The XX Factor: What women really think.

Should Spitzer Have Stepped Down?

I watched Ben Stein’s commentary on CBS News Sunday Morning this past weekend, and I’m troubled.

Have I been blinded by the salacious nature of the Spitzer story and am I not focusing on the important issues here? Have I been too seduced by the sex and the prostitute?

Stein says, “Something sinister is happening here and it scares me.” He says, “Men hire prostitutes by the thousands, maybe tens of thousands every day.” What is he suggesting? If everybody is doing it, that makes it OK? Men also rape, beat, and kill children and women and other men every day. Should we just look the other way because “everybody’s doing it!”?

And yet, I find myself wondering how exactly, aside from the illegal nature of it, paying for the services of a prostitute is different from paying for the services of a hairstylist or a massage therapist (the kind without the “happy ending”)? I think there is a difference, though I’m not sure how to articulate what that difference is. To hire a prostitute is to reduce a woman to her anatomy, I think, to reduce her to her sexual function in the same way that calling a woman a c-word is to reduce her to her anatomy or calling a man a d-word. To not want to deal with the whole person is to do violence to this person. Then again, when I go for a haircut, am I not just reducing my hairstylist to his haircutting function? I’m not sure how to answer this. It feels like there is some sense of violation and domination about going to a prostitute that does not exist when going for a haircut or a massage.

Stein says, “Spitzer was elected by an immense majority in New York.” This is true. And “Now he’s out of a job, and a man the voters didn’t vote for as governor is going to be governor.” An acquaintance this weekend reiterated this sentiment: “Paterson may be the best governor in the world, but he’s not the guy I voted for.” I don’t know if I agree with this. When you vote for a governor, are you not voting for the lieutenant governor too, in the case that the governor cannot perform his duties? I think it is the “cannot perform his duties” that is the issue here. Can the governor not perform his duties because he hired prostitutes?

While Stein acknowledges that what Spitzer did is a crime, he says, it’s “not a political crime, not treason, not terrorism.” He says, “Having elected officials kicked out of office by appointed officials is a very dicey proposition.” He suggests that because men are usually not punished at all for hiring prostitutes, or not severely punished, that Spitzer’s punishment did not fit the crime.

Last week, I felt that it would be hard for the people that Spitzer has to meet with and work with to look him in the eye knowing the details of his sex life. And this to me was enough reason for him to step down. How could he be an effective governor now that we’ve seen the man behind the curtain? In the last weekend, my feelings about that have softened some. We seem to have gotten over the details of Bill Clinton’s sex life being on display. And I sense that with the passage of time, feelings about the Spitzer scandal will lessen, too.

Was Spitzer’s departure too hasty? Or is his crime enough of a crime?

My acquaintance also expressed disgust that while the Bush administration commits crime after crime, this is what we are focused on. That I completely agree with.