I was (for reasons that now escape me) collecting e-mails from men who had paid for sex about why they had paid for sex. Spitzer was one of those guys. I mean, he didn't send me an e-mail (not that I'm aware of, anyway), but he was one more john who had paid for sex, and the only difference was that A) he had gotten caught and B) he was famous.

Since, I've followed the guy's fall from grace and heady reascent to Slate columnist. Most recently, the kids over at Vanity Fair took him out to lunch, and John Heilpern succeeds in getting the former governor to open up over hotdogs. These days, Spitzer works for his father, a real estate tycoon. He's worked doggedly to rehabilitate his reputation, but ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

A Tale of Two Spitzers

The Observer has an admiring piece on Eliot Spitzer's phoenix-like public image "resurrection." First came the Slate column. This week, there's a Newsweek byline, an interview, and a Nation nomination for treasury secretary. "[H]e says what he thinks!" Slate editor David Plotz crows. "[I]t's back-to-square-one time, and Mr. Spitzer seems to be bringing all of his Sisyphean strength to bear on the project," the Observer admires. "At rare moments, I’ll do my best to add to the public conversation," Spitzer demurs. What struck me as interesting was less this latest installment of a fallen politician's return from a sex scandal (yawn) but the contrast with the media's portrayal of his wife, Silda. The March issue of Vogue makes it more than clear how we're expected to see Mrs. Spitzer a year later: as a victim. "The survivor," the headline slapped next to her reads. I guess, in the end, it's all pretty typical. The public's initial stance of scorn at Spitzer's sexual transgression was just that—a show, designed by a public that wishes to perceive itself as above the very behaviors that its members partake in regularly. Meanwhile, Silda gets stuck in the victim rut, where America will keep her, if it has its way. If we had to perceive her any other way, we'd have to ask ourselves if we would do the same thing that she did—and, if we did so, if we were right in doing so.

And Spitzer Gets a Column?

Since Spitzergate broke, I've been pretty ho-hum about the whole thing. Men cheat. Men have sex with prostitutes. Such is the nature of the universe. But when the guy who ran the escort service that Spitzer patronized got 2½ years in prison last Friday, I couldn't help but think: And Spitzer got a Slate column? As the kids say, WTF?

Mark Brener, a 63-year-old former tax specialist, was convicted on prostitution and money laundering counts. In court, Brener asked for leniency, and his lawyer suggested Brener's crime had no victims, although, that's a claim I'd refute. As the judge put it: “It may go on all the time and be the world’s second oldest profession. It’s certainly my view that a number of people are significantly hurt by this.” I suppose I have less of a problem with Brener's conviction—it wasn't like he was sitting around baking chocolate chip cookies—than the vast discrepency between Brener's sentence and Spitzer's never having been charged. With anything.

Obviously, I'm no legal eagle. I'm not even exactly sure exactly why this contrast so bothers me. Any of you legal birds interested in weighing in with your thoughts? I guess I thought all's fair in adultery and prostitution. Apparently not. That the pimp is punished more harshly than the governor who partook doesn't seem like the best policy to me.

Is Mary Schapiro the Worst Woman For The Role Of Policing Wall Street?

(Okay, Kim Kardashian would probably be a lot worse.)

So, I hope it doesn't violate any unofficial policy to discuss times certain of us XX Factorians have interacted "In Real Life" because I am going to mention the fact that some of us met Eliot Spitzer on Monday night at the Slate holiday party. Not because I care if he's sufficiently sorry for screwing prostitutes—I'm with you on that, Susannah—but because my brief conversation with the fellow speaks to a concern I have about the woman—and you won't be surprised I'm glad she's a woman!—Obama just appointed to helm the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Schapiro. Spitzer agreed with me that the campaign of incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to oust FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair was worrisome, because it suggests Geithner is exactly what you'd fear of someone with Geithner's credentials (Clintonite, New York Fed, Council of Foreign Relations, Kissinger Associates)—an insider. Now we have Schapiro, current CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the supposed "self-regulator" of the financial services industry.

If any regulatory body involved in this disaster has been a more abysmal failure than the SEC, it's the "self-regulator" that was supposed to monitor all those concerns the real (i.e., paid slightly less than $2 million a year) regulators had so steadily deregulated out from under them over the past 10 years: mind-blowing overleverage and the attendant counterparty risk, unbridled short-selling, the over-the-counter derivatives that amplified the current crisis, etc., etc. What was Schapiro doing all that time? Cracking down on over-the-top Wall Street …

Parties! (What, you thought I was going to say "bonuses"?) Excuse me while I shoot myself in the face for a second. Would it have killed Obama to appoint someone with the perspective to understand that all those unseemly parties wouldn't have been possible if not for the phony "profits" Wall Street booked selling everyone on their mathematical model-supported certainty that everything would keep going up forever?

Schapiro also took credit in an October speech for pushing to regulate credit-default swaps, the "insurance" contracts on mortage-backed securities written with reckless abandon by many of the recipients of our trillion-dollar bailout. I'm no expert, but nowhere have I read that Wall Street's bank-funded self-regulatory trade group was a leading voice in favor of getting the government to regulate the financial instruments Wall Street claimed it could self-regulate. Even ickier, this smacks of the same sort of retroactive flip-flopping (flip-swapping!) Geithner's promoters have displayed in trying to advance the notion that Geithner, had he been "left to his own devices," would not have allowed Lehman Bros. to go bankrupt. We know who did advocate regulation of derivatives—Schapiro's successor at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born. By all accounts, Born was less "popular" in the post than Schapiro had been. Now more than ever, we need a few good unpopular people in these positions. Why not someone like Born or Bair? Or even less popular right now, a certain Slate columnist? A little exile can be an edifying thing, but no one seems more insider-y than Geithner and Schapiro. (And ugh, for that matter, Caroline Kennedy.)

Is Spitzer Sorry?

Jacob Gershman's New Republic spanking of Eliot Spitzer for not appearing contrite enough upon his return to public scrutiny by way of a new Slate column is causing a minor blogosphere kerfuffle. As Gershman sees it, Spitzer isn't sufficiently sorry for having sex with a call girl, cheating on his wife, and, according to a former Spitzer aide, "the fact that the entire state government ground to a halt." Instead, the New York governor turned Luv Gov should endure a period of professional mourning, throw himself into public service so he'll be re-seen as wholly contrite, and then slowly but surely earn back the trust of the hopefully forgiving (and forgetful) American public.

Unsurprisingly, Salon's rabid legal dog Glenn Greenwald doesn't exactly agree. Greenwald, whose general modus operandi involves identifying one wrong, comparing it to anything the Bush administration has ever done, and deeming the supposed wrong a right by comparison, posits prostitution as a victimless crime for which Spitzer should never apologize. Rather, he presents Spitzer as a pseudo-victim who committed a "minor, consensual, victimless, private crime," a teeny-tiny not-even transgression for which he was "forced to resign as Governor, had intimate details of his sex life voyeuristically dissected by hordes of people driven by titillation masquerading as moral disgust, and was as humiliated and disgraced as a political figure can be." Sniff. Dick Cheney should apologize! he trumpets.

Back in January, I launched an online project called Letters From Johns. While call-girl stories aren't all that uncommon these days, there wasn't much known about why men pay for sex. I put out a query, asking men to send me their anonymous stories about why they'd paid for sex, and the letters started coming. While many of the men I heard from were contrite and conflicted, many were not. Take, for example, "I Am Ashamed of Nothing I Have Done." Unlike Greenwald, I don't believe prostitution is a "victimless crime"—the business of buying and selling sex is far too complicated for sex workers and johns alike to be summed up so succinctly—but I don't know that I understand why Spitzer should have to apologize for what other men do, too, private actions that sometimes sit in stark contrast to their professional lives. The only difference is that Spitzer got caught. Maybe he could apologize for that?

"My First Client Was a Sugar Daddy Type"

In light of recent conversation here--"Do You Really Want a Sugar Daddy?", "Sugar Daddies We Love," "True Romance"--inspired by college senior "Melissa Beech"'s "My Sugar Daddy" story on the Daily Beast, I thought it would be interesting to hear from an expert. After all, since Slate has given a john a column, it's only fair a former sex worker gets to speak here, too. I asked my friend, blogger and retired courtesan Debauchette, what she thought of the piece and discussion. Is Beech a savvy romantic, a "sugar baby," or a prostitute in denial?

Debauchette writes:

"I read the Melissa Beech piece with interest, which discusses her relationship with a sugar daddy. I don't have much love for the term 'sugar daddy'--it's infantilizing and makes me think of tiaras and baby talk. That said, this 'daddy' aspect of the term is a reminder of where the power lies in this sort of arrangement. Sugar babies sleep with men for money and material perks, but when that perk is a credit card or an apartment in someone else's name, it results in financial dependency, not financial freedom. This is why I prefer prostitution.

My first client was a sugar daddy type. He was very charming, very kind, and very married, and when I met him, he offered a similar sort of arrangement. His reasoning was that if he couldn't offer commitment, the right thing to do would be to pay me for my time, time that might be better spent elsewhere. It was sort of a cost-benefit balancing act, and it worked because I never felt like I'd wasted my time with him. But unlike Beech's arrangement, I didn't want gifts or a monthly stipend. I wanted to be paid for time spent, like an attorney, or a therapist. And it worked. For the time we spent together, it felt as though we were two independent people put on equal footing with the exchange of cash, and that transaction freed us to have a very open, honest, and sexual relationship. Six years later, he remains one of my closest friends.

A friend of mine believes that every relationship involves a transaction, that everyone makes an emotional compromise for end goals, like marriage, or family, or financial stability, or a life that isn't spent alone. Personally, I don't believe that all relationships are transactional, but I do think it's common, and I think that might be why Beech's piece has provoked such a response. She appears to be committed to one man who's offered to cover her financial needs and wants, and her relationship developed from a clearly articulated transaction. The thing is, this doesn't just remind me of sex work. This could apply equally to marriage."

I couldn't agree more.

Can (and Should) Eliot Spitzer Be Rehabilitated?

With a very serious op-ed on financial regulation in last Sunday's Washington Post, Eliot Spitzer clearly sees the economic crisis as an opportunity to rehabilitate his reputation, trotting out some pretty powerful "I told you sos" from his New York state attorney general days. Spitzer says he rang the warning bell about subprime mortgages and accounting irregularities at AIG but was rebuffed by the Bush administration. Only in the last paragraph does he deal with the elephant—cough, prostitution-ring scandal—in the room:

Although mistakes I made in my private life now prevent me from participating in these issues as I have in the past, I very much hope and expect that President Obama and his new administration will have the strength and wisdom to do again what FDR did.

A few bloggers were so impressed by Spitzer's essay that they called on the Obama administration to offer him a job. "Do we have to exclude Spitzer from addressing the issues on which he has considerable expertise? Issues that have nothing to do with an unrelated sex scandal?" mused Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly. "Is there a better pick in mind for the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission?"

Anonymous Liberal agreed, writing: "The argument is simple. When you're really sick, you hire the best doctor you can. You don't care about his/her personal life." Politico's Ben Smith floated Spitzer's name as a replacement for Hillary Clinton in the Senate should she become secretary of state.

If you're raising your eyebrows, you're not the only one. The way I see it, the No Drama Obama team has enough trouble on their hands incorporating the Clintons into the fold. Do we really expect Obama to embrace a man who broke multiple laws by contracting a prostitute across state lines? And there's no indication that Ashley Dupre, the call girl in question, is planning on helpfully fading into the night. On Friday she will appear with Diane Sawyer on 20/20, and she has granted an interview to People magazine. Her words to Silda Wall Spitzer? "I'm sorry for your pain."

Even if you're willing to forgive Eliot Spitzer's slimeball behavior, there's the inconvenient truth that despite his Wall Street expertise and reputation as a corporate ball buster, Spitzer's governorship was rife with scandal and intrigue from day one. He used the state police to spy on his political opponents. He was so obnoxious to the state Legislature that even his allies feared his liberal policy agenda would erupt in flames. A good fit for Obama? No way. Eliot Spitzer: Not the change we need.

(Political) Husbands and Wives: Not Like You and Me

OK, here's a question: Years before the sex-scandal press conference or the chunky pearls, do political wives see their husbands differently than the rest of us see the mere mortals we promised to love, honor and so on? Obviously, there's no one model for a marriage in the public eye, any more than there is for a marriage only the neighbors care about—and even then, not that much as long as you keep the noise down. But I do wonder whether some of these spouses don't end up extra disillusioned because they're required to put their mates on the kind of pedestal that Mr. Ellen Tien has never set foot on. (No, that most certainly does not mean that whatever happens is on them, especially since idealizing these politicians is such a big part of their job description.) And yes, I am thinking all this because of the current John Edwards scandal, and because to say that Elizabeth believes in John is like saying that Washington is on the warm side this time of year, or Middlemarch is not a bad book.

But most mates of the contenders seem to feel that way—or maybe it only looks like that because when they don't appear to believe their men were born in a manger, we totally freak out, like how dare Teresa Heinz mention her deceased husband, the father of her children, and how unheard of for Michelle Obama to remark upon even the most minute and mundane of her husband's flaws. I keep thinking about Cindy McCain, when her husband was running the first time, telling me that she found her husband "a real inspiration'' -- and then stopping herself, quite charmingly, and adding, "I guess anyone would say that about their husband.'' No, they wouldn't; in fact, outside the bubble, I've never heard any woman say, suggest, hint, or infer any such thing, no matter how nice her husband or contented her marriage. So, without letting any of these guys off the hook, I guess my question is, isn't the public's demand for a mythic narrative that no actual person can ever live up to part of the problem?

Gettin' Some Strange

That's funny, Meghan—when you just posted asking if any of us had seen Philip Weiss' cover piece for this week's New York, I was debating whether it was worth gathering my own thoughts about it. Poor Weiss is already being eaten alive, entertainingly, in the comments section, and really, his piece is such a feverish blend of anecdotal evidence, confessional sexual fantasy, and ev-psych chestnuts (there are enough "hard-wiring" arguments in there to power a mainframe) that it kind of critiques itself. But if nothing else, you have to marvel at the guy's self-immolating candor, his willingness to expose his fantasy life to public scrutiny in his quest for what the old Kris Kristofferson song called "some strange." I'm all for dismantling our culture's understanding of marriage as a state-sanctioned commitment to lifetime heterosexual monogamy. But what about prioritizing the "heterosexual" part—and granting all Americans the civil rights that come with marriage—before we start rejiggering the "monogamy" part so straight guys can collect all the women they want?

As you point out, what Weiss tries to frame as a radical rethinking of marriage amounts to a code of conduct so familiar as to be reactionary. Hey, what if we lived in a world where, because of their struggles with monogamy, men were subject to a less restrictive set of sexual expectations than women? And what if, instead of working as, say, waitresses, young women could fashion alternate careers for themselves as professional "mistresses"? What if sloppy think-piece writers could conflate the practices of "empowered" courtesan-bloggers like Debauchette or the polyamorous authors of The Ethical Slut with the sequestration and abuse of 14-year-old girls by the FLDS cult? Oh, wait, we're living in that world already.

Spitzer's Socks

From the beginning, Spitzer's downfall has aroused the conspiracy theorist in me. A friend who had been skeptical of my take alerted me to this story in the Miami Herald, picked up today in the New York Post, and writes: "Not sure that it changes my view of how it had to end, but if the Post story is true, you are certainly correct about how it began and what it was for."

One mystery cleared up, and another raised: Can it really be that rare to have sex with your socks on?

The Dangerous Precedent of Eliot Spitzer

I was glad to see the New York Times raise questions about the aggressiveness and anomalous nature of the Spitzer investigation and prosecution, but I was very taken aback by the answers, especially those given by the federal prosecutors. They sounded like they were trying to wriggle out of being held responsible. There are two aspects of the case that worry me, and that I think should worry anyone who would like to prevent the collapse of our civil liberties: first, whether Spitzer should have been investigated at all, and second, whether his situation warranted him being followed and staked out by large teams of FBI agents. The pat answer to all this is that, hey, he would have done it, but a version of the old childhood saying comes to mind here: His being wrong wouldn't have made it right.

Was Spitzer's Removal a Mini-Coup?

Should Spitzer Have Stepped Down?

I watched Ben Stein’s commentary on CBS News Sunday Morning this past weekend, and I’m troubled.

Have I been blinded by the salacious nature of the Spitzer story and am I not focusing on the important issues here? Have I been too seduced by the sex and the prostitute?

Stein says, “Something sinister is happening here and it scares me.” He says, “Men hire prostitutes by the thousands, maybe tens of thousands every day.” What is he suggesting? If everybody is doing it, that makes it OK? Men also rape, beat, and kill children and women and other men every day. Should we just look the other way because “everybody’s doing it!”?

And yet, I find myself wondering how exactly, aside from the illegal nature of it, paying for the services of a prostitute is different from paying for the services of a hairstylist or a massage therapist (the kind without the “happy ending”)? I think there is a difference, though I’m not sure how to articulate what that difference is. To hire a prostitute is to reduce a woman to her anatomy, I think, to reduce her to her sexual function in the same way that calling a woman a c-word is to reduce her to her anatomy or calling a man a d-word. To not want to deal with the whole person is to do violence to this person. Then again, when I go for a haircut, am I not just reducing my hairstylist to his haircutting function? I’m not sure how to answer this. It feels like there is some sense of violation and domination about going to a prostitute that does not exist when going for a haircut or a massage.

Stein says, “Spitzer was elected by an immense majority in New York.” This is true. And “Now he’s out of a job, and a man the voters didn’t vote for as governor is going to be governor.” An acquaintance this weekend reiterated this sentiment: “Paterson may be the best governor in the world, but he’s not the guy I voted for.” I don’t know if I agree with this. When you vote for a governor, are you not voting for the lieutenant governor too, in the case that the governor cannot perform his duties? I think it is the “cannot perform his duties” that is the issue here. Can the governor not perform his duties because he hired prostitutes?

While Stein acknowledges that what Spitzer did is a crime, he says, it’s “not a political crime, not treason, not terrorism.” He says, “Having elected officials kicked out of office by appointed officials is a very dicey proposition.” He suggests that because men are usually not punished at all for hiring prostitutes, or not severely punished, that Spitzer’s punishment did not fit the crime.

Last week, I felt that it would be hard for the people that Spitzer has to meet with and work with to look him in the eye knowing the details of his sex life. And this to me was enough reason for him to step down. How could he be an effective governor now that we’ve seen the man behind the curtain? In the last weekend, my feelings about that have softened some. We seem to have gotten over the details of Bill Clinton’s sex life being on display. And I sense that with the passage of time, feelings about the Spitzer scandal will lessen, too.

Was Spitzer’s departure too hasty? Or is his crime enough of a crime?

My acquaintance also expressed disgust that while the Bush administration commits crime after crime, this is what we are focused on. That I completely agree with.

The Dissociative Mood

What I liked about the Times article about the Patersons' affairs was this censorious observation by reporter Danny Hakim: "The admission is likely to be a distraction for the new governor at a difficult time." It's a classic instance of what I call the dissociative mood, a grammatical tone that is struck when something that should have been stated in the first person with an active verb ("I or we did something") is uttered in the third person with a passive verb ("something was done to someone, mistakes were made, the whole thing is a mystery to us"). This inflection, characterized by bat-your-eyelashes disingenuousness, is found largely in government statements, for obvious reasons, and in the media, especially when we in the media report the effects of our own reporting but leave ourselves out of the account.

So: Why is admitting to consensual extramarital affairs that have long since ended likely to distract from Paterson's gubernatorial agenda? Why, because we, the media-or perhaps I, Danny Hakim-mean to make it an issue! Who else gives a damn?

Speaking of which, did any of you who read Rick Hertzberg's comment in The New Yorker go and look up the Martha Nussbaum article he quotes, the one written from Belgium, in which she declares that Spitzer was hounded out of office by "quintessentially American" Puritanism and mean-spiritedness? If so, I'd love to hear what you think, especially about the part where she compared being a prostitute with being an opera singer (apparently, not so long ago, they weren't perceived as being very different). Being fairly Euro-trashy myself, I kinda agreed with her and her podium-bashing conclusion:

What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don't share the woman's values. ... What should trouble us are things like this: The working conditions for most women in sex work are extremely unhealthy. They are exploited by pimps, and they enjoy little control over which clients they will accept. Police harass them and extort sexual favors from them. Some of these bad features (unhealthiness, little control) sex work shares with other job options for low-income women, such as factory work of many kinds. Other bad features (police extortion) are the natural result of illegality itself.

In general we should be worried about poverty and lack of education. We should be worried that women have too few decent employment options and too little health and safety regulation in those that they do have. And we should be worried if men force women to do things sexually that they do not want to do. All these things are worth worrying about, and it is these things that sensible nations do worry about. But the idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque, the unmistakable fruit of the all-too-American thought that women who choose to have sex with many men are tainted vile things who must be punished.

Eliot Spitzer's offense was an offense against his family. It was not an offense against the public. If he broke any laws, these are laws that never should have existed and that have been repudiated by sensible nations. The hue and cry that has ruined one of the nation's most committed political careers shows our country to itself in a very ugly light.

Looking for the Rev. Wright

I am so ready to read the long magazine take-out story (Hanna?) about Obama and his church and its pastor: What Trinity United Church of Christ and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright mean to Chicago, what it means that Obama and his family joined this church and stayed there, etc. I feel like I'm missing the context that helps me make sense of the Kristol line Judith points to, and I don't really know how to fit Wright into my ever-developing picture of Obama. Agreed, everyone has their baggage. Also agreed that it's fair enough if Obama's membership in this church is in part a political calculation. I want to know the specifics behind this choice, though. I wonder, for example, if this church reflects the social world and family background of Michelle Obama as much or more than Barack's? Also, it seems to me that your relationship with the pastor who conducts your wedding ceremony and baptize your children says something different about you than your cozying-up political-pal relationships with whatever man of the cloth. Though, to be fair, I don't think Wright was making the statements Obama is calling "appalling and inflammatory" at the time of those Obama family milestones.

Melinda, you asked me last week if I felt more sympathetic to Spitzer because he's Jewish and so am I (and because I stated the obvious: He ain't gonna be the first Jewish president). Nope, I didn't feel more sympathetic, but I did cringe harder over his misdeeds. On that one, I felt like I did understand the context. I may well have been fooling myself, but the Spitzers feel to me recognizable—which made the whole thing all the more unsettlling.

How Is Spitzer Different From Bill Clinton?

In regard to Eliot Spitzer, I keep thinking about Bill Clinton and Halle Berry's ex-husband, and I'm wondering which actions are forgivable/excusable and which are not. If someone is a sex addict, as Halle Berry's ex-husband supposedly is, we treat it as a medical problem and we say it is not their fault.

I am more inclined to forgive Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky thing than I am to forgive Eliot Spitzer, and I'm trying to figure out why. With Bill Clinton, here was this cute flirty young woman who was thrown in his path, who threw herself in his path, who came onto him and went after him and god knows that women are his weakness, and so, well, he gave in to his weakness. Of course, this was many years ago, so maybe I am forgetting some of the facts. But to me, Bill's problem is that he likes women too much. (I should clarify that when I say "forgive," I mean as a constituent, not as a wife. As a wife, I would be out of there faster than you could say ... well, just about anything.)

Whereas what Spitzer did feels more like an act of misogyny. Again, I am trying to figure out why. I think I can understand it more for a man to say, "I met this woman, I thought she was cute, I developed a crush on her." But Spitzer went straight to the brothel. This was demeaning to himself, to his wife, to his daughters, and to the working girls, and to women everywhere, not to mention to the people he is supposed to govern and represent. Maybe I'm not being fair. I'm trying to figure it out.

What Spitzer did feels, to me, like a hostile act of anger. What Clinton did feels like an act of weakness. But again, maybe the years have softened my feelings about the Lewinsky affair.

Also, I don't feel like every man who goes to a prostitute is a misogynist. There are men who actually cannot get laid in any other way and so really do go simply for the female "companionship." I am less inclined to judge them for this.

Nonetheless, Spitzer has problems, which is what led him to behave this way. Maybe his problem isn't as serious as sex addiction but a "lesser "dysfunction or pathology. How much do we hold him accountable for it, and how much do we forgive because he needs help?

Masquerade

I like the following detail of Ashley Dupre's (I mean, "Kristen"; I mean, Ashley Youmans) biography. According to the New York Post, part of the reason she left home was that she crashed her oral-surgeon stepfather's Porsche. Like you, Hanna, I thought of Margaret Seltzer, concocting a gang identity out of her prep-school childhood. But Ashley actually did make the descent into the tawdry. Will we ever find out why a girl with a seemingly decent childhood becomes a prostitute, any more than we'll ever understand why a governor throws his happy, successful life away because of that prostitute? And speaking of false identitities, don't forget that when "Kristen" showed up at the Mayflower, she was told by her john that his name was "George Fox."

Eliot Is a Rorschach Test, Too

"Deserve got nuthin' to do with it."—Snoop (and before her, Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven.)

Whatever the mix of bad breaks and pathology and misguided, "I Wanna Be a Supermodel" ambition that led Ashley Dupre to the Emperors' Club, I feel sorry for anybody who would wind up in that situation. And whatever unseen cracks there were in Spitzer's foundation, the same goes for him.

But this whole thing also has me thinking more about what Dahlia wrote about how this political season has so far been all about us, about identity politics and how we see ourselves in the presidential candidates—or don't—and then feel put down or lifted up accordingly, bouncing along on the waves of their campaigns. And I wonder how identity—and class in particular—might have shaped our initial reactions to this Spitzer story. [Update: Rosa points out that Ashley's stepfather was actually an oral surgeon! But we obviously didn't know that, and my own assumption was definitely that she must have been struggling financially.]

Hillary Clinton has in the past played the class card against women who claimed to have been involved with or taken advantage of by her husband; she and her surrogates suggested that these women were the real perpetrators, and her husband the victim—of low-rent gold-diggers manipulated by his political enemies, and of his vulnerability as someone caught between the first two women in his life—his mother and grandmother—throughout a difficult childhood. Aren't there also some class-based assumptions involved in seeing 22-year-old Ashley as the "vixen'' and the governor of New York as the hapless unfortunate? What does it mean that prostitution is an OK career choice for "certain women"? If it's not OK for our daughters, is it OK for anyone's daughters?

We all see the world through the prism of our own identity and experience—who else's?—so my first reaction to this story, because I am a wife and a mom, who sometimes even wears pearls, was to put myself in Silda's shoes, rather than (as I might have done if I were younger or poorer) in Ashley's presumably strappy stilettos.

Emily B., when you mentioned your disappointment that Spitzer had blown (sorry) his shot at becoming the first Jewish president, did you mean that that made you any more (or less, for that matter) sympathetic to his situation? I never really related to my fellow Catholic John Kerry as such, other than to wish that our church would stop beating up on him, but as the first Catholic president, JFK sure walked on water for a lot of my coreligionists of an earlier generation. To the point that they would have looked the other way, even if they had known at the time what a cad he was with women? We'll never know, but I'm guessing yes. Identity is so powerful still today, in 2008, that as Dana notes, even Obama's grandmother, who raised him -- and did one fine job of it, obviously -- talks unselfconsciously about distrusting what people who are different from us might have to say. 

Victims and Villains

Liza and Maureen: I guess I think that asking whether Ashley is a "victim" is the wrong question. I agree, whatever her childhood circumstances, she's a moral agent and she made a bunch of choices that landed her in that hotel room with Eliot Spitzer. Those choices weren't completely unconstrained, but they were still choices, and we can have empathy for the unique and perhaps crappy circumstances that shaped her choices without completely letting her off the hook (no pun intended) for the decisions she made.

To me, the relevant question isn't whether she's a victim in some abstract sense—we're all victims of our circumstances, blah blah blah, so who cares—but this: in that locked hotel room, who held more power, 22-year-old, 105-pound Ashley with her worries about paying the rent (and presumably with at least some anecdotal awareness of the statistics Emily cites about physical assaults experienced by high-end prostitutes)? Or Spitzer, older, stronger, smarter, and able to throw thousands of dollars around like it's loose change? It's the enormous power imbalance that bothers me—and the sense that he liked that power imbalance, and did his best to exploit it—to get prostitutes to do things women who had more power might have refused to do. (Yeah, I'm still just hung up on that "unsafe" stuff.)

Searching for an analogy here ...  Well, OK: on a more mundane level, say I employed a nanny who was an undocumented worker. (I don't, but say I did). "Favors" I might ask of an American college kid who babysits for me ("Listen, would you mind staying really really late tomorrow night? And the night after? And the next night, too?) are favors I would hesitate to ask of a nanny working without legal documents. The college student doesn't lose much if she says, "Gee, sorry, I can't," whereas the undocumented nanny is a whole lot more dependent on me—and under far more pressure to say yes. The power balance would make it hard for her to say no to my requests, however unreasonable.