notes on a scandal
When Samantha Bee stood up at the
Daily Show podium and
faux admitted to cheating on her husband in a Spitzer-esque press conference, I wondered if there were any female politicians who had been caught red-handed (red-pantied?) in an extramarital affair. In the current issue of
Newsweek, Julia Baird ponders the same question — "Why aren't more powerful public women caught up in sex scandals?" — and comes up with a few possibilities. While Baird makes note of a few female pols who have behaved badly (former Charlotte, NC mayor Sue Myrick, Idaho congresswoman Helen Chenoweth, Utah congresswoman Katherine Bryson), one of the possible reasons fewer women have been caught cheating is because there are fewer female politicians, period.
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notes on a scandal
Yesterday we looked at the Spitzer scandal from the
prostitutes' point of view, and now we ask the question: why did Eliot risk everything to bone a hooker in the first place? One possibility, according to the
Times of London, is that he's addicted to sex. An anonymous columnist writes in today's paper, "My desire for sex was so overwhelming that I had difficulty breathing." This "John X" says that he was a sex addict because "I wanted to feel nothing; oblivion feels good when you've had a bad day at work, or are hung-over." (It all stemmed from a basic inability to communicate with the opposite sex.) "It's a mistake to associate paid sex with feelings. Better to associate it with a lack of feelings, a big frightening void, an inability to communicate sexually and emotionally with a partner."
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notes on a scandal
It's been a little over 36 hours since the Spitzer sex scandal
broke, and the focus of the media is slowly but surely turning to the prostitutes with whom he was involved, or, rather, prostitution in general. In today's
New York Times, Melissa Farley and Victor Malarek, both authors of books about prostitution and policy, argue that prostitution is anything but a victimless crime. They wonder about "Kristen," the prostitute hired by Spitzer from the Emperor's Club: "What is she going through now? Is she in danger from organized crime because of what she knows? Is anyone offering her legal counsel or alternatives to prostitution?" Farley and Malarek say that the concept of prostitution-as-victimless-crime is a myth perpetuated by the powerful men who frequent them.
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