Why is it hypocritical?

Also---

> Because it is not about
> sex; it is about power

People shouldn't say things like that. People used to say that about abject rape, too, but you don't hear it so often anymore. It is about sex. Spitzer fucked that woman, he didn't take her to the handball court.

This seems like yet another piece composed for the sort of reader who wants to pretend that sex workers have all this arcane wisdom about human nature. And yet again, it seems rote and bogus. These tales always feature a "high-powered New York attorney" or an 'aspiring model", as if such descriptions could be trusted, or mean anything to us... It's as likely to have been an alcoholic paralegal and a community-college dropout.

I have this theory: To the extent that it isn't just painful and dangerous, sex work is mundane . When you find a human being who can race through these encounters without any effect on their personality (or even mood), you're not going to be dealing with someone who's capable of conveying any real interest or drama from their life. As a little boy I read a shabby paperbook about the TV show Star Trek. The guy made the offhand remark that drama comes either when a character learns a lesson or fails to learn a lesson. But narratives like this one are always told with a tone to suggest "You just wouldn't understand," as if to tune in next week for more adventures. But I bet we would understand. This girl was 22 years old (or so) and had tattoos from rehab.

> you don't know what kind
> of bargains people make
> to keep their marriage together

I agree with that 1,000 per cent. And not only that, it gets harder and harder to care about their bargains, especially when they've been living on taxpayer money in a mansion. To Hell with their immortal souls, all of 'em.

I didn't agree with everything she wrote -- like the bit about all the countless men using escort services.

But, I think she wasn't trying to be the next Susan Brownmiller with the line about power. I think men fuck hookers for the sex, not because they're on a power trip. I do think Spitzers abject stupidity suggests that he thought he was untouchable.

A lot of men just want a woman to be interested in them and sweet to them.

But, as I've said before, people don't necessarily step out for sex because their marriage is bad or they aren't getting good sex at home. Some people want variety, some want excitement, and some just work late at the office and end up having sex with a coworker because the coworker is there, and why not?

Crid, you definitely DO hear the rape is all about power line on our "top rated" feminist blogs: feministing, feministe, shakesville, pandagon, broadsheet. And anyone that suggests otherwise, especially in cases of gray rape, is roundly beaten. And if you even mention there might be such a thing as gray rape, you are roundly beaten.

That was an interesting article. I have to say the placement of that article alongside the list of PJ Media contributors makes that list look like the wanted posters at the post office. (Here are the powerful people we know use hookers: Michael Ledeen, Victor Davis Hansen, ....)

Granny rape and baby rape are rare, because rape is a crime of sex. There are exceptions, but they're exceptions. Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer do an excellent job of debunking the feminist fairytales about rape in A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion.

There's no such thing as "gray rape" (which, by the way, is not granny rape).

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/gray-rape-a-new-form-of-date-rape/

Can't it be about both sex and power?

If you're a woman and you don't want to have sex, you should see to it that you don't get so drunk that you lose your inhibitions and only manage to kinda sorta say no instead of emphatically saying no.

Contrary to feminist contentions, no sometimes means "Don't think I'm a slut," or "Don't think I do this with just anybody on the first date." If you want to communicate that it's really a no, you repeat yourself and get emphatic that yes, you really mean you don't want to have sex.

There are those guys who will ignore this and forge right ahead. And, no, nobody should be raped as some sort of punishment for lack of prudence in dating and/or being kind of an idiot about their personal safety. But, again, women as smaller, weaker individuals, need to exercise some prudence and personal responsibility about situations they get into. That's the stuff feminists should be emphasizing.

Deja - No. It can't.

If it was about power, then all rapes would be about long-term detention, degradation, and forced sex.

Instead, they are almost exclusively just forced sex.

You do the math.

Knowing Silda only as a woman who looks beautiful when she's humiliated, I went looking for another picture this morning and learned these things about her:

1. She's a Harvard JD, described as "feminist"

2. She has three daughters

Got it? In his home, the Spitzmeister was outgunned 4-to-1. Estrogen, estrogen everywhere. And the commander of all this girli-tude was an Ivy League lawyer... Can you imagine a more restless context to call home?

Paglia understands something that few people do, and will say so in as many words: Femininity is *toxic*. It's all about smothering, and complete expression of emotions and chatty, clumsy, public explication of feelings that others might want to keep to themselves. It violates boundaries as much as masculinity does, but in a different way.

(Of course, this kind of rhetoric can go too far.)

Truth is, I think a lot of women understand this on a non-verbal level... That there are times in life where they just need to fuckin' back off, and let the guy enjoy his football game or whatever.

I'm my sitcom fantasies of what happened in their marriage after the press conference the other day, I like to imagine that this awareness was foremost in her mind as they tried to move forward. I mean, I hope she kicked his balls in too, but it seems unlikely that his sexuality drifted into that behavior without some contribution from her during two decades of marriage. She literally stood by him up there, and there has to be a reason for that.

I was talking more about men using prostitutes, not rape.

I think there are lots of reasons that Silda could have stayed with Elliot, and it's all their own business. Discussing this with some acquaintances this week, I was actually shocked to hear someone I respected casually tell me of an affair he had when he was about 1000 miles out of town. And he also mentioned that his wife found out later, and that they are celebrating their 30th anniversary soon. I do shock easily, but some people are just different.

Amy, I guess I am not sure what you mean when you say there is no such thing as gray rape. I agree that both parties need to be responsible for their actions, but I think that when two people get completely drunk one night, a gray rape situation is quite likely to occur by morning, where no one clearly remembers what happened the night before, or giving consent is not remembered, or withdrawal of consent is not understood.

Although my basic point of view for both parties is that if you get so drunk at a party that you wake up the next morning in an unfamiliar bed, basically unharmed apart from not remembering if you gave consent or not, then maybe you were pretty lucky, because a lot worse could have happened.

Amy, I guess I am not sure what you mean when you say there is no such thing as gray rape.

If somebody clearly and emphatically says they don't want to have sex and then, despite that, the other person holds them down and forces them, that is rape.

If you feel bad the morning after, but went along with sex because it was easier than arguing about it, we're sorry you have regrets, but that's not rape, it's bad judgment.

Anybody who gets really drunk, especially any woman who gets really drunk, is putting herself at risk, and not just for unwanted sexual contact, but for mugging, violence, and death when she walks home from the bar.

I try never to forget I'm a girl (meaning I don't have the muscle mass, testosterone, or upper body strength men do, just for starters), and that's helped me keep from becoming a dead, raped, or injured girl time and time again in my life.

I try never to forget I'm a girl (meaning I don't have the muscle mass, testosterone, or upper body strength men do, just for starters), and that's helped me keep from becoming a dead, raped, or injured girl time and time again in my life.

I do that, and (after a few uncomfortable but not horrendous occurrences) I also pay attention to my subconscious. When it tells me to get out of a situation, I get out. Do I sometimes get resentful that I have to act this way and, for example, my tall, strong brother does not? Sure. There are days when I'd really, really like to move to Heinlein's Luna City. However, it also gives me an edge in defusing and short-circuiting knotty situations that has come in handy at times. I do find, though, that this is still one of the biggest divides between men and women, and I'm not sure that either the radical feminist types or the men's rights types really get it. I think about more or less the same things as my male grad school classmates - will I get the job I want? Will I do well in this class? Is this an intelligent comment to make? However, when I am asked out on a blind date, I make sure to pick a public place for the meeting and to let a friend or relative know where I'm going and how long I expect to be there...just in case. My (straight) single male classmates don't do that. They don't really even think about having to do that. Am I being overcautious? Perhaps, but I have somehow hit my mid-30s without having had anything really horrible happen to me, at least physically. I'll take the tradeoff.

Femininity is *toxic*. It's all about smothering, and complete expression of emotions and chatty, clumsy, public explication of feelings that others might want to keep to themselves.

Isn't it sometimes about holding people while they cry over the deaths of their loved ones, purchasing a nice wedding gift "from both of us" for friends and making sure that one's partner doesn't wear brown shoes with a black suit? And for all we know, Spitzer's raising three tomboys who are still at the stage at which they loathe outward expressions of femininity. Not to mention the fact that most of the female Harvard JD types I know aren't that into the minute expression of and dissection of feelings.

Anything, not in moderation, can be toxic.

Well, again, this was my daydream. And of course femininity has wonderful qualities too. Neither is masculinity all about raping and pillaging.

However, if you happen to find someone who's been raped and pillaged, you can save a lot of trouble in the search for whodunnit by investigating the nearby men first.

When you see an outburst of careless, hypermasculine sexual behavior from an otherwise balanced chap, shouldn't you wonder if he was getting squeezed too tightly in some other context?

You're certainly correct, Silda doesn't look like the kind of woman who makes a lot of time in her day for One Life to Live or the Bold and the Beautiful. But knowing that she's a lawyer doesn't make me think she'd be less prone to intrusive, overpowering behaviors in her personal life.

When you see an outburst of careless, hypermasculine sexual behavior from an otherwise balanced chap

"Otherwise balanced?" Crid, amigo, this is Eliot Spitzer, he who alleged that Dick Grasso of the NYSE had cheated on his wife and fathered an illegitimate child in order to get the guy to bend to his professional will. Spitz used to call people up and threaten to ruin their lives, basically, if they didn't agree to his demands. I'd call him many things, but "balanced" isn't one of them. I lived in the NYC area for much of Spitzer's rise to power - his behavior with the prostitutes seems to me to be much along the lines of his behavior when he was going after Wall Street types and corporations.

> the prostitutes seems to me
> to be much along the lines
> of his behavior when he was
> going after Wall Street

I think that's a stretch. Not everything we dislike in the world is part of a whole.

And one of my favorite pieces about Spitzer convincingly argued that his erections just weren't
firm enough.

The New York Times article -- I must be from a different planet. It basically lifts any responsibility whatsoever from women. As opposed to acknowledging the importance of communication, the awareness of what alcohol does to people, it instead insists that women can ignore all of that and any man that offers a drink to a woman is trying to commit date rape.

Do people drink alcohol to lower inhibitions? You betcha. If women really are so helpless that we have to consider any offer of alcohol to be evidence of date rape, than perhaps the Muslims are correct and we need to keep the women at home, and in the kitchen, and allow them outside only if they are under a burkha.

What's up is down is that people that think women have agency and responsibility in these encounters? Those people are considered anti-feminists. The feminists think that women can share no responsibility in this behavior.

When you see an outburst of careless, hypermasculine sexual behavior from an otherwise balanced chap, shouldn't you wonder if he was getting squeezed too tightly in some other context?

I don't buy that when one spouse cheats, it's somehow because of something the other has done or failed to do. From what I've seen, if people want to cheat and decide to cheat, they tend to look for justification after the fact. No one knows what goes on inside any marriage, but ultimately we're all responsible for our own behavior.

Absolutely, absolutely, but we'll spend the rest of our lives looking for patterns in cases like this anyway. Silda's obviously a woman of tremendous clarity and achievement, so we have to wonder why she (literally) stood by him the other day. What's your theory?

My guess is that she, like many women, thinks she is no longer interested in sex any more and suspected he was getting it elsewhere or didn't want to know at all, as long as she didn't have to put out.

Why I say she only "thinks" she is no longer interested in sex (if that's the case)...is in these two columns of mine, about the reality of female sexual response in longterm relationships, per Rosemary Basson.

This is news I broke in my column, and wrote about a second time because I think it's so important to get the word out...see below for a link to both columns:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=3&search=basson

If only my column ran in more papers, more women might know about this...but I've never met a group of people so junior high school mean girl as some of the daily paper features editors in America. A features editor who's cool, and runs my column, told me a number of them actually tried to banish me from their organization and their conferences because I wear high heels and hot pink pants (long, not hooker-style), and because I sell my own work instead of waiting like a little sparrow to be annointed okay by them.

I managed to stay in, probably both because she defended me, and because I used all their "diversitese" when I argued my case to the president of the organization, saying (about my pal Sid Goldberg, Lucianne Goldberg's late husband)..."So, you only allow old white men to come to your conferences?!"

I can't know for sure, but I think the editor who keeps me out of the LA Times started the "hate Amy Alkon" thing in the features editors organization. I just want them to judge me on my work. Ask themselves if it's better than what they're running. If not, hey, by all means, keep my ass out of the paper. My hot pink, high-heeled ass.

Amy: You were friends with Jonah's dad? That seems very appropriate, for some reason...

I think that's a stretch. Not everything we dislike in the world is part of a whole.

I agree, but I still contend that Eliot Spitzer has never been particularly "balanced." He's a crusader who was consistently willing to use whatever tactics he had to in order to win. I'm not sure he's ever really been "balanced."

Silda's obviously a woman of tremendous clarity and achievement, so we have to wonder why she (literally) stood by him the other day. What's your theory?

It's certainly possible that, as Amy said, they had stopped having sex and she had known that he was getting it elsewhere, albeit probably not the prostitution/lying to the IRS angle. It's also possible that she was in deep shock over the news and was running on autopilot. It's also possible that she decided that, as long as she had to undergo the humiliation anyway, she was going to stay with him and effectively push him into helping her set up her own political or other career, a la HRC.

Or, hell, maybe the real Silda is locked in a closet somewhere and what we're seeing is a FemBot.

And an exceptionally well-crafted bot she is.

Listen, you're right about everything. But as political mavericks go, Spitzer wasn't too far off the curve. His Governorship wasn't going like gangbusters (so to speak), but he wasn't doing so poorly that anyone was especially surprised. It wasn't a historic failure until he quit. "Balanced" may not have been the right word, but voters seemed to have gotten about what they expected to get; He was a failed investment, maybe, but not an outrageous gamble.

Or maybe she loved him, or maybe she has an emotional investment in the marriage that she feels is worth fighting for. Maybe she's staying "for the children" as some of you so often advocate.

I've been married coming up on 13 years (but who's counting?). My husband is one of the good ones. I'm as certain as I can be that he's never cheated on me, but if I found out he had, I wouldn't just give up and walk away. There would be hell to pay, but I'd still fight for my marriage because there's enough good there to make it worth a fight.

voters seemed to have gotten about what they expected to get

Oh, I agree. And I'm not saying the he was the most non-balanced guy ever. But he's also not, say, Bob Dole in terms of stability of behavior and approach. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Rudy Giuliani also wasn't the most balanced candidate for mayor of NYC. And I don't think anyone expected THIS out of a Spitzer. But still, I don't see the Spitzer story as one of a well-balanced, stable guy suddenly having a midlife breakdown and going nuts.

Femininity is *toxic*. It's all about smothering, and complete expression of emotions and chatty, clumsy, public explication of feelings that others might want to keep to themselves.

I knew this reminded me of something...found it!

"Seth: You women are all alike! Fussin' over your fal-de-lals to bedaze a man's eyes, aye?
And what you really want is 'is blood, 'is pride, and the 'eart out of 'is body.
And then when you've got 'im, bound up in yer fal-de-lals, and yer softness and he
can't move - 'cause of the longin' that cries in 'is blood, what do ya do then, aye?
Ya eats 'im, same as a hen spider eats a cock spider. But I don't let no women eat me -
I eats them instead. You don't understand what I'm sayin' do ya? - littl' innocent."

That is so over my head. (Fiction is a foreign language.) What does it mean?

Pretty much the same thing that you said, but as farce, and funnier.

The comments in this blog post (via Reynolds) are amusing. According to many of them, we're not even supposed to be having this discussion! Spitzer, being a grown man, should simply not have been balling that 22-year-old, so we're not even allowed to speculate as to why he did.

I know what Jerry was getting at above ("it's all their own business"). But we ought to be able to think about these character flaws and try to recognize them in upcoming candidates.

Being a year older than Spitzer, I can tell you that we've never elected another guy quite as creepy as Richard Nixon. Deficient in other ways, certainly.... But the electorate is educable! You can call it psychobabble, most of us would call it progress.

> and funnier.

I trust you on this. Camille Paglia is a woman with brilliant emotional insights and a keen appreciation of the importance of humor in public affairs, but she herself couldn't tell a joke if her life depended on it.

Deja,
The best ever (I think) adaptation of the brilliant Cold Comfort Farm was done on BBC radio in the 1980s. Not surprisingly. The Beeb used to be fantastic at getting perfect comic period voices.

voters seemed to have gotten about what they expected to get

Wow, you mean we knew he would set the State Police on the leader of the State Senate, then attempt a cover-up? Spitzer out-did Bush in sending his approval ratings dropping, and this was before hookergate. He's enough to make me nostalgic for Pataki, who at least had no pretensions about being more than worthless.

He was atypically bad, even for a maverick?

Jody, would've loved to have heard a recording of that!

RE; Rape and prostitution being about power.

I think that people are missing the boat on rape here. Sure, rape is about the sex, it's a sex crime. That does not mean that it's not also about power. For the most part, rape is a fetish. Fetishes are about what gets you off, in the case of a rape fetishist, the domination of an unwilling participant is part of the kink. So yes, it's about power. And no, that doesn't detract from the fact that it's also about the fucking.

Prostitution is really a host of things, not all, probably not even most being about power. But there certainly are a lot of situations where it is.

There are those who get off on the power of being able to buy the time of a virtually helpless sex-slave. There are those who get off on the notion that their money affords them the power to buy time with someone else's genitals. There are those who get off on the notion that they are in control to the degree that prostitution can allow them.

SO yes, it really can be and often times is, about power, as well as the sexing. The two are not mutually exclusive. And occasionally, it is all about the power and has nothing to do with the sex.

Steve Moxon on prostitution:

At first glance, prostitution is how the sexes get along when all is laid bare. Sex swapped, supposedly for resources. It's not. Or rather, at root - at least for the classic professional prostitute - it's not. With money being proxy for status, women in general are open to the possibility of sex - even behind the back of a long-term partner - with a man they judge to be high status by virtue of the money he has. This is not having sex for money though. The money a man provides through presents and picking up the tab for a woman during courtship is not payment either, but tokens of status or reliability to persuade her to be a long-term partner. A fee to a professional prostitute, from a biological perspective, is akin to this.

Yet long-term partnership is not, of course, the object of prostitution, so prostitution is more that a short-circuit of courtship. It's a distortion of it. For some reason, women here are exploiting the natural male desire for novel sex with a variety of partners. Most women would never prostitute themselves..why any women would want to do so is the interesting question.

The answer to the other question here, of why men pay for sex, is also more complicated than you think. There is the joke that men don't pay for sex so much as for the woman to go away afterwards. There is truth in this...

A now mainstream view has arisen by the default of nobody bothering to challenge it, that the forfeit of resources by men in exchange for sex, somehow is men exercising "power" over women. Handing over money is reckoned to be either in itself somehow hurtful to women, or to insufficiently offset some other hurt that attends the transaction. How this may be hurtful or what kind of hurt it might be, is never ventured. Prostitution is regarded as..intrinsically oppressive to women. This is at root a denial of the acceptability or even the existence of natural male sexual behavior. Simple prejudice towards men.

From "The Woman Racket", Chapter 12.

Moxon on rape:

Being the ultimate crime of sex difference where, of necessity, only men are perpetrators and only women are victims, rape is supposedly a quintessential example of male "oppression". This is undermined by the revelations of the scale of "male rape", but nevertheless rape is an irresistable platform for unbridled hatred towards men. Both public institutions and the media parrot Orwellian and Kafkaesque wrong-headedness about rape. The general public assumes that the law on rape is dispassionate, but it's now completely compromised. The vitriol expressed for the men accused - whether subsequently found guilty or innocent - is on a par with that reserved for murderers (and sometimes worse).

There are several questions key to unravelling the phenomenon of rape to see if the idea that it is "male oppression" stands up. Is rape on a sufficiently large scale? Does the experience of rape invariably give rise to serious psychological consequences? Is rape essentially not a sexual but a violent crime? The answer to all these questions is a resounding "no". Why is rape considered to be such a heinous crime as to be on par with murder when - nasty though it can be - self-evidently it isn't? ..

"The Woman Racket", Chapter 11

Norman L -

I hope your not trying to respond to me with quotes from this nut. Just perusing his blog for a few posts is rather indicative of his extreme distaste for women. While I find the term used all too often, to describe people who are anything but, it is exceedingly obvious that Moxon is the quintessential misogynist.

I wasn't responding to anyone in particular.

I don't know much about his personality, but most of what he's written rings true. Also at least from reading the book, I don't get much of a sense that his viewpoints are misogynistic. I think one thing that will upset lots of people about his book, even some men's rights advocates, is that he makes absolutely no apologies, e.g. caveats to statements he makes so that P.C. people will be happier or more receptive to his views.

In short, he tells it like it is. Maybe that's what's bothering you..his straightforward manner?

Norman -

No, in short, we have a man who flat out doesn't believe that rape exists and not only doesn't believe that men oppress women (which I would agree is considerably less of a problem than a lot make it to be) but claims the reverse is true. He also made a strong argument that women making less than men, is a sign that women oppress men, apparently because the difference isn't far greater.

I am most assuredly not a PC person. I do not throw the M word out injudiciously either. I use it in this case, because Moxon's own words at his blog bare me out. While he refrains from outright saying the bitches should all be barefoot and knocked up, he most certainly infers it.