Spitzer Spritzer

[Pressing-On]

(excerpt)

March 13, 2008
What I Couldn't Teach Spitzer at Harvard Law
By Susan Estrich

How could one smart guy get that stupid?

He used his own cell phone to arrange for a prostitute to go from New York to Washington, D.C., to have sex with him. Didn't he remember the stuff I taught him about how crossing state lines and using phone wires turn things into federal crimes, about the aptly named Mann Act, which makes prostitution a federal offense when you cross state lines to do it? Eight years of prosecuting Wall Street as attorney general of New York, and he was still clumsy enough in pulling money from his own accounts that his bank noted it and alerted the authorities to suspicious transactions on his account.

The easy answer, the one I heard frequently as the story was breaking, is that men just get stupid about sex. But prostitution is -- from my vantage point as a woman and a mother -- a particularly unattractive and offensive kind of extramarital activity. I really believe it is none of my business, as a member of the public or the media, if a political or business leader has an affair. I don't sit in judgment of other people's marriages or their private lives. But prostitution isn't just sex. Prostitution objectifies the women who engage in it, dehumanizes sex and sexuality, and turns both into commodities with a price tag.

Rich, powerful men don't need to pay women to have sex; there are plenty who will do it for nothing, save the expectation that they be treated as people. I have never understood why such men prefer to pay for it. Or, more accurately, I have understood, and I think less of them for their choice. What does it say about a man that he'd rather pay for sex? That he is willing to offer nothing but money? It is the cheapest sex a man can have, a friend of mine says, which is why I find it so offensive. Both Eliot and I are big believers in personal responsibility.

Of course, the real issue isn't sex, but judgment. Ruining a career you've spent decades building, ruining your future, making yourself vulnerable to criminal punishment, humiliating yourself and your family literally in the eyes of the world, all for a few nights in the sack with a whore? Insane. Just insane.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...eliot_spi.html