Roxanne, you don't have to put on that red light
Notwithstanding my (possibly in bad taste) joke at the beginning of my last entry, I have actually been devoting some serious thought to the Eliot Spitzer scandal.

Spitzer, for those who aren't as fully in the loop as a New Yorker might be, became famous as an extremely ethical Attorney General. He went after the fat cats, for instance -- Wall Street doubtless cracked open some serious champagne bottles upon hearing of his political demise. And, in fact, he spent quite a lot of time breaking up prostitution rings (yes, he broke up more than one!). He was voted in as Governor because he had such a badass, such an amazingly ethical record.

So what are we to make of the fact that he was busted hiring a prostitute for thousands of dollars per hour? And, in fact, apparently had a habit of hiring such prostitutes? Apparently, Spitzer's expensive prostitute habit cost him somewhere around $80-100k (that sounds like a lot, but when you think about it, how many hours of Ashley Alexandra Dupré's time does it even buy? maybe one day? -- let's call it 24-48 total hours). This seems especially crazy when you consider the fact that Spitzer himself pushed to instate higher penalties for the patrons of prostitutes (hereafter referred to as johns).

I haven't fully brought all my thoughts together, so I'll take the numbered approach.

1) Do I think Spitzer did a bad thing? Yes. I think he betrayed his wife. Her expression during his speech made it more than clear that Mr. Spitzer did not clear his activities with Mrs. Spitzer ahead of time. So, he betrayed his wife. And that's a bastardly thing to do. Period.

1a) However, betraying one's wife -- while a bastardly thing to do -- does not make someone into an irredeemably Bad Person. If he were younger and hotter and had lots of stuff in common with me, would I marry him? Hell no. And I wouldn't advise another woman to marry him, either. And if I were friends with his wife, I would damn well spit in his face. And if I were his wife, I would either shoot him in the head, or divorce him as soon as possible; certainly I would never forgive him -- he cheated in a prolonged, premeditated, dishonest and even risky (STI-wise) fashion. But still, the act of cheating on his wife does not intrinsically make him a horrible man. It doesn't even, necessarily, make him an unethical man.

1b) Just as a side note, isn't it funny how so many people who quickly leapt to Bill Clinton's defense during Monicagate are shifting their feet and pulling back from Eliot Spitzer?

2) Do I think Spitzer was a hypocrite? Maybe. I've thought over and over about what was going through his head. Did his urge to punish johns come from a deep-seated guilt? Did his dogged work against prostitution rings also arise partly from that deep-seated guilt?

2a) I doubt it. Why? Because, as was best summed up by my friend Zach (who once interned with Spitzer), "the hooker rings he busted as an AG were more of the human trafficking variety than the $5000/hr variety." In other words, the prostitution that Spitzer cracked down on was closer to rape / abuse / sex slavery than it was to a white, educated, English-speaking American citizen freely consenting to have sex for money. And, of course, the johns he thought deserved punishment were doing something a lot more analogous to paying for rape than paying for consensual sex.

3) Do I feel bad for Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a.k.a. Kristen? Hell no -- at least not for the prostitution thing. Let's look at her lifestyle: she had a flat in Manhattan whose rent was literally thousands of dollars per month; the building has a pool, a gym, and God knows what else. And let's look at her profession: struggling singer.

She's clearly not an idiot -- her MySpace page is impressively free of grammatical errors and stupidity -- and she's goddamn beautiful. It would have been extremely easy for her to support herself, perhaps a bit less extravagantly, with a "real" job. For instance, she could have chosen to live in a less costly place and take a part-time job in order to support herself while she worked on her art. It wouldn't even have been that bad -- after all, that's pretty close to what I'm doing, and my life is pretty awesome. But instead, she chose to have sex for thousands of dollars per hour. That is not even close to tragic.

4) Do I think that Eliot Spitzer is a scumbag for paying Ashley Alexandra Dupré to have sex with him? Absolutely not. In fact, I think that Eliot Spitzer probably drew on his vast experience as Attorney General to find prostitutes who were not pressured into becoming prostitutes -- who were not raped -- who were not trafficked. In other words, he specifically went to the most ethical possible prostitute.

5) The Smoking Gun has released some pages from the affidavit that have an interestingly close focus on Client 9, Eliot Spitzer. So what were the investigator's priorities, exactly? Here's another quotation from Zach for you: "What were federal investigators doing monitoring a state government official to check for bribery?" And right in an election year! I mean, I'm not saying that he didn't do it, but I am saying that this is a bit of a convenient scandal. edit Okay, so I wasn't super well-informed before, but now I am better informed. It seems that the Feds deliberately pulled out all the stops on Spitzer (including calling in multiple 12+-member shadow teams, etc). Their justification for this is "Well, we wouldn't normally put so much effort into breaking up a prostitution ring, but with such a highly placed politician we had to put more effort into discovering wrongdoing." Riiiight .... /edit

6) Does this case make me angry? Yes, it does -- but not because I'm all that mad at Eliot Spitzer, even though he did a bastardly thing.

As always, I'm angry at the media. The papers, TV, etc. are treating this case as if it's all about insane hypocrisy -- he brought down prostitution and yet patronized prostitutes! gasp! -- when a minimum of reflection will show that Eliot Spitzer was not patronizing the kind of prostitutes whose activities he aimed to take down. There's a huge difference between (a) an illiterate downtrodden woman whose pimp beats her, rapes her and takes all her money ... and (b) Ashley Alexandra Dupré. There's a world of difference. Eliot Spitzer was patronizing the second, not the first -- and it really says something about how fucked up Americans are, that everyone seems to think that patronizing the second is practically the same as the first.

The distinction is more than just important. It's crucial. Apparently, most Americans consider Ashley Alexandra Dupré to be just as victimized as your average street whore -- or, conversely, they consider your average street whore to be just as empowered as Ashley Alexandra Dupré. The failure to grasp the difference is at the heart of much current commentary on this issue.

Furthermore, the same Americans who brushed off Bill Clinton's routine unfaithfulness are hissing and spitting at Eliot Spitzer's scarce, consensual, non-emotionally-engaging unfaithfulness. In fact, New York -- which failed to punish Giuliani for his flagrant, corrupt, continuing affairs -- is forcing Spitzer to step down for 24-48 hours of sex.

7) I am probably somewhat influenced by the crazy fantasy series I have been reading lately (a somewhat ridiculous set of books by Jacqueline Carey whose main character is an extreme S&M courtesan chosen by the gods -- the first half of the first one, Kushiel's Dart, is awesome and filled with well-written complex intrigue; the rest of the first one and all of the succeeding ones seem to have devolved into less interesting, less complicated, travel-focused fantasy; anyway I do recommend the first one, though you have to be able to handle some BDSM-y scenes). But ... wouldn't it be nice if prostitution wasn't viewed as a degrading horrible thing? Wouldn't it be fantastic if selling one's body was viewed as, not just reasonable, but respectable -- even, perhaps, holy?

The fact that a woman selling sex is seen as such an awful thing tells us a lot about how sex is viewed in general. If we didn't see sex as something that women ought to be avoiding as much as possible in the first place, then we wouldn't be so horrified by the idea of women doing it for something as crass as money. I've no idea how to fix this one, but it bothers me.

8) (By the way, if you're interested in a really well-thought-out, balanced, feminist look at the issue of prostitution and legalization, please please read this excellent interview from Feministe.com: Interview with the Sex Workers Project in NYC. A lot of the comments are awesome, too.)