I've resisted piling on Spitzer mainly because I've been struck dumb.
Like many New Yorkers, I totally bought his guy-in-white-hat persona. Bottom line is, as my dear husband pointed out, imagine how different this story would be if Spitzer had spent his $80G on a shrink.
So it goes ... .
I come not to praise or bury Spitzer but to share my two cents - not a lot I know, but maybe I can structure a bank transfer later this afternoon - on Kristen, aka Ashley Youmans.
Yesterday while I was grinding out a book chapter, Ashley made $200,000 in a single day on a little song she'd posted on the web. And Larry Flynt offered her a million dollars to pose naked. Ka-Ching!
Lots of women want to know, what exactly does Ashley do that provokes men to pay a thousand bucks an hour to rent her? What tricks of the trade might we married women learn from her that could keep our own husbands happy and, ahem, home on Valentine's Eve?
What amazing oral, vaginal or anal stunts did she perform to inspire one of her satisfied clients to tell her pimp "Now I can die happy!"
I'm willing to wager Ashley's hourly take that what she does is something pretty simple, something that doesn't even rise to the level of skill possessed by those legendary Asian hookers who can smoke cigarettes from their nether orifices.
What Ashley has down cold, no doubt, is the ability to provide lumpish, boring, self-absorbed men with the illusion that they are desirable, sexually capable and making her happy. In other words, she did a damn good job of pretending that she actually enjoyed whatever they wanted to do with her.
Besides the fairy tale come true of having her music "career" catapulted into celestial media heights she could only fantasize about a week ago, and the temporary porn-ification of New York's three newspapers, what does her success at fragile male ego-stroking tell us?
To me, the creepiest thing about Ashley is what she reveals to us about the entertainment industry and its marvelous way with women. This Jersey girl is just another pretty face and set of enhanced boobs in a cast of thousands of striving starlets in Hollywood who also got their start giving blowjobs for pay in Ferraris.
How many under-endowed entertainment bigwigs and financiers, deceived into believing the pretty girl they pay really likes their moves, has been inspired to produce and finance the next movie about the dorky nerd or the repulsive balding old guy who gets the beautiful babe in the end?
Go to the multiplex and let me count the ways.
In her book, "Female Chauvinist Pigs," Ariel Levy masterfully compiled the ways in which modern American women now participate in their own commodification. If she'd been born male, Ashley might be lucky enough to be selling used cars in Paramus, crossing the bridges and tunnels to club in Gotham at night and dreaming of striking it rich in a Wall Street boiler room. As a woman with a similar set of material dreams, she chose to rent her own flesh, and for that, she has been amply and now publicly rewarded, confirming the wisdom of her career choice for thousands of pretty but average teen girls whose futures right now are only as bright as the Mass Comm course at the community college.
You go Girl!