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When Eliot Spitzer gave his public "apology"on Monday, I was just coming off a sprint on the treadmill at my local gym. A woman who looked to be in her mid-fifties walked up to my machine and made a motion to speak to me. Anyone who belongs to a gym knows that interrupting a person's workout is a huge breach of gym etiquette (unless the building is on fire or you are in possession of the television remote). Breathlessly I removed my headphones.
"Can you believe this?" she said as I slowed to a walk.
"What?" I gasped.
"This." She waved at the row of televisions, all tuned to a jut-jawed Spitzer leaving the podium. "It's terrible! It's just so terrible!"
She was in such a state of distress she obviously just needed to talk to someone -- and I was the only other woman there exercising in the mid-afternoon. We chatted for a few minutes, expressing our mutual horror and revulsion.
I suspect female encounters like this one were taking place throughout the country as the Spitzer scandal unfolded. The affair seems to have struck a nerve among women -- and maybe, especially, among a certain demographic of middle-aged wives -- that no recent political scandal has since, well, Bill Clinton.
Eliot Spitzer wasn't some Southern holyroller caught with his pants down, nor the old legislative hack pathetically caught en flagrante with a young floozy. And his wife, Silda, is poorly cast as the scorned woman. I had the opportunity to sit next to her a few years ago at a luncheon in New York -- before her husband ran for office. I had no idea who she was. By the end of the lunch, I was completely wowed by her: She was smart, funny, beautiful, wise, all at once. The sort of woman who causes bachelors and unhappily married men to say to themselves, "If only I could find someone like her!"
So knock me -- and clearly, most of the female population -- over with a feather. The question everyone wants to know is: Why? Why would a man in his position -- and with his record -- do something so reckless and foolish? Why, with such a seemingly solid wife and family, would he seek out the attention of high class tarts? And why would a woman like Silda agree to stand by him in his hour of infamy?
First let's deal with Silda, who has come under fire for doing the dutiful wife thing while her husband attempted damage control. As Amy Ephron, echoing many others, asks on this site:
Why do they show up? Why did Silda Spitzer appear at her husband's side at his press conference today? The picture in the New York Times' is so telling, so sad, so perfectly humiliating. And you just want to ask, why? Why do political wives -- especially when they seemingly have no political aspirations of their own, it's not like Mrs. Spitzer is going to run for office -- show up for their husbands when their husbands have behaved so badly?
My own impulse in that situation (which I voiced rather icily to my husband over dinner) would be to pack the girls in a car to the Hamptons, and call Raoul Felder from my cellphone. Let the rat hang himself. My husband, in turn, defended the dutiful impulse: When your marriage is on life support, you don't rush to pull the plug. And to give Silda her due, there was nothing of the obedient gaze in her expression that even Hillary Clinton could muster for Bill. This was a woman whose puffy complexion suggested she'd been crying all night--and whose downturned mouth did not radiate forgiveness or acceptance. As Pulitzer-prize winning author Anne Applebaum argued on Slate:
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.
Okay, fine, but so what of him?
A male acquaintance of mine remarked in sympathy to Spitzer, "I can see from a certain male viewpoint there is nothing different from taking a hooker than smoking a cigar out of his wife's view."
The statement is breathtaking -- and yet (to a certain female viewpoint) uncomfortably true. Millions and millions of words have been written since the onset of the sexual revolution to persuade women that they have similar sex drives to men. Or more precisely, that women and men should have similar sex drives. Women can be just as sexually voracious as their male counterparts -- and men can find sex as emotionally fulfilling and binding as women do. Or so the argument goes (and went). An older view saw a role for prostitutes in maintaining marital harmony. If men persist in having sexual urges and desires (e.g. "not safe") that can't be, or aren't being, fulfilled by their wives, isn't it better for everyone if these can be filled by a professional stranger? This same male friend went on to wonder whether it would have been worse if Spitzer had been discovered with a mistress. Certainly it would have been less politically damaging -- but probably more emotionally damaging to his wife. A friend of mine emailed this thought:
As Charlie Sheen stated authoritatively, the point of paying the prostitute is not for the sex but so that she'll leave afterward. My guess is Spitzer's been doing this for years. Just looks like the type. Felt bad for his wife (she was a lovely looking woman) and daughters. It was interesting to think of him sitting down to dinner tonight with four aggrieved females gazing balefully at him.
Another weighed in with this:
Not sure what I think about prostitute/family values. I think sometimes men just want to sleep with whores, whether they "pay" them or not, and the question is "how best not to get caught?" He screwed up.
Years ago, my late mother-in-law was asked by a female friend how a man they both knew could have left his wife for a much less attractive woman. She replied, "That's never the point."
What is the point, in Spitzer's case, is probably best left to his therapist and future marriage counselor.
Or maybe the point is a lot simpler than we're making it. I hashed the matter over with my builder/philosopher John -- who is in the midst of renovating our kitchen. As he strung some overhead lights , he said, "Dunno. Maybe the guy's just an idiot." He paused to spit out a bit of tobacco in the sink before adding, "An idiot who can't control his dick."
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Lets see if i have this right .I paint a piece of art that takes 60 hours ,sells for $5,000 and last for more than a life time and people of wealth and privilage want a deal (like give it to me for nothing) but think nothing of paying $5,000 for sex which might last an hour if their lucky and leave them nothing but a cheap/expensive thrill,something is screwed up with this picture.and America
www.williamcain
Has anyone even considered the possibility that wives of big-shot politicians might simply not care that their husbands use hookers, or get blow jobs from interns? Is that so completely impossible? As Danielle points out, marriage is, for many people, primarily a partnership about money and kids; couples adopt different approaches to each others' sexual needs, and it's not that huge a leap to suppose that some of them approach it by being just fine with their mates seeking relief elsewhere. The assumption that these political wives who appear by their husbands' sides at the press conferences must be all twisted up in knots over the infidelity contains a lot of built-in assumptions that just aren't necessarily true.
We need to stop with the "all men are ruled by their testosterone and take us into war.... mentality''--- seems that a Lincolnesque Senator from Illinois voted against the unnecessary Iraq war-- while a female voted for it-- so that shuts down that argument--
How long is your builder/philosopher going to be in the midst?
There is something so complex in his actions that I can't figure it out until we have more of his history. Whether sex addict, grandiose, some bizarro love/hate thing with the law, or the good man/bad boy thing, well, we have psychologically not enough info. This is going to be interesting study in human behavior. So many odd parallels to his work and his non-work.
Spitzer paid upwards of $5,500 per lay. And he complained that Richard Grasso was overpaid!!!
all well and good and reasons dont matter because this man has put people in JAIL f or doing the same thing,
i could care less about his "dick" or anyone who wishes to excuse or berate him.
but let him pay the price that he opposed on others.
nothing else is fair.
I say, legalize prostitution and stop pretending we're all so gosh-darned perfect! Sex is fun, people. As to the kids, teach the kids to play it safe and consensual and let 'em run buck wild!
Who knows if Mrs. S. was "oppressed" or not? Or whether she and her husband had a "private" life before, during, or since this event? Not the point at all. And "outraged middle aged women ought to take a look at themselves in the mirror --and should be taking care of business?" Wow, what a blatently misogynistic statement. (By the way, Mrs. S. looked FABULOUS til this happened. You'd look pretty grey too if you'd spent the night crying. That's how she looked. And the kids! The pain never goes away.
Many a woman doesn't know about her husband's behavior 'til after the fact. Even THAT doesn't cut to this chase. In this case, you'd think, with a wife, three kids, the state of NY to run, numerous social and political obligations (ahem, an ELECTION year), he'd have thought more closely about HIS behavior.
His behavior. NOT hers. Blame the victim? Wow. It's the hypocrisy, folks. Watching him in action all these years, NYers know it! Do as I say, not as I do is so old hat. "Watch what I say, not who I did?" Kinda late for that.
As long as we make sex a commodity people are going to sell sex and pay for it.
The real story here is whether Spitzer was targeted by the Bush Justice Department.
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002589
"During the Bush Administration, his Justice Department has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican."
Bill is Client number One or Clien Ten for all we know. With all the money, the time and the sex addiction, who knows where Bill has been? So do not go telling us that Billary have been vetted.
I suppose the honorable thing to do would have been to divorce his wife and leave his kids and move in with a younger girlfriend. That is a better outcome for society right? He should be able to have fun with a prostitute safely and legally. It hurts no one. Including his wife. It only hurts her because of the puritanical social stigma put on it here in the US. Its been legal in many parts of Europe for years and they seem to be doing ok. The outrage is that this is a scandal at all.
Until women take a stand against this behavior and leave for the sake of the children instead of staying for the sake of the children, then their children will learn that there are consequences for bad behavior and break the cycle.
Spitzer has been upholding those good old "moral conservative," republican values. ;-)
My question to any offended wife would be to ask yourselves when was the last time sex with your husband was exciting. Just because one person in a relationship is bored with sex, doesn't mean the most powerful urge any human being has besides thirst and hunger is just going to go away.
He would have been politically smarter to end his marriage, abandon his wife and kids. He could have pulled a Guiliani and just kept a mistress. My guess is he still wants to remain in his marriage and in so doing, threw his political career out the back door.
a man pays a woman to have sex, and no one can stop pontificating about it. a country goes to war, local causes devastation, drains another country of its resources, bankrupts its own treasury, and we still haven't decided that it was a bad idea.
i see where the sexophobe priorities are.
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Posted March 11, 2008 | 01:42 PM (EST)