-
sponsorship
When law firms institute family-friendly policies (flex hours, reasonable work loads), who benefits? That depends how you measure it. Mothers at these firms are neither more nor less productive than mothers at other firms, as measured by billable hours, according to a new study of 670 lawyers in Alberta, Canada, by sociologists Jean Wallace and Marisa Young. But fathers at family-friendly firms are less productive than fathers at old-style firms. At the same time, fathers with help at home, like stay-at-home wives and weekly cleaning services, increase their productivity at work, whereas women with stay-at-home husbands and cleaning aren't more productive.
What's going on here? Wallace and Young argue that fathers tend to consider breadwinning an all-important family contribution, so when they have more help at home, they respond by working harder. Also, men are far more likely to have a stay-at-home spouses than women are. Women, on the other hand, seem to sink more time into their kids, if they have it. The happy spin from the authors is that the family-friendly policies aren't hurting the firms vis-à-vis their women employees, which makes the policies seem less costly. The finding about the men working less, though, throws a wrench into the discussion, doesn't it? The authors ask, "How are men using their free timeas a result of working fewer hours?" and then cites other evidence that men may plow their time into more leisure activities. Is that perfectly understandable, or is it shirking? Who's modeling the good behavior here? It's hard to tell, but the gender split is there to be mulled over.
Over at Legal Blog Watch, Carolyn Elefant argues that billable hours are a bad measure of productivity. That makes sense to me as a reason that this study may not translate to other professions in which parents can argue they work more efficiently, squeezing more work into less time. But it doesn't seem like a salient criticism of these findings, since hours are firms' explicit measure of productivity.
-
sponsorship
Anybody else read the NYT Magazine piece on Harvard's intentional virgins? It was in many ways right off-the-rack: Not all young people who are virgins on purpose are dum-dum religious nuts. Some of them—brace yourselves—have even infiltrated Harvard. And have complicated philosophical reasons for this lifestyle choice. Too complicated, in fact, even to take a stab at explaining. But don't sweat it, because underneath—who would have guessed?—they're religious nuts, too! With hilarious hang-ups, as you'll note when I torture Harvard's Head Virgin with completely disrespectful questions about just how far she'll go. So ciao for now and see you next time, when I pull the wings off butterflies. ...
OK, so it infuriated me, but it did sound one hopeful note. When the head virgin (who doesn't even order dessert after lunch, poor sensually starved child) debated a campus sex blogger (who voraciously gobbles every crumb of her ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting and raspberry compote, get it?) the two women showed mutual respect. They declined to supply the crowd with a catfight and refused to live up to their billing: Harvard's Jezebel Takes On Campus Virgin Mary. "The women themselves saw their encounter as a meeting of two feminist positions,'' the story says, and good for them. Afterwards, they probably headed out for a glass of water and a chocolate martini. Oh, and according to their chronicler, the men of Harvard indicated that after some serious reflection, they would indeed rather marry Mary Ann than Ginger—though I'm not sure either of them would say yes.
-
sponsorship
Judith, I agree that the right messenger (at the right moment) could deliver most of your speech on gender. But maybe it would be easier for a woman to achieve liftoff. Anybody else remember Nicole Hollander's Sylvia cartoon on the wage gap? From her classic, Ma, Can I Be a Feminist and Still Like Men? (A: Sure, just like you can be a vegetarian and like fried chicken.) In it, four people respond to the question, How do you feel about equality for women? "I feel that women should get equal pay for equal work,'' says the white guy. "I think it's only simple justice that women get equal pay for equal work,'' says the Hispanic guy. "I think if a woman's doing the same job a man is doing, she should get the same pay,'' says the black guy. "Equality for women,'' says the Hillary stand-in, "means that our potential for physical, intellectual and emotional growth be supported and nurtured. It means being recognized as full and valuable members of this society. It means being given a chance to risk, to grow, to make a contribution to a better world, side by side with men.'' I think about this not infrequently. (Though perhaps not as often as I do my very favorite Sylvia, in which two hookers walk into a bar. One tells the other, "So he dresses himself up in this chicken suit, covers himself up with mostaccioli ... and then looks around real scared. He says: 'How do you feel ... about Title IX?' And I say, 'Senator, anything that turns you on, turns me on.'' And then I trigger the hidden camera.'')
-
sponsorship
Rachael, Melinda,
1. I agree that Hillary would have a hard time getting away with the speech
I want her to make. As
Rachael says, abortion and workplace policies and matters of that ilk remain white-hot and divisive among women, not to mention in the general population. It is hard to wrap one's mind around a speech that bluntly addresses these issues and is uplifting and unifying to boot. Nonetheless, these are (I believe) the fundamental issues: control over one's body and workplace policies that level the playing field for women, despite women's child-bearing and mothering functions. They seem essential if we're to achieve a truly egalitarian society. (Yes, I still think we should seek an egalitarian society, even though I also think that it's unlikely, for biological and possibly linked social reasons, that women will ever be able or even willing to give up certain primary caregiving functions. The job of feminism today, as I see it, is to create a world in which we get to remain members of society in equal standing while raising our children in a serious, loving, attentive way. In this possibly idiosyncratic sense of the term, then, feminism isn't just for women anymore. It's for fathers as well as mothers. Maybe it isn't even feminism any more.)
As for the presidential race: It also seems evident that a woman seeking higher office faces obstacles that a man does not face, no matter what the color of her skin. Check out
Mike Kinsley's hilarious piece on the time-cost to a female candidate to meeting female standards of presentableness—roughly two-and-a-half weeks more spent primping during the average campaign cycle. Women operate under countless other double standards. You know which ones: They sound "overemotional" or they seem "calculating"; they're too sexy or not sexy enough; they made choices in the "Mommy Wars" that half of all American women disagree with, or else lack children and thus are't people American women can identify with. I don't see Obama taking any heat for having left the child-rearing to his wife. I wonder how a woman running for office would play to the public if she had left the child-rearing almost entirely to her husband.
In short, it seems as if we have arrived at something of a consensus, albeit a very rough one, about what racism is and why it's bad, whereas we still disagree about what sexism is and so don't agree on what's bad about it. That's why it's hard to imagine that speech.
2. Even though I see that it's hard to imagine, I don't think it is nearly as impossible to make as we think. The miracle of Obama's speech was that he made a number of thoughts that have long been unthinkable in America sound reasonable, even obvious--the notion that white America is suffused with casual racism; the idea that we need not demonize a man who says unacceptable things but does good in other ways. And so on. I put my list out there in a bald, unadorned way.
Emily suggested a way to wrap it up more elegantly. The speech would try to re-imagine family values. There might be other ways to give it. I'll admit that neither Kerry nor Clinton has found a way to do so. That doesn't mean that Obama couldn't, if he so chose; or that a female politician with similar levels of eloquence and courage wouldn't be able to put it across.
-
sponsorship
If Dahlia can stand one more conversation about the conversation, I thought the grace note of Barack Obama's March 17 epic conversation starter were his few words about his grandmother’s quiet bigotry. He was, as pundit Jon Stewart said the next evening, speaking to the electorate as adults. At the same time the remark reminded everyone why his particular heritage is so appealing to lead the effort for change. If you missed it, Stewart and Larry Wilmore had a hilarious sample conversation of their own. All that was before, as Dahlia wrote, the "dialogue" devolved into “the sort of conversation that always goes badly in the end.” I missed the example of Obama being blacklashed on by the Fox & Friends hosts on March 21 when Obama’s reference to the elderly woman who raised him as a “typical white person” in a radio interview was apparently edited to sound offensive while the morning show hosts imagined insult. The New York Observer gives a flavor here:
Can you say ‘typical white person’ if you’re white?” asked Mr. Doocy. Of course not, noted Ms. Carlson. There’s no way that Senator Hillary Clinton could use the phrase “typical black person,” they noted. “So there is a certain double standard in society,” said Ms. Carlson. And also: “I sort of take offense at that line: ‘typical white.’”
Oddly, Chris Wallace, who anchors Fox News Sunday, thought they weren’t “providing the full context” and thought their spin was “excessive.” Chris who can be a bit snappish, called his Fox colleagues on their zeal. Fortunately, he did so using the live 2-way camera they had set up to promote Wallace’s Sunday lineup so we can all hear.
-
sponsorship
Ouch. I think I just got my hair pulled. Guess it wasn't so memorable, but here is Kerry on the wage gap, which he spoke about on many occasions. Here he is on his plan to subsidize day care, which he tried to make a big deal of, though the press mostly ignored it. Both Kerry and his wife spoke about early childhood education every time I ever traveled with them—though much of the resulting attention, as here, seemed to focus on how we just couldn't afford such programs. Here he is being congratulated for reaching out to women "not only about abortion but in the questions of gender discrimination in the workplace over pay and family-related flexibility, and also the minimum wage, which affects the pay of more than 9 million women.'' And here he is on choice, which he talked about plenty. If Hillary has been more subdued on the subject of abortion rights, maybe it's because she agreed with what Kerry said after the '04 election—about how his party's determination to make pro-lifers feel like pariahs may have hurt him at the polls. According to USA Today, "In a meeting with liberal organizers after losing the presidential election in 2004, John Kerry infuriated some party stalwarts when he said the approach to abortion needed to change. He said Democrats should do more to welcome candidates and voters who say they're pro-life and to make it clear that being 'pro-choice' didn't mean being 'pro-abortion.' A survey in February by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg concluded that the abortion issue was a significant factor in Kerry's loss of white Catholic voters, a key group that sometimes votes for Republicans, sometimes for Democrats. President Clinton carried white Catholics by 7 percentage points in 1996; Kerry lost them by 13 points.''
-
sponsorship
One of Hillary Clinton's rationales for staying in the race when she was getting battered in a string of defeats was that she was so much more experienced than Barack Obama, that over time his inexperience would cause him to stumble. That would leave Clinton, having been so gruelingly tested over so many years, ultimately victorious. But isn't it ironic that now a central Clinton claim on the presidency—her experience—is making her look foolish. There have been her embarrassing, exaggerated claims that as first lady she helped bring peace to Northern Ireland and risked her life in Bosnia. And now the Boston Globe has effectively taken apart one of her oft-repeated accomplishments: that she created the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Turns out, according to the legislators who did create it, that she had virtually nothing to do with it, and that the (Bill) Clinton administration initially opposed it.
-
sponsorship
Christie's New York will be auctioning a naked portrait of the French first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, on April 10. I'm no prude, I'm certainly not a Victorian, and I commend the French for turning a blind eye to their politicians' private lives, but I'm starting to come around to the idea that we're better off with straight-laced statesmen.
Case in point: A CNN article on the French couple's first official visit to the U.K., which tries to, ahem, cover Carla's bod and Sarkozy's foreign policy all at once. The result is absolutely ridiculous: a nude pix lede, followed by the portentous quote, "We cannot afford to lose Afghanistan," back to the nude pix, then mention of a rumor that Sarkozy might boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.
I think the world needs dull, egghead politicians. Or maybe sexless ones, at least until the press grows up (and God knows we never will). I'm pretty sure the Qing Dynasty had eunuch bureaucrats, so there's precedent.
-
sponsorship
Hey Melinda, when you get off your fainting couch, John Kerry did NOT give that speech—not in the memorable, reimagining-family-values way that Judith is imagining. And yes you're right, Rachael, these issues are divisive, and I guess I have to reluctantly agree that it wouldn't be in the Democrats' interest if Hillary or Obama decided to have a Big Gender Moment. Which is why, as Dahlia and Melinda started out by acknowledging, we're not having it. But I applaud Judith's list, especially in its attention to economics and employment, which never quite seem to get their due and catch on fire, and so leave two-working parent families scrambling to keep it all together. I'd like to think that someday the country will be ready for and will find the candidate who will make universal preschool seem as important as saving Bear Stearns.
On a lighter note, earlier this week I watched Fifty Nude Women by Margot Roth of New Yorker Talk of the Town fame and marveled at its winsome playfulness. The women in this 12-minute film seem entirely at ease in their bodies, of all varieties. I'm with Jezebel in that the video made me think about weight but in a much less tedious way that usual. The curves and rolls and wrinkles and scars and stretch marks signaled vulnerability and also a record of lives fully lived.
-
sponsorship
Sorry for the delay; I was on the fainting couch, indisposed and hoping I'd remember to tell Chantal that while I appreciate her efforts, overlacing cuts off oxygen to the brain. Judith, John Kerry did give that speech, point for point—until he was hoarse, bless his heart. Yet when the votes were counted—or some of them, anyway, because I, too, have my conspiracy theories—all he had to show for it was a three-point narrowing of the gender gap. And if Hillary sent up that flare right now, the most likely effect would be a narrowing of her lead in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. She won't.
-
sponsorship
Judith,
I think you make a great point that we can get a little too caught up talking about politicians' sexual peccadilloes when there are larger issues at stake. But I can't see even an imaginary speech by Hillary tackling some of the topics you address. And I think that illustrates some of the differences between race and gender that we've been talking about—I'm particularly reminded of Melinda's post, about the black woman who said she didn't have much in common with white women. There's a lack of shared experience. Most if not all blacks, regardless of their education or socioeconomic class, have felt the sting of racism at some point. And most if not all whites, for better or worse, right or wrong, have felt threatened by blacks, be it from ignorance, or angry rhetoric like that of Jeremiah Wright, or affirmative action.
In his speech, Barack Obama was trying to help each side understand where the other was coming from and get us past it. He called out the Rev. Wright and his own white grandmother. But some of the topics you suggest in a hypothetical speech on gender are still white-hot among women, and whatever Clinton could say would only be divisive. Abortion? Her long-established philosophy of "safe, legal, and rare" is something that I can accept, even as I disagree with her. She should leave it at that. Roughly half of all American women are anti-abortion, and we're not changing our minds. Subsidized day care? That's sure to stir up another battle in the Mommy Wars: Women who choose to stay at home aren't going to be pleased to see their husband's paycheck shrink (in the form of higher taxes) so that two-income families don't have to pay for child care. A shorter workweek? Well, OK, I could live with that. Let's at least make hiring a housekeeper tax-deductible.
That doesn't mean that the conversation about women's issues isn't vital or that we shouldn't be seeking out common ground among ourselves. I just can't picture a speech on these issues that would be sweeping, uplifting, and/or unifying.
-
sponsorship
When did infidelity on the part of politicians become such an urgent feminist issue? From the outrage on the XX Factor over Eliot’s misdeeds, Bill’s affairs and Hillary’s toleration thereof, and, most of all, from the speech on gender that Melinda and Dahlia think Hillary should give, you’d think political philandering was the paramount issue facing women in our time. Public figures cheating on their wives, having sex with prostitutes, and—oh yes!—sexually harassing employees: These are the grievances we and Hillary are supposed to deem worthy of addressing the nation about. Sure, my fellow bloggers recognize that there are other important policy matters, but to gauge from word count over the past few weeks, this is what gets their juices going—the negative “gender signals called out by the media” (to quote Melinda and Dahlia) in their coverage of the various scandals. Poor, weak women being victimized by powerful married men. The bad examples Eliot and Bill and their consorts set for the young men and women of America.
Since when has it served the cause of women to demand that our public figures act like Victorian gentlemen? Since the era of Victorian feminism, of course, when women’s clubs joined with “social purity” clubs to police the morals of the time. (Anyone remember the Society for the Suppression of Vice?) Ladies, move on. Trust the several generations of 20th-century feminists who fought for such freedoms as no-fault divorce: Making marriage this sacred is not a good idea. For one thing, women philander too. Even sexual harassment is an issue feminists ought to handle gingerly, given the long history of institutions and politicians abusing sexual harassment codes to take down their enemies or violate civil rights. (See Margaret Talbot’s still-remarkable piece about the University of Wisconsin’s prosecution of feminist professor Jane Gallop, for an example.)
What didn’t Melinda and Dahlia put in “Hillary’s speech” that I think they should have? Here are a few things I’d have liked a speech on gender to address:
—Abortion and contraception. Our right and access to them have diminished steadily in the past eight years, and they lack a firm supporter in the Republican presidential candidate. Have women in America forgotten how grisly life gets without those things? If so, they should request 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days from Netflix immediately. The movie is set in Romania in the 1980s, when the crazy Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had made both abortion and contraception illegal, but it could just as easily be us in a land ruled by the anti-choice crowd.
—Fairness in the workplace. By that, I don’t just mean equal pay and equal treatment, but the need for business and the professions to alter the criteria for promotion so that working women aren’t damned by their biology. In other words, rethinking how people come by tenure and partnerships and editorships and other leadership positions so that women aren’t penalized for, or forced out by, the decision to have children in their 30s.
—Day care—expanding it, funding it, regulating it.
—Public preschool education—making it universal.
—The length of the work day/week—given women’s “double shift,” a feminist issue if I ever saw one.
Anyone care to contribute to the list?
-
sponsorship
Here's one thing George W. and Hillary have in common: She never was a big consumer of news. In fact, according to Carl Bernstein's book, during her Little Rock years "Hillary didn't read newspapers or watch television news. Instead, she listened to National Public Radio or classical music in the morning. If there was anything else she really needed to know, she figured, she'd be told about it early in the day, either by Bill on the phone or Vince in the office. But even in her earliest days as first lady of Arkansas, "she didn't want to read about things that would bother her and about which she could do nothing,'' said Betsey Wright. "She saw it as an irritant.'' So perhaps no one's made her aware of the David Brooks column you mentioned, Meghan. Not that she needs him to tell her it's over—and has been for some time, if you're going to be a total math drone about it. Honestly, if you didn't know better, you might even have begun to suspect she was hanging in there at least in part to do the maximum damage to her party's nominee, weakening his chances in the fall and building the I-told-you-so case for Hillary in 2012. But that couldn't be right. Right?
-
sponsorship
This link is to the utterly bizarre video tribute by Hillary Clinton to Heather Mills—the mentally unbalanced newly ex-wife of Beatle Paul McCartney. Hillary, in a kind of zombie mode, gives a unified field theory tribute to Heather. In this four-minute accolade, Hillary credits Heather, in part, for New York's recovery from Sept. 11, Hillary's decision to introduce an anti-landmine bill, and Hillary's knowledge about life that we must "just enjoy every single minute of this beautiful gift that we've been given." She ends by saying, "God bless you, Heather." (The judge in Heather's divorce case has a somewhat different take on Heather's qualities, saying she is a self-aggrandizer with a tenuous relationship to the truth and an "explosive and volatile character".) The only explanation for this artifact I can come up with is that in a little-known episode Hillary was forced to make this tape while being held hostage by Heather, which must have been a far more perilous situation that Hillary's trip to Bosnia.
-
sponsorship
Dahlia, I definitely agree that these "conversations'' on race and gender are no fun. Still, maybe the only thing worse than having them is not having them; we've been trying it that way more or less forever and where did it ever get us? Yesterday I was part of an online discussion on race and gender in the Democratic primary on Washingtonpost.com, and though the questions were great, I found it frustrating trying to snag at least a few of the balls whizzing by me when each one of them deserved a seminar-length give-and-take. One question I never even got to—because it was more than I could begin to address on the fly—I am still thinking about today. As I no longer have the questions, I'm paraphrasing here, but it was from an African-American woman who was writing in to say that she just doesn't feel she has that much in common with white women. Occasionally, there's a spark of connection over childbearing or -rearing, but in the main, she relates more to black men than to women of other races.
Now, that does make me feel sort of rejected—I feel like her sister and she doesn't feel like mine -- but it's interesting, too: Why is it that I'm imagining I'd feel kinship with women from Jupiter, and she doesn't see the female experience as all that formative? Donna Brazile told me the answer once, I think. This was when I was just starting to work on my book on how women make electoral decisions. (Short answer: Other-than-rationally, just like men do. Not unlike decisions in dating, really. Which is why our dutiful, "Oh, my top issue is health care,' answers to pollsters don't always mean that much.) Anyway, what Donna said was, you know, women don't vote as a block because we never had to go through something like the slave experience together. So the biological and cultural deal that I consider such a sealing bond just doesn't compare. (Does it?) My son who is mad for movies had us watch Sixth Sense for I think it was the 234th time this last weekend, and you know how the ghosts go away after the little boy finally listens to them? Cheesy, OK. But on race and gender, I do think there's a lot more we have to hear from one another.
-
sponsorship
Interesting post by Andrew Sullivan in response to Hitchens' current piece in Slate about Obama and cynicism. I have to say I'm with Sullivan on this one. I think if the mask were going to come off Obama and reveal some foul, calculating monster within, it already would have. Sure, all politicians are to some degree calculating; they have to be, to survive at all. But Obama has really made such calculations as transparent as he can. And he has for the most part resisted stooping to the petty mudslinging that passes for political discourse today. Sure, we can catch him out on exceptions now and then. And I think there are some real questions about how untested he is, and whether he'll be able to make good on his many promises to the American people. But I don't find him to be a powerful hypocrite. Meanwhile, Hitchens' piece and Sullivan's response only underscore the very solid point of David Brooks column in the New York Times today: That whatever you make of Obama, it is time for Hillary Clinton to bow out of the race gracefully. Read it; it's more cogent than I can be. The power of language is real. And the longer Clinton stays in the race and hashes it all out with vicious political rhetoric, the more that power will be driven home to all of us. As Brooks says, Obama's ratings have already dropped in the polls.
-
sponsorship
Gerry Ferraro thinks Obama's "base is African-Americans"? Noted campaign expert Obama Girl begs to differ. (Me, too, but I have nothing whatsoever to add to the tortured discussion of race vs. sex, so let's stick with Obama Girl for now.)
Anyway: Obama Girl has a new music video out—following on June's viral hit "I Got a Crush on Obama"—and her latest is addressed directly to Hillary Clinton.
Though Obama's gonna win it, you're sorta kinda staying in it
Sometimes in this campaign, you've got a crush on John McCain
Can't you see it's hopeless?
It's become an Obama-nation.
After calling on Hillary to drop out of the race—or at least stop attacking Obama—Obama Girl speculates that it's all just spurned love on Hillary's part:
"I know deep down, you're an Obama Girl ...
We all have a crush on Obama."
Take that, Gerry.
-
sponsorship
I thought I was onboard with Emily about all the benefits of openly airing this buried anger and rage about race and gender. I’d been arguing for months that it was past time to lance this boil and just have it out in the streets about how mad everyone in the Democratic Party feels.
Perhaps I’ve read one too many livid blogs today or listened in on a few too many enraged racially charged debates this weekend, but I am starting to go a little wobbly at the ankles. Can someone remind me what’s truly served by a “conversation” about race and gender for its own sake? Are we progressing toward something better here? Is all this dialoguing fostering some new paradigm for talking about personal identity and politics? Or is this just the sort of conversation that always goes badly in the end? The kind that starts when some guy in a bar says, “Wanna hear what your real problem is?”
-
sponsorship
Here is Geraldine Ferraro defending herself against Barack Obama's accusations. His base is African-Americans? What is it with this generation of American feminists? All she left out was "articulate."
Overall, Ferraro said, she thought the speech was "excellent," but she lamented that Obama did not go further in condemning Jeremiah Wright. She surmised that Obama was limited in that regard because he did not want to offend black voters, whom she called the base of Obama's support.
"I think they got as far as they could go politically," she said. "They're looking at their base. Their base is African-Americans. They're looking at that and they're trying to walk a very thin line. They don't want to offend the African-Americans, and this is the way he did it."
-
sponsorship
I am curious about what all those people who think immigrants have such a fabulous free ride in this country think about this New York Times story about a 22-year-old Colombian woman, married to an American citizen, who was informed by a U.S. immigration agent that her application for a green card would sail right through—after a couple of blow jobs, that is.
According to the story, this was not even an isolated incident: "Money, not sex, is the more common currency of corruption in immigration, but according to Congressional testimony in 2006 by Michael Maxwell, former director of the agency's internal investigations, more than 3,000 backlogged complaints of employee misconduct had gone uninvestigated for lack of staff, including 528 involving criminal allegations."
In a conversation the Colombian woman taped on her cell phone, she pleaded with the agent not to force her to have sex with him: "If I do it, it's like very hard for me, because I have my husband, and I really fall in love with him.'' But when she tried to get out of the car where this conversation was taking place, he stopped her and made her perform oral sex. Too frightened to take the tape to the police, she eventually went to the newspaper, and, because there is a God, found reporter Nina Bernstein. Now the immigration agent has been arrested, but the woman's new husband—no Silda Spitzer he—has left her.
Is it fair to immigrants like this poor woman to leave them effectively unprotected by the law? And to all of you who've canceled your NYT subscription because it was mean to your favorite candidate or added a conservative voice to the opinion page, have you really thought about what we'd do without newspapers? Or without reporters like Nina who have the time and the inclination to actually listen to this woman's story and say, That happened to you? We'll see about that. If that day ever comes, I don't want to hear a word out of you.
-
sponsorship
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?
-
sponsorship
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.
First: Never having researched this issue, I don't understand the charge of "structuring," or the exact nature of the financial transactions that triggered the Suspicious Activity Report, but it is clear that they involved what the Times once called "apparent sleight of hand" with sums of money that otherwise fall below the threshold of concern, and that would probably not have attracted notice before the new financial regulations put in place after 9/11. Those rules were adopted to catch terrorists, but I wonder how many terrorists they have helped to catch, and whether, rather than protect our security, they have instead exposed citizens—us—to unduly intrusive oversight of our personal finances. Maybe one of the many of you with law degrees, or someone who covers the legal beat, has a more informed opinion on this. To me, it seems that we should be absolutely certain we know what we're agreeing to before we let the government investigate behavior that is not actually illegal, such as moving small sums of money around.
Second: According to the Times, the prosecutors argued that they had to go to the lengths they did to investigate Spitzer, even after it became clear that he wasn't bribing anybody but just paying prostitutes, because if they hadn't, they might have been accused of a cover-up. His prominence and importance did him in. What could they do? This answer, it seems to me, is mischievous. It is a prosecutor's job to exercise discretion about whether or not to investigate and prosecute, and most prosecutors, I would hope, spend most of their working hours saying no. Are the federal prosecutors now saying that, in the case of a highly visible elected official, all they can do is throw up their hands? That they no longer have the right to exercise discretion—even though they did with every other client in that sting? That's a pretty alarming thing to say, especially when they didn't just fail to exercise reasonable discretion, they threw the entire weight of the U.S. Justice Department into spying on Spitzer. If visibility or prominence is the standard for investigation/prosecution, and not the gravity of the conduct involved, then that's an open invitation to harass our public figures for just about anything. It strikes me that an attitude like that toward elected officials could subvert—has subverted—our democracy in a very dangerous way.
Prominence, moreover, is a very subjective standard; in the era of electronic surveillance and YouTube fame, who isn't prominent? It seems to me that public figures are liketerrorists in this way: They are canaries in the civil-liberties coal mine. As go the rights of public figures and terrorism suspects, so go ours.
One other thing: To respond to Emily's question about whether in
my last post I was claiming that sexism is worse than racism: I was saying that I thought Hillary Clinton had had a more horrifyingly personal encounter with sexism in her days as a public figure than Barack Obama has with racism. I was not making a blanket statement about racism vs. sexism, both of which strike me as equally brutal, insidious, and alive in our day. The context of my comment was the Woolf quote, which was about mockery and superciliousness and a very intimate sort of psychological harassment. I haven't read the Obama autobiography, but I find it hard to believe that he has been subjected to as much ridicule and deep, mean-spirited, unwarranted humiliation, as she has. (I have no doubt that he has encountered a great deal of racism—but doubt it has been as intimate as her brushes with sexism.)
And please don't say that her humiliation is Bill's fault. First of all, it started long before the Lewinsky affair, and second, what happened between Bill and her should have stayed between Bill and her. It should never have become public knowledge, and thus fodder for sadistic, voyeuristic, and yes, sexist awfulness. That it did, and the manner in which it did, is another good example of why the privacy of public officials needs to be protected from prosecutorial overreach.
-
sponsorship
The Republican race for the White House turned out to be something of a snoozefest compared with the drama of the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton contest. I've waffled among envy, relief, and worry that the lack of excitement actually means a lack of enthusiasm for John McCain. And, as Politico points out this morning, the fact that Democrats are raising so much more money than McCain is a sign that conservatives "have yet to coalesce behind their standard bearer."
But maybe John McCain doesn't need all the conservatives. A new poll from Pennsylvania (hat tip: Drudge) suggests that the divisiveness of the Democratic campaign might indeed hurt the party. The candidates have each inspired such passionate followings that 20 percent of Obama supporters and 19 percent of Clinton supporters polled have vowed to vote for McCain if their candidate doesn't win the nomination. It's hard to say if that will play out, but given that our past few elections have been so close that even a small percentage of defectors can make a big difference, I think for now Republicans of all stripes can be glad we didn't nominate Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, who have far less appeal to our Democratic friends.
-
sponsorship
Rosa, I'm glad to know that Rev. Wright made it to the Clinton White House, but no, I don't think it's time to stop talking about him. Obama and the country are better off for his amazing and moving race speech, which Wright popping up on YouTube forced him into giving. All of this needs to be aired, and now, during the primaries. If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, the Republicans are going to come back at him with another round or three of Wright. And if the party isn't ready to nominate Obama because he's got roots in the angry black community, alongside his message of hope, well, I think that's the wrong rationale, but let's get it all out there. No surprises. Or at least as few as possible.
-
sponsorship
Noooo... it wasn't Monica.
It was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of course, joining Bill and Hillary for a breakfast with "religious leaders" on Sept. 11, 1998. There is a lovely photo, too.
Q. Does this mean Bill & Hillary are closet Wright parishioners who share Wright's every opinion?!
A. Nope. But I think now we can all stop talking about Jeremiah Wright. If Wright was good enough to be considered a major national religious leader by the Clinton White House, then maybe Barack Obama wasn't uniquely obtuse in his decision to stay on at the church where Wright presided. And maybe Hillary Clinton's campaign should stop trying to use Wright to discredit Obama.
Just a thought.
And in case you were wondering what Bill, Hillary, the Rev. Wright, and the other religious leaders chatted about over their coffee and muffins: Bill took the occasion to repent. Even the absent Monica got an apology from Bill, at least in passing: "It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine. First and most important, my family, my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people."
-
sponsorship
Rachael, I don't think your sympathy for Hillary is misplaced. But I think perhaps you are not cynical enough. I've always assumed that the Clintons had a purely political marriage. So when you ask, "Wouldn't it be easy for Hillary to pop down to the Oval Office and see how Bill's doing or ask him if he wanted to serve the red wine or the white at their dinner that night, on a quiet Sunday afternoon?" I wonder, what if she had? Would she care if she found "that woman, Ms. Lewinsky," under Bill's desk? I always assumed she would not in the same way that you or I would care if we walked in on our husbands with another woman, except that it would be a pain in the butt for Hillary in political terms. (How to keep it quiet? How to explain it? etc.)
Do the Clintons love each other in the way that married people love each other? I just assumed they were still together for political reasons only.
Why does a man, or woman, have to be married to be successful in politics? Why couldn't Hillary have ditched Bill then and gone on to have her political career? Sadly, I don't think she stuck around for love.
Also, I do find it mean-spirited for the AP to cross-reference Hillary's public schedule with the Starr Report. After all, she did nothing wrong.
-
sponsorship
Hillary Clinton released her "public schedules" from her days as first lady, and Ann Althouse has a good riff on how Hillary was a very "First Lady-y First Lady." But—and I suppose it was bound to happen—the AP went through Mrs. Clinton's schedules and apparently cross-referenced the Starr Report, and the result is a half-dozen or so incidences of Bill Clinton trysting with Monica Lewinsky while Hillary was at the White House.
I had two immediate reactions. First, I felt sorry for poor ol' Hillary. Bill is such an unrepentant philanderer that he had no qualms mocking his marital vows right under his wife's nose. Plus, Hillary's lived with this elephant in the room for the whole campaign. And now, boom, here it is out in the open. But then, a more cynical reaction: Could it be that Bill didn't worry about getting caught because Hillary was aware and lived with it because a scandal could have tainted her political future? Even when I'm feeling cynical, though, I still feel for her.
For some reason, this particular encounter really stands out for me: "Jan. 7, 1996: On a Sunday afternoon, Lewinsky and the president spent most of the afternoon in the Oval Office. The first lady and the president had a small dinner with 20 people at ‘the Old Family Dining Room' at the White House." Was that particularly daring of Bill? Wouldn't it be easy for Hillary to pop down to the Oval Office and see how Bill's doing or ask him if he wanted to serve the red wine or the white at their dinner that night, on a quiet Sunday afternoon?
So, colleagues, is my sympathy for Hillary misplaced? Or is my cynicism?
-
sponsorship
I love that Woolf quote, Judith, and it's sadly apt, lo this century later. And I think you're right that's both Hillary's own doing and a product of how she's been treated. But I wonder about your claim that she has weathered horrors and Obama's hasn't. Yes, she wore the straitjacket of being the first lady, which was never more strangling than in Bill Clinton's White House. But Obama is a 46-year-old black man with an amazingly unconventional and also difficult past; see his autobiography. Forgive me if you were talking about their public and recent political personas and experiences rather than their whole selves and lives, but since I don't like the race-and-gender-suffering one-upsmanship, I can't help pointing out that Obama knows a real trial when he sees one. His have been different kinds of crucibles, and maybe that explains why he's sunny Jane Austen, but maybe it's more apt to think of him as a black writer with a light and wry side, like Langston Hughes (who Rosa reminded us of the other day.)
I'm curious: Does the comparing of your racism as worth than my sexism, and vice versa, distress any one else? Or is it just me who sees this as singularly unproductive?
-
sponsorship
In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf talks about how the struggle to be heard and taken seriously by a dismissive and mocking world leaves ugly traces in a writer's work-- how it distorts reasoning, undermines arguments, sharpens the tone. Woolf is talking about novels written by female writers of the past, but it seems to me that she could be talking about books by Germaine Greer or sermons by Jeremiah Wright or, I can't help thinking, the shifting self-presentations of Hillary Clinton:
One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was 'only a woman,' or protesting that she was 'as good as a man.' She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the center of it. And I thought of all the women's novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked appes in an orchard, about the second-hand bookshops of London. It was the flaw at the center that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.
[Then Woolf says of the two writers she feels have managed to wriggle free of these conditions, Jane Austen and Emily Bronte:]
What genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. ... They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess...
If we were to contrast Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama we'd have to say that Clinton is one of those forgotten novelists, with an edge of rage warring in her with a penchant for excessive deference to the "divisive" politics of the past, and Obama is Jane Austen, speaking as Woolf said she did, with "freedom and fullness of expression." But I'd also have to say that what Clinton has weathered is far more horrifying than anything Obama has weathered—think of all the mean articles about her hair, about her glasses, about her name, about her every utterance and deviation from the well-scripted role of first lady. Given all this, I think it's a miracle that she has emerged as unscarred, as clear-thinking, as politically effective as she has.
-
sponsorship
Good for Huckabee. Here's what he had to say yesterday on MSNBC:
On Obama's speech:
... I think that, you know, Obama has handled this about as well as anybody could. And I agree, it’s a very historic speech. ... And I thought he handled it very, very well.
And on the Rev. Wright:
... One other thing I think we've got to remember: As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, "That's a terrible statement," I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, "You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would, too. I probably would, too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.
Funny how you don't see Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson or Hillary Clinton saying things like that.
-
sponsorship
In a newsroom, you see right away that a high percentage of people who would like you to write about them—people with serious grievances of all kinds, against the cops or the city or the hospital or whatever—are at least a little bit crazy. Unfortunately, this makes it harder for them to get any action, because they're written off: "Guy's a nut.'' Which is especially unfortunate, because in a lot of cases, if the story is even half-true, of course he's a nut; that's what injustice in the long term tends to do to people. Maybe we shouldn't be so surprised if the generation that ran into more brick walls of sexism and racism than is currently necessary has some post-concussive issues as a result; they are entitled to their tirades—and to our respect, though I don't think we honor their sacrifice by refusing to see that they actually did accomplish something.
-
sponsorship
Judith your In Treatment post calls to mind another dim cultural memory—of Clarence Thomas’ stunning autobiography (I reviewed it here) and the ways in which Justice Thomas both worships the grandfather who raised him and is scarred by him. Thomas painstakingly catalogues the man’s endless cruelties, from throwing him out when Thomas dropped out of the seminary to skipping his weddings and graduations. But despite all this, and despite his grandfather’s paradoxical message—work harder than whites and you will succeed/success on “white” terms is not true success—Thomas reveres the man as the "one hero in my life.” The book is titled My Grandfather’s Son, after all. He believes his grandfather’s cruelty shaped and tempered him.
Thomas’ grandfather, like Wright, and like your Glynn Turman character, Judith, suffered horribly and survived. But what they passed on to the next generation was this double-edged wish: I want you to have it better than me, but I know you never will.
I often feel that’s what Gloria Steinem and Co. feel about us: We’re kidding ourselves if we think life is any better now, and we're insulting them or in denial if we disagree.
One other insight from My Grandfather’s Son? Thomas writes that when he met his second wife, Virginia, he was astonished to encounter anybody who still "thought it was possible to make the world a better place.” Thomas’ sense that repairing the world is impossible echoes Obama’s criticism yesterday of Jeremiah Wright. If Thomas teaches us anything, it’s that if you glorify your father's cynicism and hopelessness along with his heroism, you will never get "past" race.
-
sponsorship
Does anyone at XX Factor watch "In Treatment"? I watched last night's episode immediately after watching Obama's magnificent speech on YouTube, and was struck an echo of the speech in the show. It had me thinking about something like the point you made, Dahlia, about having to apologize for one's crazy elders.
Here's the echo: As you all know, every day of the week, Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) sees a different patient, and we see the session. Well, over the weekend, his Tuesday patient, a black Navy pilot (Blair Underwood), died. He had been struggling to unpack a suitcase full of anguish--guilt over having bombed a madrassa full of teenage boys, gay impulses, the legacy of his father, a harsh sometime civil-rights activist. Then his plane crashed during training exercises. He was considered one of the Navy's best pilots, and it is unclear whether his death was accidental or suicidal. And the father (Glynn Turman), who had emerged during the sessions as not just as a harsh man but as a soul-destroying monster, arrives on Dr. Weston's doorstep. He wants to understand what has happened to his son.
Turman gives a menacing, heart-breaking performance,well worth watching [http://www.hbo.com/intreatment/tuesday/], but his accomplishment per se is not what made me think of Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That came at the moment when he makes us see the father's side of things. He draws himself up, this thin, erect, bitter man, aware that the doctor partly blames him for the son's death though is too professional to say so, and he narrows his eyes and says (I'll have to paraphrase and make it sound more banal than it was): "I saw terrible things as a child. I understood that only the strong could survive this world. I wanted my son to be strong." And the doctor gently chides him, saying, "Couldn't you see that the world your son was born into was not the world you were born into?" And the father looks around at Dr. Weston's gorgeous office, with its deep sofas and mahogany furniture and picture windows full of leafy views, and says, in effect, "How can you, who know nothing of where I come from, of my culture, dare to judge me?"
The scene volleys our sympathies back and forth many more times before it ends, but I found myself thinking about some of the same people Dahlia did, Robin Morgan and Jesse Jackson and yes, Hillary Clinton, and all those other public figures who saw terrible things and fought bitter battles and said things we couldn't possibly agree with today and may not have agreed with even then--with the result that, as Obama said, and as Dahlia repeated, we can now afford to see things differently. What felt so new about the speech was not that he apologized but the degree to which he refused to, as well as the extent to which--and this was REALLY new--he eschewed derision and ridicule and the very American sin of presentism, of seeing the past through the lens of the present. Like Glynn Turman, he changed the way we see these people. They're not drooling on the sofa. They're battle-scarred, and so will we be one day. Hillary has a deep historical understanding of such matters, I have no doubt, but I am afraid she may lack the political courage required to articulate such complicated thoughts in the heat of a campaign, as well as the eloquence to make us understand them.
PS I have been told that the show reenacts with shocking fidelity its Israeli model, and I can't help wondering whether in the original, the pilot was in the Israeli army and his father survived the Holocaust. It's the only thing that would make sense. Anyone who has seen the original, please let me know.
-
sponsorship
Sorry to be late to Obamapalooza, but I didn’t get to watch his speech until late last night. Isn’t it fascinating to hear Obama apologizing for Rev. Wright in almost the same terms we at XX have used to apologize/make excuses for Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and some of the other second-wave feminist heroines who now seem frozen into some rictus of '60s outrage? One of the ways Obama tried to humanize his pastor was by describing what Wright saw and experienced before the demise of legal segregation. It was that experience that, according to Obama, made it impossible for Wright to imagine change, just as Morgan, et al., can’t seem to conceive of a world that isn't consumed by perpetual gender warfare.
Hanna, you once made this same point about watching the video of “Germaine Greer and the rest of the feminist street poets take on Norman Mailer in that 1971 town hall”—that these women were sexy and ferocious and inspiring but also, in today’s terms, a little hysterical and cartoonish. Greer and Wright were on the front lines, and, as Obama explained yesterday, there is honor in having endured what they did, surviving it, and hacking down the barriers for those of us who came after. But Obama was also reminding us that we can be deeply grateful to that generation and also acknowledge that their stark language and relentless, perhaps terminal, anger also created massive divisions that need to be healed.
I find it fascinating at this new turn in the conversation—where we have to publicly apologize for our civil rights and feminist icons because, at least rhetorically, they’ve turned into Crazy Aunt Tessie, who gets drunk and drools all over the ottoman. I didn’t see it coming.
-
sponsorship
While we're on the topic of race, I happened onto something quite difficult to watch on MSNBC this morning, something my husband saw as "a wake-up call for white guys everywhere.'' Right there in front of God and all of America, Chris Matthews was trying to get down with Ellen DeGeneres. At least, I think that was the drill ... (After watching several times, I think I can state with confidence that he did not, as it first appeared, inadvertently grab her boob. Though, in the wrong kind of shoes, she would surely have fallen to the floor.)
-
sponsorship
I'm with Maureen Dowd today: The Obama who talks of grays and of complicated legacies and long evolutions, not just of high hopes and change, is my kind of guy. See, there's a reason the campaign isn't over yet—we need to see this man dealing with more than adoring crowds. And he's clearly thinking not just narrowly and strategically about the superdelegate count, but broadly about what the pattern of his primary successes and failures so far tells us about the country. This speech was a response to more than a flap over Rev. Wright, I would say. It was Obama's admirable effort to speak to an electoral puzzle that Matt Bai pointed out in a fascinating piece in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. "To put this simply," Bai wrote, "Obama wins in major urban areas but can't seem to win in urbanized states, while Clinton wins in rural communities but consistently loses in rural states. Why?" Bai proposed a counterintuitive answer that says something important about race in America: Obama does well in areas with the least racial diversity—where there are either lots of African-American voters or very few (Wisconsin and Vermont). The actual experience of racial diversity—of living side by side, feeling hard-pressed, struggling, and competing for "a piece of the American Dream," especially during an economic downturn—may not build enlightened racial unity, but instead fuel skepticism about facile promises of harmony. It was exactly that sobering reality that Obama addressed head on in his speech. I call that audacity.
-
sponsorship
However Obama's speech plays out, Hillary Clinton's No. 1 surrogate, Bill, has weighed in again on race. He said the idea that he has said anything racially insensitive during the campaign (particularly comparing Obama's win in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's) is "a myth" (what, not a "fairy tale"?) and a "mugging" by Obama's campaign. (Does this mean Bill Clinton is suggesting he has been mugged by a black candidate?—not to play the race card or anything.) He further went on to say, in that self-pitying style he is so very good at reminding us of, that he never played the race card against Obama, but that Obama's campaign played the race card against him. I hope Hillary will be asked to respond to this.
-
sponsorship
Thank you, Ellen. I remember sitting in front of the television in 1998, during the first few days of the Lewinsky scandal, listening to television commentators all but demand Clinton's resignation, and shivering, and saying to my husband, "Wait a minute! This is a coup d'état!" I wasn't the only one. Press critics ranging from the shrill (Michael Moore) to the reasonably steady (Todd Gitlin) were obviously thinking the same thing, because they soon published articles saying it, or saying that it had been a near-coup-d'état Back then it was easy to see who was behind the circulation of the information and innuendo that wound up fueling an impeachment. The Lewinsky scandal was straightforwardly partisan. It was the extreme right that dug up the dirt and the Republicans who used it for political ends.
This time around, it all happened so fast we still don't understand what led to Spitzer's downfall, other than his own hypocrisy and the salacious detail included in the criminal complaint. (One federal prosecutor I know—who dismisses all conspiracy theories out of hand—nonetheless says that the level of detail in the complaint went far beyond what was strictly necessary or germane to bringing the case, and speculates that its authors were at the very least looking for some serious publicity, even before Client 9 was identified.) But I found myself in front of the television anyway, saying the same thing. Yes, Spitzer committed a crime, but personally, I still don't understand why it's a crime. (Read my post about Martha Nussbaum if you want to know why I think that. Better yet, read
her article and the longer law-review article on prostitiution linked to it.) And what about the shocking invasion of Spitzer's privacy? Isn't there anything wrong with that? Does being a political figure automatically strip you of the obvious civil protections? Once it became clear that he wasn't moving money around for nefarious political purposes, oughtn't some form of restraint kicked in? Did his purported crime deserve the aggressive prosecuting it received? And as Martha Nussbaum asked, don't his estimable efforts over the years get him any credit? Or do his sexual pecadillos mean we should just kick this dedicated public servant aside like so much trash?
And how about the fuss the media are making about Paterson's affairs? Check out today's
Times: The story is spiralling way out of Paterson's control. Are we going to throw him out of office, too? If this raging fire isn't what Philip Roth once called "sexual McCarthyism," I don't know what is.
-
sponsorship
Truly. I was all set to write that we had given Obama a free pass, that we had allowed him to slip away from something the we'd pin on anyone else. Every one-word slip in this campaign—bitch and monster and Jesse Jackson—has been endlessly scrutinized. I myself have hung many an evangelical politician on the words of their pastor. Reading Obama's book, it's impossible to conclude that he has some vicious strain he's hiding from us. Still, I thought we should acknowledge that it means something to choose as your place of worship a Farrakhan-tinged church where the pastor spits out some white-hating, Jew-hating, America-hating poison.
But then you listen to that speech and it makes you want to weep. Everything I thought was lost in American politics—raw honesty, depth, a natural style, biography un-packaged, un-Disneyfied, and seamlessly matched to meaning, beautiful, unpretentious rhetoric, and whatever is the opposite of pandering to your public—was there in that speech. Amen to that.
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
Do three saps make a trend? What I like best about Obama is that he does not play dumb and keep moving, or shout, Hey, look over there! So that instead of either rushing by this outcry over his preacher's remarks, or attempting to minimize what's happened, he's taken the far harder tack of doing just the opposite, of slowing down and broadening the focus of what Wright's frustration and the public's reaction to it are all about. It would have been so easy for him to get out there and tell us the 34 ways in which Wright is contemptible—but instead, he's actually tried to put the man in context. (Wright's been compared to Hitler on Fox and you think this is without risk?) And I'm asking seriously: When was the last time a politician, any politician, paid us the compliment of asking us to take a deep breath and get beyond our first reaction? Which is why I think he's not only been able to address the immediate campaign concern, but has managed to turn this into a chance for us to learn something. Don't we need someone in public life who can look at a problem and say, No, I reject that premise; let's go at this a different way. He has that capability, and the whole notion that his only real gift is a way with pretty words drives me mad: Lovely words are the product of clear thought. Always.
I heard Obama's speech today as an announcement that we should call off the purity tests, all of them, because we are all flawed, sure, but are also more than the sum of our three worst YouTube moments. We don't have the luxury of continuing to play this gotcha game, because we can every one of us be got—and why would we spend our time that way, when there is so much work to be done?
"As imperfect as he may be,'' Obama said today, Wright "has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.''
Isn't there a little Jeremiah Wright—and a little Toot, as he calls his Kansas-born grandma—in all of us? But what I heard him say today is that that's just the starting point.
-
sponsorship
That was the flat-out best political speech I have heard in my lifetime. No, nothing messianic about Obama: It's just that he's the rare politician who doesn't insult the American public by pretending that our complicated world is simple. And, damn it, the man can write a speech. The sheer poverty of the Democratic Party's rhetoric over the past few years has often made me want to cry in frustration. Obama manages the near-impossible: He turns a tricky and potentially damaging story into a teachable moment, and he does it with eloquence, too.
Below, by the way, is a Langston Hughes poem Obama seems to be channeling—listen carefully to his speech and you'll hear echoes. A great and moving poem. (And there's an ironic back story here, too, which I wrote about a couple of years ago: For a short moment in the summer of 2004, Democratic nominee John Kerry briefly hit upon a decent campaign slogan, "Let America be America again," a phrase inspired by the Hughes poem of the same name. But the right quickly attacked, using Hughes' 1930s flirtation with communism to discredit the poet, the poem and any phrases or sentiments inspired by it. Does that sound like a familiar strategy? Cf. "Jeremiah Wright." Kerry—who's no Barack Obama—disowned the slogan in about 10 seconds flat.
I'm glad we finally have someone who can reclaim the sentiments, if not the slogan. Anyway—here's an excerpt from the poem (with a link to the whole thing):
Let America be America Again - (Langston Hughes, 1938)
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me).
(Read the rest of the poem here.)
-
sponsorship
Meghan, I am also a sap, but I don't think you needed to be one to be moved by this speech. Obama has often tried to transcend race. Wright's remarks reminded us all that sometimes you just can't. And so Obama got out there and owned the specific injustices black Americans experience while also marrying them to incarnations of disadvantage that can be just as burdensome. The worst moments in this endless primary season, for me, have been the ones in which we have to listen to a chorus about who has it worse, women or black people, or whose -ism is more worthy, feminism or anti-racism. Obama takes us away from that false choice, and that's where I want to be.
And then, for good measure, he singled out reading to your children as one of the most important things parents can do. Which made me think of him as a dad—and a good dad. A welcome image.
-
sponsorship
I've been more and more impressed with Obama's speeches—especially since I saw him at a rally in San Antonio. But I still wasn't entirely prepared for today's speech—inspired by the criticism of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. In it, Obama tackled racism head on, and did so—amazingly—in a rather forgiving if rigorous way. He talked first about the anger certain African-Americans feel at finding themselves shut out of the American dream. Then he went on to acknowledge how easy it might be to feel a similar anger if you're a working-class white American who doesn't feel particularly enfranchised either—an immigrant, or someone who lost his or job as the economy globalized. He showed a kind of empathy (at least at first) for those folks in this position who might resent African-Americans for the opportunities afforded them by affirmative action. And he talked about this "unacknowledged resentment" like it was something less dirty that "racism," something not just to be bundled up and hid under the bed where no one could see it, but a fact of national life that deserved voicing. Of course, the last thrust of his speech was about why that resentment is ultimately divisive and needs to be overcome. But he didn't act censorious or threatened by this race resentment. On the contrary, he acted almost like a pastor—someone gently prodding and guiding a flock to acknowledge latent sins that seem too shameful to voice. I usually feel that Obama kinda stumbles when he gets anecdotal and folksy—it's a bad John Edwards or Bill Clinton imitation, I think—but the story about Ashley, a white girl who volunteers for his campaign, was incredibly moving. Maybe I'm just a sap.
I don't think so, though: The other thing that was powerful about the speech, because it's still unexpected, is how directly and uncagily he acknowledges his own role in these scandals. Sure, he said, he knew about Wright's inflammatory remarks. He doesn't try to shield himself from them; instead, he invites Americans into his thought process. This is a kind of political performance too. But it's one that's closer to what I've always thought our politicians should strive to do: appear as if they're speaking naturally to us, their constituents.
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
This morning is a flashback to 1998, toward the end of Lewinsky hell, when Bob Livingston decided not to run for speaker because someone had figured out he'd had an affair. And then came all sorts of rumors about who else Larry Flynt was going to out. And then it turned out Newt Gingrich was also getting some. (Newt Gingrich! Who would ever get steamy with him???) Back then, I had the same thoughts I am having now: Am I a conservative? Am I socially conservative? Am I the last person in America without an open marriage? Or who hasn't had an affair? What got to me today was not the McGreevey driver threesome story (which seems to fit right in with this Ashley Dupré moment) or the more-than-I-needed-to- know details about the Patterson marriage and the Days Inn. It was the blasé comments, by both Paterson and the anonymous New York city officials. "Like most marriages," Paterson began his confession. Most marriages go through periods where both spouses are having open affairs with other people? And then: It's "commonplace" for Albany officials to keep mistresses or have second families in the capital, said NY officials. Really? Second families in the capital are commonplace? Where else is that commonplace, that I don't know about? At the DoE? The IMF? On K street? In Kansas?
These last couple of weeks have been a real end of innocence for me. First Client 9. Then in Sunday's NYT, call girls who drink mint tea, carry NPR bags, and read Junot Díaz. Today, the driver threesome, and the Days Inn. What will I learn tomorrow? That Nancy Pelosi's a madame?
-
sponsorship
And a new record, isn't it, for time elapsed between the swearing in and the swearing at? That's quick work, when right under the New York Times headline "New Governor for New York, Pledging Unity" is this second offering: "Patersons Acknowledge Extramarital Affairs.'' Only as these his-and-hers relationships were over years ago, this is relevant how? No laws were broken that I can see, except for the one about taking your wife and your girlfriend to the very same hotel. And I've stayed in worse, but the Days Inn? I see here where you can't have more than two guests in a room with only one bed, though—which might or might not have ruled out a stay by the McGreeveys. (Whatever happened, it's sure odd that New Jersey's former first lady sees the allegations that she and the ex-governor had threesomes with his young driver as an attempt to upstage her. "He cannot stand it,'' Dina McGreevey said of her ex, "when I am receiving attention in the media rather than him.'' Could anybody be that starved for attention? OK, yes. But wouldn't these revelations be problematic in his new line of work as an aspiring Episcopal priest?) Now that John and Abigail Adams, there was a lovely couple.
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
Melinda H. posts for me, except I'd take her argument a step further. It is actually a politician's job to have nutty acquaintances, because a politician needs to foster alliances with a wide range of different groups. That's how he or she acquires enough backing to get elected and, if elected, to get legislation passed. Any group passionate enough to have political significance is bound to have many nut jobs, or at least immoderate and fiery advocates, in its midst. That's why Bill Kristol's scornful observation in the New York Times this morning—"Obama seems to have seen, early in his career, the utility of joining a prominent church that would help him establish political roots in the community in which he lives"—warmed the cockles of my little Hillary-loving heart. Obama is a politician! He sees the necessity of seducing, pandering, backpedaling, compromising! He has done the work of establishing political roots in a community that he needs to win his campaign! Hurray! Now let's hope he does the same in many, many other communities as well. That way if I wind up voting for him, I won't worry I'm voting for a politics-transcending naif.
-
sponsorship
The answer, my fellow Americans, is yes. Hillary Clinton, just for instance, has spent years cozying up to Nixon's old friend the Rev. Billy Graham. And yet what are the chances that she seconds Graham's feeling, caught on Nixon's tapes, that Jews are pornographers with a "stranglehold" on the American media? Just a ballpark guesstimate: zero. Or that John McCain is right there with his buddy televangelist John Hagee's belief that Catholics are the spawn of Satan? (I paraphrase, but what he actually said was worse.) Or that McCain agrees with his other "spiritual adviser'' Rod Parsley (his real name), who thinks we ought to declare war on "the false religion" of Islam? What, you didn't even know John McCain had a spiritual advisor? I doubt that he did, either.
Barack Obama, of course, has had a far more substantial relationship with his longtime preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who in turn is sweet on Louis Farrakhan. And as everyone with cable now knows, Wright has given a bunch of fiery sermons in which he blasted America's foreign policy and racism, and said Hillary Clinton has never been called the n-word. (Only, except for the part about the "chickens coming home to roost'' on 9/11, isn't much of what he was railing about sad but true? Former Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro suggests that Obama is an affirmative-action slacker with skills inferior to those of the average white guy, her candidate responds with a tepid tut-tut, and there's somebody out there who thinks racism is not still a problem?)
But spend two minutes listening to Obama, and you know he is no more in the same zip code with Wright on the anti-American or us-vs.-them stuff than Clinton is anti-Semitic or McCain is anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim. The real question about Obama in all of this is why, knowing that this guy Wright was a big political liability, he didn't quit that church years ago. But isn't the only possible answer that he didn't do that because he still has other-than-political motivations in his life, ties to a community that mean more to him than they maybe even ought to, and stubborn gratitude to the man who, as he put it, brought him to Jesus and to the "Gospel on which I base my life''?
Kind of puts to rest those rumors about him being a secret Muslim, doesn't it?
-
sponsorship
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?
-
sponsorship
Right, so my best friends and I occasionally went to bars and told men we were on spring break from mime school. Then we would do “mimes climbing the rope” and “mimes feeling the wall in front of them” until someone bought Sevgi a drink. Of course Sevgi could have burped the alphabet and someone would have bought her a drink. Someone remind me how this has anything to do with politics?
-
sponsorship
I had a friend one time who decided to tell the men at the bar she was a forensic pathologist. I am not sure what, if anything, it accomplished. I guess it beat telling them she was a lawyer.
And so do you think the guy sitting next to me on the plane that time hadn't really participated in the Iranian hostage rescue mission?
-
sponsorship
In college, I had a friend whose favorite thing was trying on different personas in bars, spinning all kinds of wild life stories just for the fun of it. (Excellent storyteller, that one.)
So one time when I went home with her for the weekend, she got me to try it too. (In my defense, keep in mind that this was Indianapolis we're talking about, so you can imagine how easy it was to get caught up in the whole anything-goes spirit.) Anyway, as a beginner, I decided to keep most of the bio I was born with but change one thing: In the Indy version, for reasons that have long since escaped me, I had a summer job in the water-ski show in Cypress Gardens. Or so I told the quite appealing guy I met that night—who, as it turned out, was from very near where I lived and soon thereafter called to invite me to come and hang out with him—of course, on his ski boat. And I couldn't go because I didn't want to have to fess up that I was not only a big fibber but actually quite a disaster on skis! So, lesson learned. But I suspect that my friend, who really should have gone into acting but became a stockbroker in Texas, might still change things up a little now and then, just to keep her skills up.
-
sponsorship
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."
-
sponsorship
Well, fine then. How does this sound:
I am 24 years old. I grew up in Venezuela, although my mother was Danish. When I was 8 years old, a child welfare worker discovered I'd been abused by my stepfather and placed me in a black foster home. (Oh wait, sorry, that's Margaret Jones.) When I was 18, to support myself, I took to modeling. There were nights when I wore mink and drank Courvoisier to my heart's content and other nights when I slept in a cardboard box and called the city rats my friends. I am now an aspiring singer, in a style you could call Reggaeton/Folk. I like sweet tarts, and golden monkeys.
-
sponsorship
Funny Hanna, I am having no trouble at all reconciling sweet middle-class baby-sitting Ashley with starving streetwise Ashley with elegant upscale hooker Ashley. They’re all clichés. At one point or another I had each of those Barbies in my collection. (Upscale hooker Barbie had the BEST shoes.)
I’m willing to double-down on Melinda’s post about these folks as vehicles for our own shifting sense of who we are. I think we are a culture of people who have learned to build an identity for every occasion. MySpace is not about who you really are, its theater. So, for that matter, is hooking. We had a version of this conversation back when we talked about the MySpace tragedy: We are all too busy constructing identities—perhaps in the event that a reality show lands in our laps.
-
sponsorship
Hanna,
I think it’s always a better story to go from rags to riches as a pop singer than to be just another pretty face from the privileged ’burbs, isn’t it? That hasn’t been sexy since Debbie Gibson, if it ever was—or at least it’s not nearly as compelling.
There was an interesting e-mail discussion among Slate “XX Factor” contributors today about why wealthy politicians like Spitzer are always killing themselves to appear middle-class, a phenomenon that Michael Kinsley deconstructed (albeit on Bill O’Reilly rather than a politician) here. It seems that Ashley and Eliot deserved each other—both were trying to appear like someone they are not, and both were blinded by their own ambition. And posturing to be from a lower class background than you actually are presumably helps you whether you’re singing or on the stump. (And many professions in between, most likely. America loves an underdog.)
And as a postscript, I’m just glad someone took the time to do the reporting. The New York Times seemed to fall for Ashley’s MySpace story hook, line, and sinker.
-
sponsorship
OK, so I am a sucker, or at the very least confused. Ashley grew up in a nice middle-class suburban neighborhood? She spent her young days cheerleading and putting up signs for baby-sitting? So, can someone answer me these questions?
1. Why does a nice suburban girl pretend she was homeless and broke? Do you get more play on MySpace if you're abused? Does this make for better American Idol fodder? Was she just ashamed of being a hooker so had to invent a sad past so when she got busted people like me would feel sorry for her?
2. Could there have been something weird going on in that nice suburban home of hers, with the stepfather?
3. Could something have happened when, as a teenager, she went off to live with her own father?
4. Or, like Venkatesh writes, is being a high-class hooker now a middle-class aspiration?
All I can say is, the fathers of Wall, N.J., must have been begging her to baby-sit.
-
sponsorship
I, too, was fascinated by the piece about Obama's late mother, which seemed an overdue corrective to the attention typically given to his late dad. She was such an interesting mix of ‘50s and ‘60s (and '70s and '80s and '90s ...) womanhood: marrying at 18 and having a baby right away, as good American girls did in the middle of the last century, except that she married an African exchange student, unusual at the time among young women who had grown up in Kansas. Then ending up an anthropologist and globe-trotting champion of microcredit, with two children and two ex-husbands and a host of cultural ties. Given Barack Obama's own, more conventional, family setup, it seems unlikely her casual notions about marriage will tarnish him among voters. But did it strike anyone else as surprising that Obama himself declined to comment for the Times piece? It is hard to get an interview with him, it's true—now more than ever—but not long ago he did give the Post's Kevin Merida some phone time for a piece on his father. This is the first substantial article I've seen on the mother's influence, and I would have thought he'd want to say something for the record about the impact she and her liberating notions must have had on him growing up. If either of my kids runs for president, and they are asked about me, I would like them to say something. Anything, really. I'll just get that out there right now.
-
sponsorship
Sort of. On MySpace, all is not as it seems. Who'da thunk it? So, I retract what I said about "working class," and I hereby downgrade Ashley Dupre to merely "messed up."
-
sponsorship
"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.
-
sponsorship
Today’s NYT cover story on Obama’s late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, contains one passage that gave me a sinking feeling:
In Hawaii she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the poor.
Somewhere around the words “peasant blacksmithing,” I found myself thinking, “This man can never be president. His mother was just too cool.” American presidential mothers don’t drift bohemianly around the globe, marrying and divorcing foreigners, working for Third World development banks and discussing “esoteric Indonesian woodworking techniques” with their daughters. They are not named Stanley. They’re Barbaras and Dorothys; they wear pearls and host charity events. At the most, a presidential mother might, like Bill Clinton’s mother Virginia, be a working-class Southern widow abused by a rotten second husband. But that image still fit into a familiar American narrative of bootstrap pluck (and allowed Bill to keep telling that story about threatening his wife-beating stepfather with a golf club). Stanley Ann doesn’t sound like someone who needed that kind of help.
Obviously, people don’t cast their votes based on the biography of a candidate’s parent. But they do care about his or her familial story. (Indeed, as Hillary’s campaign has shown, sometimes that story can be hard to escape.) And the huge swath of the electorate that believes in a much more traditional notion of family (including not only evangelicals but Hispanic and white working-class Democrats) would no doubt balk at the very details in this piece that made me hoot “Right on!” One friend of Ms. Soetoro’s, discussing her two divorces, muses, “She always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly essential or important.” Another friend, an anthropologist, references a “Javanese belief” that if a couple is unhappy, “It’s just stupid to stay married.” Word up, sister—but I wonder if those beliefs won’t ring an alarm bell for family-values voters already wary of Obama’s complicated racial and cultural back story.
Elsewhere in the article (which is a font of killer quotes), Obama’s Kansas-born grandmother, Stanley Ann's mother, is cited as saying “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me.” That skeptical xenophobia sounds like a much closer match to the worldview of most Americans than does Stanley Ann Soetoro’s brand of brainy bohemian globetrotting.
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
Rosa, for me the age-old dilemma you pose comes down to three statistics. From Venkatesh: Street hookers in Chicago experience an average of six incidents of physical abuse a year. Higher-end prostitutes in New York experience an average of two. Not much better, really. Also this today, from Nicholas Kristof: "The American Journal of Epidemiology published a meticulous study finding that the 'workplace homicide rate for prostitutes' is 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women, working in a liquor store. The average age of death of the prostitutes in the study was 34."
This doesn't settle the legalization question, because these stats are from our ban-blanketed country (except for parts of Nevada). But I agree with Kristof that it makes the Swedish model of prosecuting only johns very intriguing, because after that law passed, the incidence of prostitution in Stockholm plummeted and so did trafficking.
-
sponsorship
Conversations like this always make me feel like Bill Bennett in a skirt, but even if you're the highest-paid hooker in history—and lucky enough not to wind up getting beaten anyway—prostitution and self-respect still seem mutually exclusive to me. Because ideally, at least, isn't sex "somehow sacred"? And speaking of daughters, if any girl of ours grew up and announced, "Hey, I've found high-paying work doing what for some women could be considered a smart career choice!' could we even conceivably be fine with that? OK, time for me to toddle off to the casino now.
-
sponsorship
Seconding Ellen: Yes, it's striking, isn't it, how many women have been mortified and collaterally damaged by this scandal. The wife. The daughters. Vacuous Ashley (maybe). Clearly, whatever else it is, prostitution is not a victimless crime. Or not in this case. Victims, here, as far as the eye can see. You do feel for the daughters, horribly, who doubtless don't want to venture outside now on even the simplest errand. As for raising them: "Daddy made a mistake, which he regrets and which we all can learn from" probably won't cut it here, will it? Nor "I'm sorry," either. He' d need something stronger and more persuasive--the claim of sex addiction, maybe? Over which he had no control? For which he will be treated? And doubtless they do love him, his daughters, which makes it all the more awful. Ruth Marcus made that point on the Diane Rehm Show this morning about Silda Spitzer: One reason she may have been out there, by his side, is that in addition to all the other feelings she may be feeling, she may well love him.
I am not so sure about the victimhood of Ashley. I had dinner recently with a friend who also came from a broken home, who had an abusive stepfather, who lived for a while in a foster home. She did not become a prostitute. She became a scientist and put it behind her.
Still, really at this point I feel sorry for all of them.
-
sponsorship
I think it’s worth reading Ashley’s MySpace page pretty carefully. I guess I have a lot less sympathy for someone whose rent troubles seem fueled as much by delusions of grandeur as by poverty, abuse, or lack of education. If she had so much trouble paying rent, did she really need to live in Manhattan? Of course she did, because in the tradition of American Idol, if she wanted to be famous, then of course she’s a fabulous singer and that’s where she needed to be. (I don’t think I believe the anecdote about the musician and his friend bursting into the bathroom while she belts out “Respect,” either. When does that really happen?). She couldn’t possibly have lived anywhere else more affordable? Come on.
I’m not sure where I come down on prostitution, so I don’t begrudge her the choice. But I don’t think she’s necessarily a victim in all this, having made the choice to go with prostitution rather than, say, waitressing or one of the other myriad jobs women slugging it out everywhere take to get by.
-
sponsorship
Oldest profession = oldest feminist dilemma in the book, ladies:
"It's my body, so why shouldn't I make money from it if I want to? Why is selling sexual services different from getting paid to do physical labor/give blood/provide donor eggs/give someone a massage?"
vs.
"In the world we live in (in which women earn less than men, have less political power, and are more often victims of sexual violence) prostitution can never be freely chosen. Prostitution is always a product of fear, need and coercion."
I'm sympathetic to both arguments: Hell, why shouldn't an attractive young woman like Ashley Dupre make some cash off idiots like Eliot Spitzer? The world is full of not-very-appealing economic transactions; let's not pretend sex is somehow sacred.
But I also still wince, thinking of 22-year-old Ashley, clueless as they make 'em, with her fantasies of making it big in the music industry and her fears of not being able to pay the rent. There she is, a working-class girl meeting a strange man alone in a fancy hotel room. He wants her to do those "things you might not think were safe."
She's tough and she says, "No way!" And she's also lucky, because it sounds like he didn't push.
But ... what if he had been more insistent? A lot more insistent? She's 22; he's 48. She's 5'5" and weighs 105 pounds; he's a big, tall guy who probably weighs twice that. They're alone. She's a prostitute. She thinks she needs this job—she needs this money. She's worried about paying her rent. How often do the Ashleys of the world end up going along with things they don't think are safe because the alternative could be losing a job or worse, getting beaten, or raped, or even killed? How often do the Ashleys of the world actually get beaten or raped or killed?
I haven't really researched the pro/con arguments for legalizing/decriminalizing prostitution (and I know there is some interesting data from other countries that have done this). But I think my instinct is that we should do, with prostitution, the opposite of what we do with drug crimes. With drugs, we generally have stiffer penalties for selling drugs than for buying drugs. At the moment, that's mostly true for prostitution as well: We give harsher sentences to prostitutes than to their clients. Seems to me that we should eliminate criminal penalties for those who seek to sell their own bodies but increase penalties for those who patronize prostitutes.
Ironically, Spitzer agreed, and he helped do just that in New York. Thanks, Eliot!
-
sponsorship
I want to talk about Spitzer's daughters. What happens to them now? I'm hoping Silda will file for divorce as early as humanly possible. But the daughters, who I think are 14, 16, and 18—the oldest a mere four years younger than the whore whom daddy was banging.
All I can imagine is this: If I were one of them and my father ever tried to say anything at all parental to me (Where are you going? With whom? When are you coming home? You can't wear that; it's too provocative), it would be all I could do not to shoot back: What's that you say, whore-monger?
How do you raise a teenage daughter after being caught up in such a thing?
-
sponsorship
So no, I wasn't. Or at least what I meant was, there's this lipstick-feminist notion out there that prostitution is a victimless crime, that being a high class hooker is a sort of glamorous life, particularly in this new online world where nobody has to walk the streets anymore. Sudhir Venkatesh gets at these distinctions in his Slate piece arguing that Spitzer didn't pay enough for his nooky. The elite escorts Venkatesh interviews sound like old fashioned mistresses; they are kept "on retainer," sometimes in their own apartments, with medical and grocery bills included. One is an ex-corporate exec (so she says) and describes prostitution in clinical, boardroom terms. So it's possible to delude yourself that high-class hookers are the ones on top, getting paid $10,000 a month to do nothing more than give some rich guy a bath and tell him he's amazing. Which makes the rich guy seem like the fool. But then you read further and the sad part always comes: They are often abused, sometimes take drugs, and every once in a while have to watch the rich guy masturbate in front of them and pretend its just awesome. At least that's the stereotype. I look forward to Venkatesh's book to clear it all up.
-
sponsorship
Hanna and Rachael, I too was struck by the vulnerability of Ashley that emerged in today's New York Times' profile. I noticed a "primary source" ("Hot Document" speak) for the profile was the young woman's MySpace page, which by "Thursday at noon ...appeared to have been corrupted." If I were Ashley's mother (alas, I could be her grandmother) in addition to making sure she got her own lawyer (attorney Don Buchwald was appointed by the court to represent the 22-year-old—although his bio of has the feel of someone QAT Consulting could really use), I might tell her to also get some technical and PR support that will get that MySpace storefront humming again. (Tips on traffic management are available by checking out Tila Tequila's page.) I can picture the stampede of TV bookers now thundering to the Flatiron apartment leased by the young entrepreneur once known as Kristen. Since her male source of support "walked out on me," and she is clearly "not a moron," she might as well be in charge of her own image as straightforwardly ("listen, dude ...") as she took control of clients at her last job.
-
sponsorship
Whoa, there, Nellie! Hanna, you're at least kinda sorta kidding, right? About initially being "lured into this notion that ... it was poor Eliot Spitzer who got played by a young vixen, a conniving madam, petty payment schemes, and a culture that suffocates its public figures.'' That time-honored, blame-the-girl view has cast XXers from Eve in her fig leaf to poor thong-flashing Monica Lewinsky as the temptress aggressors. But if there were anything to it, wouldn't pretty young women rule the world? Is it really any surprise that the emperor's call girl turns out to have been homeless and harmless? Paying for sex is always both pathetic and predatory. But could employment as a sex worker ever, for any woman, really be "a smart career choice"?
-
sponsorship
Hanna,
Your post about Ashley Dupré has me wondering whether her story gives lie to some of the arguments made for legal but well-regulated prostitution. Isn't the ideal version of legalized prostitution something like the Emperors' Club? An agency that handles booking and vets "clients" seems far less dangerous than street pimps who abuse their prostitutes and send them into potentially dangerous situations, right? Makes it seem more like a career choice and less an act of desperation. But then we see that Ms. Dupré is worried about making her rent payments and considering returning to the family that she described as "broken" and that inspired her to strike out on her own as a teenager. As the Spitzer scandal has played out, we've seen outrageous sums of money thrown about: $4,300 for the infamous session at the Mayflower, the $80,000 that Gov. Spitzer may have spent with the club overall, etc. But I have yet to see a breakdown. How much do the escorts keep from their fees? Does the agency's cut go toward testing for STDs or toward health care for the women? How much better off are they than a typical street hooker?
I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about the legalization issue. But as we learn more about the Emperors' Club and "Kristen"/Ashley, it seems like even this upscale version of the world's oldest profession thrives by taking advantage of women who are vulnerable or have suffered misfortune, and that that should be taken into consideration before we rush to make this a legitimate profession.
-
sponsorship
Over the last couple of days of reading XX Factor, I have been lured into this notion that this scandal is not about powerful men having their way, that in fact it was poor Eliot Spitzer who got played by a young vixen, a conniving madame, petty payment schemes, and a culture that suffocates its public figures. I can often bring myself to believe that prostitution, as Judith wrote, should not be illegal but highly regulated, and that for certain women it's a smart career choice. Then, this morning comes the Ashley Dupré moment (and there is always in these sordid connections the Ashley Dupré moment). She is like the pathetic contestants in the early phases of American Idol: broken, rejected, exploited through a fantasy in which she willingly particpates. I read her story and the old '70s feminist in me (admittedly, a tiny presence) rears up. A broken home on the Jersey shore. Abused as a kid. A nightclub singer. Worried about paying her rent. Men walking out on her. "Broke and homeless," and known for giving extra food to homeless guys. OK, so she's not a Thai village girl smuggled into Amsterdam. But she is a sad American type: This is Marilyn Monroe territory—a woman who can play the role of sexy and powerful but is always herself being played. I think about Ashley looking at an eviction notice and Spitzer cavalierly wiring $4,300 from one account to another, and it's very hard for me to feel sorry for him.
Read the rest of our discussion about Ashley Dupré.
-
sponsorship
A correspondent—my former University of Virginia law student Chris Guhin—e-mails to report this:
I'm ... an avid reader of XX Factor on Slate, as well as someone who was for a while mystified by the lack of general media attention on the "things ... you might not think were safe" that Governor Spitzer asked various escorts to do. Still, it appears that those things were in no way related to sexual violence but instead related to Spitzer's desire not to use a condom during sex. According to the New York Post, "Two law-enforcement officials said a 'safety' worry expressed by one of the bookers about Client 9 was Spitzer's preference not to wear a condom during his $4,300 night with the prostitute. One source said he wanted her to perform oral sex on him without the prophylactic. But the hooker, Kristen, apparently insisted on one, and he submitted to her request, according to court papers."
Interesting, and in line with XX Factor speculation. But though I have no particular reason to suspect Spitzer himself of violence, this doesn't really change my views about what's creepy here: the looming threat of violence that's inherent in the prostitute-client relationship ...
Thanks, Chris!
-
sponsorship
I always thought pedophiles became priests (and ministers and rabbis and teachers and scout leaders) so they could be around kids. So maybe Spitzer got into his line of work that same way? For that and whatever 12 other reasons he and his (hopefully grandfatherly) shrink will be mulling for years to come, he in any case wound up with a big old combo plate of self-indulgence and masochism. And as for that question about whether we'd in theory rather see our mates with a) a mistress or b) a pro, as long as that's still a hypothetical, the answer's c) none of the above.
-
sponsorship
It does make one wonder, what is "not safe" to a person who goes to hotels and has sex with strangers for money? I assumed "Kristen" was talking about not using a condom or inserting things into places that would cause physical damage, but perhaps I'm just old-fashioned and have a Pretty Woman idea about what the world of prostitution is really like.
-
sponsorship
Well, all gerbils aside, there are several thorny issues here.
A male Slate contributor, who asked to remain nameless, wanted XX Factor to address whether it’s worse if your husband cheats with a prostitute or a nonprostitute.
I’m not sure that question really gets to the point. The real point, I think, is that people hate hypocrisy. Or rather, we treat it like shit and masturbation and homelessness—it’s OK that it exists, we just don’t want to have to look at it. So I’m not sure this Spitzer thing is about sex or cheating or prostitution or spending money or even about breaking the law, so much as it is about lying, about presenting one image of yourself to the public (crime-fighting avenger!) while doing something very different in private (partaking in the very crimes one is fighting). In fact, Meghan, I think that Spitzer did not become interested in prostitutes because he was prosecuting sex rings, I think he prosecuted sex rings because he was interested in prostitutes.
It’s like a pedophile who becomes a priest because he thinks it will help him stop.
-
sponsorship
Meghan: And/but.
I'm with you that what we're talking about here is darker and deeper than any sea dingle. So I retract my earlier query about Spitzer's rationality, since clearly "reason" is not what's at issue. And I agree that someone's private sexual behavior/desires/fantasies have no necessary relationship to his/her public behavior, and "sketchy behavior in the bedroom doesn't necessarily correlate to deeper corruption in the courtroom or the city hall."
But here's what really bothers me about L'Affair Spitzer (and so far it's getting amazingly little media attention): Remember that little bit in the affidavit, in which the Feds recorded an exchange between two employees of Emperor's Club VIP—one apparently a sort of booker, and one the prostitute assigned to Spitzer? They have an conversation about whether "Client 9"—alleged to be Spitzer—is "difficult," and "Rachelle" comments that she's heard Client 9 will "ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe—you know—I mean that ... very basic things ..." To which "Kristen" responds, "'I have a way of dealing with that. ... I'd be like, listen dude, you really want the sex?' ... You know what I mean.'"
A touch of bravado there—but what we glimpse, behind it, is a world in which the threat of sexual violence is omnipresent: Women are alone in hotel rooms with unpredictable, unknown men, who may demand things "you might not think are safe," or worse, and if a sex worker's "way of dealing with that" doesn't work, what immediate recourse does she have?
For obvious reasons, it's hard to get good stats on violence against sex workers, but this exchange reminds us that the world of high-end call girls isn't, in the end, all that far away from the violence of the streets.
And that's what really bugs me about Spitzer. Not the adultery. Not the "crime" (I tend to think prostitution should probably be decriminalized, though I haven't thought it through completely yet). Not the fantasies, however dark they may have been. But the creepy hints that somewhere, some more important line may have been crossed—that he treated these women whose bodies he bought in a way he knew no one ought to be treated—that fantasies about sex and power may have turned into abusive behavior that endangered real live human beings.
-
sponsorship
Meghan, I love that premise for a novel. Sudhir Venkatesh is about to publish a great piece in Slate laying out the different layers of the New York sex trade, which he has studied as a sociologist at Columbia. (I"ll post the link when it appears.) For the unintiated, which seems to include XX factor, it's helps clarify what men get from prostitutes that they don't get from afffairs. Beyond the simple (and yet so false) promise of averting entanglement that I think the Emperors' Club Web site offered before it got yanked.
For what it's worth, I agree with you that sex crimes like this one don't necessarily disqualify people from holding future public office, in part because the word "crime" seems just too harsh. And I also agree that Spitzer's case is different because of his record zealously prosecuting prosection rings—and also because of the allegations that he broke other laws by moving money around illegally. For this former, scourge-of-Wall-Street AG that is some whole level beyond irony. My favorite scandal fact, from NPR yesterday, is that Spitzer's deposits got picked up because banks now have powerful software for sniffing out the sort of cash bundling he was doing—because as AG, he told the banks to get it! More novel fodder.
-
sponsorship
Ellen, you hit the nail on the head, like any good therapist ought to. Clearly, Spitzer liked hiring prostitutes, for whatever reason. Maybe it was that he couldn't find a sex partner who'd do what he wanted to do, or maybe it was that he liked the power dynamic of paying for sex. We won't really ever know. But this gets at the fundamental thing about sex that has been left out of a lot of the analysis of Spitzergate: Sex is basically irrational. What people need and want has nothing to do with what they think they should want or need. And how they behave in the bedroom has, for the most part, not all that much with how they would behave elsewhere in the world, if we're going to trust sex surveys. In other words, I don't buy that sex complies with any broken-window theory of moral probity: It seems to me sketchy behavior in the bedroom doesn't necessarily correlate to deeper corruption in the courtroom or the city hall.
Which raises a question about the idea that public servants should be held to a higher standard. That idea makes sense to me when it comes to things like paying nannies' Social Security tax or speeding. But isn't sex a different kind of realm? Spitzer's case is complicated by the hypocrisies inherent in his prosecution of a prostitute ring. But what if it weren't? Would that change how we feel? Is visiting a prostitute really so ethically wrong that he should never be able to perform public service again? Like Judith, I tend to think no.
Meanwhile: Ihe ironist in me has been wondering if it was actually prosecuting the sex ring that made Spitzer want to visit high-end prostitutes in the first place ... I'm sure that's not the case, but it'd be a fun premise for a novel about political scandal.
-
sponsorship
Rosa and friends, I'm not a shrink, but I love to play Monday-morning therapist as much as the next guy. I think what you are forgetting or overlooking is that there is an element of dysfunction or rebellion or self-destruction or blind hubris or whatever in what Spitzer did. He didn't hire whores because he can't get laid for free. He hired whores because he gets off on hiring whores. If you get off on shoving gerbils up your ass and someone says, "Hey, wouldn't it be more rational if you shoved Twinkies up your ass instead, since they don't have teeth or claws?" You wouldn't say, "Hey, you're right, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks!" You'd say, "Twinkies? That's gross and not very exciting. I prefer my gerbils. Thanks."
-
sponsorship
Re: Our speculation on what Spitzer was thinking. The New York Times has a story today about how Spitzer as governor supported sex-crime legislation to toughen penalties for the men patronizing prostitutes, a bill he signed, we now know, while he was in the frequent-patronizer program at Emperors' Club. This reminds me of a story I read years ago about men who were arrested having homosexual sex in a park, many of whom wore wedding rings and had baby carriers in the back seats of their cars. A sociologist who interviewed these men said most strenuously denied being gay. This was not about sex, they said, they definitely weren't gay—it was simply a matter of stress relief. I wonder if this level of self-delusion applies to Spitzer. I'm guessing that, yes, on one level he actually knew he was having sex, but that another part of him said this wasn't sex the way Bill Clinton tried to have sex with every female he saw, and this wasn't sex the way some guys emotionally betray their wives and get into affairs with women at the office. What he was doing was so totally cut off from the rest of his life that he could convince himself it was just something a "f--king steamroller" has to do sometimes to blow off, ah, steam.
-
sponsorship
Judith, I also shared Dahlia's initial reaction—Spitzer's the governor of New York, and he can't find anyone willing to sleep with him for free?
I mean, fine, maybe he thought he was buying discretion by paying a prostitute so much money for sex. But what's with these guys? Haven't they heard of the Internet? How about, say, an anonymous personal ad? Craigslist? Nerve.com? Whatever?
I mean, could someone explain to me why it would be rational for Spitzer to spend a fortune on prostitutes instead of spending no money at all to hook up with some fun lovin' D.C. gal? Surely there must be some! And there would presumably be less risk of exposure (no traceable movement of funds; he can use a fake name; plus he can wear a Groucho Marx nose and glasses if he wants). Not to mention, it's not a crime, and the scandal, if it did come out, would have been far less bad.
-
sponsorship
Diligent reader Edouard Markson found a link to the exchanges I summarized in my post this morning.
He also comments:
"The relevant section begins on the bottom of page 26.
If you're ever interested in running a call-girl service, you can get a pretty good education on how it's done if you read the whole complaint. (That's just an observation, not career advice.) "
-
sponsorship
Didn't make it any easier for them to get it, or at least to get away with it. Remember: powerful people (and I take the Fraysters point that it isn't just automatically men) can't just sleep with anyone they please, because the average potential partner poses an enormous risk for them. I assume you pay for sex in that situation because you want and need discretion, not because you feel like throwing your family savings away. Seems to have backfired in Spitzer's case, but the moral of that story is, imo: you can't hide from Big Brother.
-
sponsorship
Welcome to XX Factor Judith, and thanks for your thoughtful post.
My only quibble is with the assumption that Spitzer somehow had to pay for sex (pathetic), which then unspools the freight train of humiliations you’ve just described. Is it really all that hard for someone in high office to “to get extramaritally laid” as you put it, or is it exceptionally simple? I always assumed the latter. Can’t imagine Spitzer didn’t have heaps of women throwing themselves at him. I assumed he simply opted to pay for it (power). Raises a question about whether it’s “better” or “worse” to buy extramarital sex the way you’d buy new loafers. But judging from the way Silda looked just now at the press conference—I didn’t think it was possible for her to look more heartbroken and exhausted than she did 48 hours ago, but I was wrong—maybe that just doesn’t matter.
Read other posts from XX Factor bloggers on the prostitute vs. regular-old-affair dilemma.
-
sponsorship
Silda didn't listen to us, did she? But the gay-American-luv-guv's ex, Dana McGreevey, explained on MSNBC that wives don't stand up there for their husbands; they stand up there for their kids. My first thought was oh, great modeling on how to be a doormat. But then again, a friend of mine whose wife left him (and their daughter) always says that the best advice he ever got after she took off was that every time he behaved generously toward her, he was doing a kindness to his child, and that sounds right.
-
sponsorship
In defense of Spitzer, I have to say that the great-man-abusing-power narrative does not seem apt in his case. In fact, it seems rather out-of-date. If you read the wiretaps closely, you'll discover that, as a consumer of sexual services, Spitzer was actually shockingly powerless. Client 9, the governor of New York State, had to make dozens of phone calls and multiple trips to an ATM machine over the course of three days just to get a single date with a prostitute.
How do I know this? From an abridged transcript of his exchanges with the escort service that ran as a sidebar on page 5 of the New York Times Metro section yesterday morning. I cannot for the life of me find it online; I suspect it only ran in the local edition. So let me summarize:
On Monday, Feb. 11, the booking agent at the Emperors' Club VIP asks a coworker to notify her when an overdue package arrives from Client 9, presumably a deposit of cash sent by mail. On Tuesday, Feb. 12, she calls Client 9 and tells him the package has not yet arrived. He reassures her that the address was the same as in the past, "no question about it." Ten minutes later she calls to say that they cannot proceed if the package does not arrive. The next day, Feb. 13, Client 9 calls the booking agent to tell her that he has reserved a room at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. An hour later she gets a text message telling her the package has arrived. She immediately calls him to suggest that when he sees the prostitute, Kristen, he give her extra cash upfront to avoid such problems in the future. They discuss his debt—$2,600—and he agrees to give Kristen an extra $1,000 toward future appointments. The booking agent urges him to give $1,500 instead. Client 9 agrees to go out and look for a bank. An hour later he calls the booking agent to tell her where Kristen should go in the hotel. The agent tells him again how much he owes her. He promises again to find a bank.
A few minutes later, the booking agent texts Kristen to ask her to text back when her "four hours" begins. Two and a half hours later, just past midnight on Feb. 14, Kristen leaves Spitzer's room.
This, my friends, is pathetic. It's practically an outrage. No one with less to lose would ever allow himself to be importuned and harassed by an employee of an escort service evincing such cavalier familiarity. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that she felt entitled to give Spitzer such a hard time precisely because he was the governor of New York State—because he was so blackmail-able. (Was he being blackmailed? The sums involved make you wonder. And his public anti-prostitution stand would only have added to his value as a mark.)
So I don't buy the thesis that he abused his power by seeking paid sex. Whatever you think about prostitution—I for one don't understand why's it illegal,rather than well-regulated, but that's not wholly relevant here—Spitzer's bumbling, embarrassing effort to buy himself some must stand as another example of how the private lives of public figures have become fearful, furtive, diminished affairs, denied all but the most conventional responses to the urgings of human desire. Not that Spitzer, when a prosecutor, didn't do his bit to make life more miserable for those vulnerable to being shamed by surveillance techniques and technology. But his situation now makes the larger point. Refuse to pity the powerful if you must, but don't think for a minute that running a government in the modern world makes it easier for one of them to get extramaritally laid.
-
sponsorship
I'm with you, Melinda, and all the other Silda sympathizers. And while I don't think it's going to work, I can appreciate why she wouldn't want her husband to resign, as the NYT reports. If he goes, that's it for the legacy they wanted for themselves, not to mention the career. He becomes not the best (if dim) hope for the first Jewish president but a footnote, and an embarrassing one at that. And she is forever the pitiable wife. It's when politicians brave it out and go on to have a second and third act that we think of them again as more than the sum of their sexual follies. Bill Clinton lived down Monica, and that meant that Hillary lived her down, too. Eliot Spitzer probably won't live down Kristen. And that is rotten rotten for Silda.
-
sponsorship
On The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart showed footage of a few of Eliot Spitzer's predecessors in the "Parade of Shame,'' who, as he said, were "all following the one simple rule of public humiliation: Bring a date.'' Then Samantha Bee gave us the scene we've all been waiting for: Her real life hubby, Jason Jones, in pearls, standing meekly by as she apologizes, sort of. "Last night I engaged in activity that failed to live up to the high standards I set for myself as a wife. I was with a man—men, a group of men, maybe a lady or two, I don't really remember. Definitely, though, several men. It was a betrayal of my marriage, even if it left me satisfied in a way my husband, who you see next to me, never has...I also want to apologize to our daughter - I think 'our daughter —definitely mine ...''
But killing as this stuff is—and Lewis Black had a funny riff on it, too—each time they cut to footage of the Spitzers at their news conference, it only compounds my feeling that the sight of his dutiful wife is too sad to bear. Over and over, there she is, so mortified she's unable to lift her eyes from whatever piece of paper her louse husband is fiddling with. Doesn't it seem like this was longer than two days ago? My real problem with this scandal is not that it's none of our beeswax, but that I can't get past wanting to bake something for Silda—and then I hate feeling like that, too, because nobody wants pity-inspired sticky buns. In fact, knowing we're all feeling sorry for her is probably the thing she hates most, or OK, second-most, or maybe third. And I totally reject this whole "great men have great appetites" argument—bah, that's what every two-bit cheater who ever took home a waitress told himself. These Luv Guvs just have bigger egos, more of a sense of entitlement, and lots more disposable cash.
-
sponsorship
I don't know about the rest of you, but I grew up admiring Geraldine Ferraro. I was 14 when she ran for vice president, and I viewed her as a trailblazer.
When I saw her initial comments about Obama last week ("If Obama was a white man ... if he was a woman [of any color], he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is."), I thought, oh, come on, Gerry! You're kidding, right? You actually think—the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder quipped—that it's a stroke of good luck to be able to run for president, in post 9/11 America, "as a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama"?
Even Hillary Clinton seemed anxious to distance herself from this ("I do not agree with that ..."). That was the right move, but I wasn't eager to see Ferraro drawn and quartered. I was inclined to write her statement off as one of those stray, overtired, crackpot comments. I thought: Well, I'm sure she didn't really mean that! Not Gerry Ferraro!
Turns out she did really mean that. She really, really meant it. Today, she went on Fox News to explain just how much she meant it, defending herself against criticism by explaining: "[T]hey're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"
How's that? That's race-baiting, Gerry, and it's pretty appalling stuff.
Another idol crumbles. Bad week for Democratic icons!
[UPDATE, Tuesday night: The New York Times reports that Ferraro, reached at home, had this to add to her earlier remarks: “Every time [the Obama] campaign is upset about something, they call it racist. I will not be discriminated against because I’m white. If they think they’re going to shut up Geraldine Ferraro with that kind of stuff, they don’t know me.” Urgh.]
-
sponsorship
Rosa, I'm glad you mentioned tragedy in your last post. I've been thinking all day that what makes Spitzer's downfall electrifying to watch isn't just the comical pop schadenfreude of seeing a public figure stand accused of the very vice he has publicly deplored (and Liza, some other examples that pop to mind from this very well-padded list include televangelist-turned-adulterer James Bakker, senator-turned-washroom-cruiser Larry Craig and New Jersey governor-turned-gay-Episcopal-priest James McGreevey.) The "myth" Dahlia refers to -- that the holders of power are somehow immune to human weakness—is at least as old as Aristotle's definition of the tragic hero: A powerful man of noble birth, who experiences a reversal of fortune because of an error in judgment or character. In the words of the Shakespeare scholar Robert Heilman (as quoted in this essay), the tragic hero is caught "between imperative and impulse, between moral ordinance and unruly passion ... between law and lust." I think some of the fascination this scandal affords comes from that paradox at the heart of political power. Some part of us expects our leaders to be morally exemplary supermen, no matter how often we're reminded that once in power, they often operate more like tribal warlords, brazenly amassing women and wealth. The argument can certainly be made that Spitzer's dalliance is a private matter, unrelated to affairs of state (assuming he used his own money to pay for that staggeringly expensive nookie.) But to move from an ancient archetype to a more modern one, isn't Spiderman's motto "with great power comes great responsibility"?
-
sponsorship
It would have been just one more distressing story about a controversial, possibly threatening student essay; gun possession on campus; and an expulsion and involuntary hospitalization in Virginia. There are almost too many layers to untangle: The 23-year-old student who wrote the violent short story for a college writing class was a former sailor in the Navy. Guns found in his car were legally owned, although in violation of campus policy. His work of fiction references Sueng-Hui Cho and the killing spree at Virginia Tech last year. And the professor subtly threatened with death in the work of fiction is named "Mr. Christopher." That’s because the assistant writing professor at UVA-Wise—the one whose life may have been threatened—is Christopher Scalia, son of the U.S. Supreme Court justice.
-
sponsorship
"Dow Climbs 416.66 for Its Biggest Gain in Over Five Years," reports the New York Times. The Gray Lady attributes it all to the actions of the Fed, which "injected a burst of financial adrenaline into the ailing banking system." Well, maybe so! But maybe the adrenaline was pure schadenfreude, as Wall Street celebrated the downfall of Archenemy No. 1.
And this, incidentally, is why L'Affaire Spitzer is tragedy as well as farce, for the nation as well as for his family. Spitzer did a whole lot of good in his long career, especially as New York attorney general. His hypocrisy on the-- ahem! --small matter of prostitution rings shouldn't lead us to forget that. Let's hope the many good causes he championed don't suffer the same fate as his career.
-
sponsorship
That's a good point, Dahlia—if I understand you correctly, the argument would be that human nature is constant, in high places and low, and that the proportion of wrongdoers and plain idiots is bound to be the same among politicians (even moralizing ones) as it is among private ones. We're just a lot more likely to hear about a governor and former prosecutor when he is found to have been visiting a prostitute than an ordinary person.
I don't know if I entirely agree, though, that it's unreasonable to expect public figures to behave with more decorum than the average citizen. I don't fraternize with powerful officeholders, but living in Washington, I know lots of ordinary people who work for the U.S. government. While they are not public figures, many do consider themselves public servants, and it does affect their personal lives. Many have security clearances. In part because of their clearances—and the way their careers will be impacted by any significant ethical or legal problems, not just prostitute visits but, say, drunk-driving arrests—and in part because they feel they are vested with a public trust, they are, often, more careful about what they do and say. They are less likely to download bootleg music files or drive 30 mph over the speed limit, and more likely to pay their nanny taxes. I do, sort of, expect more of public officials. They have taken oaths of office and promised to uphold the law. For many people I know, this does result in a certain amount of behavior modification. They aren't exempt from human frailties, by any means, but they do have an extra incentive to try to be.
That said, Marjorie's point is brilliant, like everything she wrote. Maybe the trust invested in powerful public officials is offset by the temptation that more often comes their way, and so it all evens out.
-
sponsorship
Dahlia, Mrs. Chatterbox was right. I'm amazed, in fact, at the lengths we'll go to, to prove that these people's every gesture and utterance fits into some grand scheme. When five minutes in the Senate visitors' gallery should make plain that even when they have a script, our elected officials still manage to come out with more or less the same number of unfortunate slips as any of the rest of us. Sometimes, though this is not widely known, they say stuff just because they actually feel that way. And whenever anyone in public life does something because it's the right thing to do, we'll go through whatever contortions are required to explain how this was in fact a wily if exotic political play. Why are we so afraid to get caught out thinking these are real people? When if they weren't, they'd be no fun at all to write about.
-
sponsorship
Liza and Melinda, I confess I am torn here: Is the problem that big-deal moralizing politicians always cheat or that everyone cheats and the big-deal moralizing politicians always get caught? The late Mrs. Chatterbox, Tim Noah’s wife, Marjorie Williams, once wrote that “the core myth of Washington life is that the men and women who win political power here somehow also win exemption from the irrational, elemental forces of human nature that guide behavior everywhere else, exalting, ruining, ennobling and disrupting lives in Phoenix and Flint and Tulsa and Miami.” That sounds right to me. Sex makes people stupid. Possibly it just makes extraordinary people extraordinarily stupid?
-
sponsorship
So behind every squeak is a little bit of grease? These super-clean super-moralizers usually do turn out to have been railing against themselves all along. And if I feel like looking away, I guess it's lucky for me that I have finally given in and made the leap from sordid reality to ... sordid reality TV. Yes, I was always a little vain at never having seen a single minute of American Idol or any of the other shows, but I am a frail hypocrite, too, because now my daughter has me hooked on something called Millionaire Matchmaker, starring this fabulous woman named Patti Stanger, who teaches boys (some of whom are getting on in years) how to be respectful on dates; Big Patti would have made quick work of the Luv Guv!
-
sponsorship
Yes, exactly—I don't find the Spitzer debacle tedious yet, in part because the details (some prostitutes found him "difficult"—in what way?) are too interesting and in part because it's just so striking how the loudest moralizers often turn to have been wrestling in secret with the very shame they've set out to exterminate. Two years ago we had the Rev. Ted Haggard, aka Pastor Ted, the evangelizer and inveigher against "homosexual activity" who turned out to have indulged in the selfsame activity with a call guy. Now Spitzer, breaker-up of prostitution rings, turns out to have availed himself of one—and to have overpaid, at that. Shades of Elmer Gantry! This seems such an eternal type—the moralizer brought down on a morals charge—that by now we should almost assume anyone nicknamed Mr. Clean (that is, anyone who makes a point of his rectitude and prosecutorial zeal) has a dirty secret. It's a different personality type than, say, Bill Clinton. Can XXers offer other examples of Gantrylike personages, hoistable on their own petards? What I always wonder is: What is the psychological impulse that leads someone to denounce the practice they are engaging in? Is it simple hypocrisy or something more complicated?
As for Dahlia's point: There may or may not be stricter gun control if women ran the world—only one way to find out, really—but it really does seem safe to say there would be less visiting of prostitutes in the interstices of time between governing and testifying before Congress on bond insurance.
-
sponsorship
I think you have a point, Melinda, and had Eliot Spitzer merely had a boring old affair, we probably wouldn't be making such a fuss. But there are a couple of factors that make this case different. One is the hypocrisy of it all. Spitzer made his name by cracking down on corruption and white-collar crime, and, as Emily pointed out yesterday, high-end prostitution rings.
The other factor that sets this apart is the same thing that attracted our attention to so many of the rich-guy criminals who Spitzer busted as A.G.: the dollar signs. Spitzer's alleged that $4,300 night with a prostitute is as outlandish to most of us as Dennis Kozlowski's $6,000 shower curtain.
-
sponsorship
I am guessing that the answer will be yes—but am I the only one who finds this Spitzer stupidity actually kind of tedious? Why don't we out the handful of big-deal politicians who actually keep their pants on and be done with it? Which would solve the whole problem of wives having to show up and stand there for their ritual humiliation when they could be out practicing law, or playing tennis, or getting even, for all I care. Don't look now, but I don't think the public would faint in surprise or anything. And all it would take would be one brave spouse, willing to state the obvious ...
-
sponsorship
My friend Corey Owens takes me to school for last week's gender-based generalizations . . . .
Guest post follows:
Not to stand between you and your spitball-straw, but "...if women ever ran the country"...?!? Come on. The not-so-subtle suggestion that a) women do/would care more about that fact that "kids keep dying" and b) men somehow care less is both ill-informed and dangerous. The importance of the fact that many (albeit not all) of the politicians who would defend the right to carry assault rifles into elementary schools happen to be men should be mitigated by the downright foolishness of so many men AND women on both sides of the gun control debate. "...if women ever ran the country..." is a pretty good way to keep the debates about both guns and gender stuck deep in the mudholes of old.
-
sponsorship
No, this is not cool. Asked to comment on Spitzer, Hillary Clinton told reporters, "I obviously am sending my best wishes and thoughts to the governor and to his family."
What? This is all she can think of to say? Mr. Ethics turns out to be patronizing pricey prostitutes, a sleazy, sexist, act which may yet cost him his career, and Hillary sends him ... her "best wishes?" (Is there a Hallmark card for this?)
Asked if she thinks Spitzer will survive politically, Hillary would comment no further, saying, "Let's wait and see what comes out of the next few days."
Noreen, you commented that Spitzergate makes you less dismissive of the idea that there might be a "feminist 'obligation' to vote for a woman." I understand your reaction—my initial, visceral reaction to Spitzergate was also something along the lines of "Men! I've had it with the bastards! Let's toss 'em out, girls!"
But. Here's why that does not, in the end, lead me toward Hillary. To say that her history with sexual peccadilloes isn't uncomplicated doesn't quite capture the reason so many feminists feel queasy about HRC. She stood by Bill—but standing by him required her to become complicit in the trashing of "that woman's" reputation. (Not just that woman—there was also that woman, that woman, and a whole bunch of other women.) Married to a guy who couldn't keep his pants zipped—and who had an unpleasant habit of getting into sexual relationships with women who tended to be much younger and much less powerful—Hillary consistently sided with Bill.
On one level, fair enough; marriages and marital loyalty are complicated, and hey, he was the president. And she believed that there was a vast right wing conspiracy. (And, whaddaya know, there kinda was one, at that!) But on another level, she didn't have to let Bill off the hook quite so easily, and she sure didn't have to look the other way (at best) while her political allies demonized the women in question as cheap. That, though, seems to have been the Faustian (and not exactly feminist) deal she struck with Bill: I'll stand by you now, Bill, but the deal is that I get to run for president and you have to help make it happen. Sure, it's good that Hillary "learned other ways of manipulating power" than sleeping with powerful older men—but the "other ways" she learned were also time-honored and not exactly great: stand by the powerful older men; pretend their sexual misbehavior is just boys being boys; let the "cheap" women be the ones who pay any price that gets paid.
That's what's so depressing about Hillary's reaction, so far, to Spitzer: It's just more of the same. Hillary has an opportunity here to say something from the heart: about what it's like to be a woman in a world where too many of her male peers think sex is a perk of the job—about what's wrong with a society where so many powerful men, including "progressive" men, secretly think it's fine to just buy a women's body on the open market—about the factors that drive young women into prostitution—about sex and power and money and inequality—about the nasty links between these high-toned escort services and global sex trafficking, an issue she's crusaded on in the past.
But instead, she sends Spitzer her "best wishes."
-
sponsorship
Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go. Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate—not Hillary’s tears, nor her scolding—to make me less dismissive of the feminist “obligation” to vote for a woman. The Spitzer scandal reminded me of a comment a friend repeated to me after her (married) boss from a political internship flirted heavily with her at a fundraising event, something that clearly disturbed her a little despite the gossipy retelling. The comment, from her (nonwhite) father: The most powerful people in the world are old white men and pretty young women. The subtext, of course, was that she should learn to manipulate power.
There are all kinds of reasons why that very bald statement is infuriating, but perhaps chief among them is the very reason it stuck in my head—that it seems true all too often. That’s been something that’s easy to forget in a primary race between a middle-aged woman and a younger black man, but during my supposedly post-feminist lifetime, the women who’ve created the biggest political stir have been the young women who’ve ruined the careers of powerful old men. The Madeline Albrights and the Nancy Pelosis, no matter how much they work to build something of substance, have never grabbed the headlines the Monicas and Paulas got from tearing something down, in a very passive fashion. Obviously, power and sex (in both its meanings) are never going to be fully disentangled, in Washington or elsewhere, but Spitzer’s yet another ugly reminder of the sort that has dotted the political landscape pretty much since I started paying attention to it. I have to wonder if lots of women and girls haven’t internalized certain lessons along the lines of the one my friend’s dad spelled out.
There’s always—rightly—lots of talk about the wife’s perspective when scandals like this happen, but it’s certainly not a great feeling if you’re a twentysomething or younger, trying to figure out the way things operate, to be told, implicitly or explicitly, that your chance at having any sort of real influence might already be on the wane. I’m not saying I’m for Hillary now, and I’m not saying that Hillary’s history with sexual peccadilloes is uncomplicated, but it certainly makes me appreciate the fact that she’s learned other ways of manipulating power.
-
sponsorship
I remember thinking a profile of Silda Wall Spitzer in the New York Times a year and a half ago was very interesting, and I just went back to look at it again. Reading it now is an uncanny experience. The anti-corruption crusader gets cast as a man of boorish manners and "brash" impulses—and she is his "even-keeled" foil with a real challenge on her hands. Their friend Jim Cramer's characterization of the pair has an all-too-prophetic ring: ''Silda is poised; Eliot is a maelstrom.'' You could almost think their circle worried about an accident waiting to happen, counting on a wife lauded for "her remarkable ability to rein in" her husband to be able to stop it. So here's a question being debated here at XX: Whatever Hillary does, or doesn't, say, will all this resonate in her favor? At last, just put the woman in charge. Or will it give people pause, as Emily Y. suggests, as they cringe at four years of worrying what Bill might be up to?
-
sponsorship
Dahlia, it's interesting that you used the word bride instead of wife in your post: It's much less likely, I think, that you would have slipped groom in there for husband had the genders been reverse. That itself points to just how differently we view female and male extramarital affairs. The woman in the marriage is supposed to remind bridal and quasi-virginal, a paragon of good faith. While a man who cheats is a familiar type, the guy who can't keep it in his pants, etc, etc. We don't like him, but we find him familiar—enough so that the supporting role of stand-by wife with pasted-on smile is by now a type itself. I, too, can't think of any counterexamples of a cuckolded husband clasping his wife's hand. Instead, I conjure up all the news items about Paula Zahn's "betrayed" husband and her "lurid" and "shocking" affair.
-
sponsorship
When politicians are caught cheating, I'd wish they'd leave their wives in the green room while they address the press. You're in the dog house, and it should look that way.” At best, Option A means you were lied to along with the rest of the country; at worst, it means you knew about it and sucked it up for the sake of his career.
I keep going over and over the thought experiment in which a cuckolded man is forced to stand there and look aggrieved yet supportive while his bride cops to an affair. How would that play? Has it happened and I’ve repressed it?
-
sponsorship
How great would it be if Client No. 10 was Bill Clinton?
-
sponsorship
In defense of the political wives who go to the press conference, smile forced smiles, and say nothing:
Speaking (ahem) as a political wife myself, I can see one clear advantage to this option: It's all over quickly. And no one asks you for a follow-up interview. You appear once—and then you vanish forever, along with your husband's career. If you've been clever about it, you've kept your maiden name and can thus return to your own career. Those who make other, more attention-getting choices will later be forced back into the limelight to explain themselves, which is gruesome.
And you can, of course, quietly change the locks the next day. Though I hasten to add that I've never had to.
-
sponsorship
Right here on Page 1 of the political-spouse handbook, it says that in event of scandal, you will show up, preferably in pearls, medicated if necessary, and manage at least a small smile while the father of your children explains that he never, ever meant to let you down. Oh, and it strongly suggests that unless he leaves you, you will stay married. Sometimes, you hear women in political life vow that would never be them—as when Louisiana Sen. David Vitter's wife, Wendy, said in 2000 that if her husband ever carried on the way Bill Clinton had, "I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me.'' Last year, though, after Vitter was linked to the D.C. madam, she stepped right up to the microphone and said this: "David is my best friend. Some people said to me they wouldn't want to be in my shoes. I stand before you to say I am proud to be Wendy Vitter." Her business, of course, though like Hanna I'd like to think I'd say time for a new best friend. So, what is Hillary supposed to say about her governor? As voters seem to like her better when she's misty-eyed, wronged, or shaking her fist at the heavens, she might help herself by even glancingly referencing her own Silda Spitzer moments. But I really hope she doesn't—and for her, of course, the handbook no longer applies.