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In regard to Eliot Spitzer, I keep thinking about Bill Clinton and Halle Berry's ex-husband, and I'm wondering which actions are forgivable/excusable and which are not. If someone is a sex addict, as Halle Berry's ex-husband supposedly is, we treat it as a medical problem and we say it is not their fault.
I am more inclined to forgive Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky thing than I am to forgive Eliot Spitzer, and I'm trying to figure out why. With Bill Clinton, here was this cute flirty young woman who was thrown in his path, who threw herself in his path, who came onto him and went after him and god knows that women are his weakness, and so, well, he gave in to his weakness. Of course, this was many years ago, so maybe I am forgetting some of the facts. But to me, Bill's problem is that he likes women too much. (I should clarify that when I say "forgive," I mean as a constituent, not as a wife. As a wife, I would be out of there faster than you could say ... well, just about anything.)
Whereas what Spitzer did feels more like an act of misogyny. Again, I am trying to figure out why. I think I can understand it more for a man to say, "I met this woman, I thought she was cute, I developed a crush on her." But Spitzer went straight to the brothel. This was demeaning to himself, to his wife, to his daughters, and to the working girls, and to women everywhere, not to mention to the people he is supposed to govern and represent. Maybe I'm not being fair. I'm trying to figure it out.
What Spitzer did feels, to me, like a hostile act of anger. What Clinton did feels like an act of weakness. But again, maybe the years have softened my feelings about the Lewinsky affair.
Also, I don't feel like every man who goes to a prostitute is a misogynist. There are men who actually cannot get laid in any other way and so really do go simply for the female "companionship." I am less inclined to judge them for this.
Nonetheless, Spitzer has problems, which is what led him to behave this way. Maybe his problem isn't as serious as sex addiction but a "lesser "dysfunction or pathology. How much do we hold him accountable for it, and how much do we forgive because he needs help?
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Right, so my best friends and I occasionally went to bars and told men we were on spring break from mime school. Then we would do “mimes climbing the rope” and “mimes feeling the wall in front of them” until someone bought Sevgi a drink. Of course Sevgi could have burped the alphabet and someone would have bought her a drink. Someone remind me how this has anything to do with politics?
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I had a friend one time who decided to tell the men at the bar she was a forensic pathologist. I am not sure what, if anything, it accomplished. I guess it beat telling them she was a lawyer.
And so do you think the guy sitting next to me on the plane that time hadn't really participated in the Iranian hostage rescue mission?
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In college, I had a friend whose favorite thing was trying on different personas in bars, spinning all kinds of wild life stories just for the fun of it. (Excellent storyteller, that one.)
So one time when I went home with her for the weekend, she got me to try it too. (In my defense, keep in mind that this was Indianapolis we're talking about, so you can imagine how easy it was to get caught up in the whole anything-goes spirit.) Anyway, as a beginner, I decided to keep most of the bio I was born with but change one thing: In the Indy version, for reasons that have long since escaped me, I had a summer job in the water-ski show in Cypress Gardens. Or so I told the quite appealing guy I met that night—who, as it turned out, was from very near where I lived and soon thereafter called to invite me to come and hang out with him—of course, on his ski boat. And I couldn't go because I didn't want to have to fess up that I was not only a big fibber but actually quite a disaster on skis! So, lesson learned. But I suspect that my friend, who really should have gone into acting but became a stockbroker in Texas, might still change things up a little now and then, just to keep her skills up.
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I like the following detail of Ashley Dupre's (I mean, "Kristen"; I mean, Ashley Youmans) biography. According to the New York Post, part of the reason she left home was that she crashed her oral-surgeon stepfather's Porsche. Like you, Hanna, I thought of Margaret Seltzer, concocting a gang identity out of her prep-school childhood. But Ashley actually did make the descent into the tawdry. Will we ever find out why a girl with a seemingly decent childhood becomes a prostitute, any more than we'll ever understand why a governor throws his happy, successful life away because of that prostitute? And speaking of false identitities, don't forget that when "Kristen" showed up at the Mayflower, she was told by her john that his name was "George Fox."
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Well, fine then. How does this sound:
I am 24 years old. I grew up in Venezuela, although my mother was Danish. When I was 8 years old, a child welfare worker discovered I'd been abused by my stepfather and placed me in a black foster home. (Oh wait, sorry, that's Margaret Jones.) When I was 18, to support myself, I took to modeling. There were nights when I wore mink and drank Courvoisier to my heart's content and other nights when I slept in a cardboard box and called the city rats my friends. I am now an aspiring singer, in a style you could call Reggaeton/Folk. I like sweet tarts, and golden monkeys.
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Funny Hanna, I am having no trouble at all reconciling sweet middle-class baby-sitting Ashley with starving streetwise Ashley with elegant upscale hooker Ashley. They’re all clichés. At one point or another I had each of those Barbies in my collection. (Upscale hooker Barbie had the BEST shoes.)
I’m willing to double-down on Melinda’s post about these folks as vehicles for our own shifting sense of who we are. I think we are a culture of people who have learned to build an identity for every occasion. MySpace is not about who you really are, its theater. So, for that matter, is hooking. We had a version of this conversation back when we talked about the MySpace tragedy: We are all too busy constructing identities—perhaps in the event that a reality show lands in our laps.
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Hanna,
I think it’s always a better story to go from rags to riches as a pop singer than to be just another pretty face from the privileged ’burbs, isn’t it? That hasn’t been sexy since Debbie Gibson, if it ever was—or at least it’s not nearly as compelling.
There was an interesting e-mail discussion among Slate “XX Factor” contributors today about why wealthy politicians like Spitzer are always killing themselves to appear middle-class, a phenomenon that Michael Kinsley deconstructed (albeit on Bill O’Reilly rather than a politician) here. It seems that Ashley and Eliot deserved each other—both were trying to appear like someone they are not, and both were blinded by their own ambition. And posturing to be from a lower class background than you actually are presumably helps you whether you’re singing or on the stump. (And many professions in between, most likely. America loves an underdog.)
And as a postscript, I’m just glad someone took the time to do the reporting. The New York Times seemed to fall for Ashley’s MySpace story hook, line, and sinker.
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OK, so I am a sucker, or at the very least confused. Ashley grew up in a nice middle-class suburban neighborhood? She spent her young days cheerleading and putting up signs for baby-sitting? So, can someone answer me these questions?
1. Why does a nice suburban girl pretend she was homeless and broke? Do you get more play on MySpace if you're abused? Does this make for better American Idol fodder? Was she just ashamed of being a hooker so had to invent a sad past so when she got busted people like me would feel sorry for her?
2. Could there have been something weird going on in that nice suburban home of hers, with the stepfather?
3. Could something have happened when, as a teenager, she went off to live with her own father?
4. Or, like Venkatesh writes, is being a high-class hooker now a middle-class aspiration?
All I can say is, the fathers of Wall, N.J., must have been begging her to baby-sit.
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I, too, was fascinated by the piece about Obama's late mother, which seemed an overdue corrective to the attention typically given to his late dad. She was such an interesting mix of ‘50s and ‘60s (and '70s and '80s and '90s ...) womanhood: marrying at 18 and having a baby right away, as good American girls did in the middle of the last century, except that she married an African exchange student, unusual at the time among young women who had grown up in Kansas. Then ending up an anthropologist and globe-trotting champion of microcredit, with two children and two ex-husbands and a host of cultural ties. Given Barack Obama's own, more conventional, family setup, it seems unlikely her casual notions about marriage will tarnish him among voters. But did it strike anyone else as surprising that Obama himself declined to comment for the Times piece? It is hard to get an interview with him, it's true—now more than ever—but not long ago he did give the Post's Kevin Merida some phone time for a piece on his father. This is the first substantial article I've seen on the mother's influence, and I would have thought he'd want to say something for the record about the impact she and her liberating notions must have had on him growing up. If either of my kids runs for president, and they are asked about me, I would like them to say something. Anything, really. I'll just get that out there right now.
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Sort of. On MySpace, all is not as it seems. Who'da thunk it? So, I retract what I said about "working class," and I hereby downgrade Ashley Dupre to merely "messed up."
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"Deserve got nuthin' to do with it."—Snoop (and before her, Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven.)
Whatever the mix of bad breaks and pathology and misguided, "I Wanna Be a Supermodel" ambition that led Ashley Dupre to the Emperors' Club, I feel sorry for anybody who would wind up in that situation. And whatever unseen cracks there were in Spitzer's foundation, the same goes for him.
But this whole thing also has me thinking more about what Dahlia wrote about how this political season has so far been all about us, about identity politics and how we see ourselves in the presidential candidates—or don't—and then feel put down or lifted up accordingly, bouncing along on the waves of their campaigns. And I wonder how identity—and class in particular—might have shaped our initial reactions to this Spitzer story. [Update: Rosa points out that Ashley's stepfather was actually an oral surgeon! But we obviously didn't know that, and my own assumption was definitely that she must have been struggling financially.]
Hillary Clinton has in the past played the class card against women who claimed to have been involved with or taken advantage of by her husband; she and her surrogates suggested that these women were the real perpetrators, and her husband the victim—of low-rent gold-diggers manipulated by his political enemies, and of his vulnerability as someone caught between the first two women in his life—his mother and grandmother—throughout a difficult childhood. Aren't there also some class-based assumptions involved in seeing 22-year-old Ashley as the "vixen'' and the governor of New York as the hapless unfortunate? What does it mean that prostitution is an OK career choice for "certain women"? If it's not OK for our daughters, is it OK for anyone's daughters?
We all see the world through the prism of our own identity and experience—who else's?—so my first reaction to this story, because I am a wife and a mom, who sometimes even wears pearls, was to put myself in Silda's shoes, rather than (as I might have done if I were younger or poorer) in Ashley's presumably strappy stilettos.
Emily B., when you mentioned your disappointment that Spitzer had blown (sorry) his shot at becoming the first Jewish president, did you mean that that made you any more (or less, for that matter) sympathetic to his situation? I never really related to my fellow Catholic John Kerry as such, other than to wish that our church would stop beating up on him, but as the first Catholic president, JFK sure walked on water for a lot of my coreligionists of an earlier generation. To the point that they would have looked the other way, even if they had known at the time what a cad he was with women? We'll never know, but I'm guessing yes. Identity is so powerful still today, in 2008, that as Dana notes, even Obama's grandmother, who raised him -- and did one fine job of it, obviously -- talks unselfconsciously about distrusting what people who are different from us might have to say.
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Today’s NYT cover story on Obama’s late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, contains one passage that gave me a sinking feeling:
In Hawaii she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the poor.
Somewhere around the words “peasant blacksmithing,” I found myself thinking, “This man can never be president. His mother was just too cool.” American presidential mothers don’t drift bohemianly around the globe, marrying and divorcing foreigners, working for Third World development banks and discussing “esoteric Indonesian woodworking techniques” with their daughters. They are not named Stanley. They’re Barbaras and Dorothys; they wear pearls and host charity events. At the most, a presidential mother might, like Bill Clinton’s mother Virginia, be a working-class Southern widow abused by a rotten second husband. But that image still fit into a familiar American narrative of bootstrap pluck (and allowed Bill to keep telling that story about threatening his wife-beating stepfather with a golf club). Stanley Ann doesn’t sound like someone who needed that kind of help.
Obviously, people don’t cast their votes based on the biography of a candidate’s parent. But they do care about his or her familial story. (Indeed, as Hillary’s campaign has shown, sometimes that story can be hard to escape.) And the huge swath of the electorate that believes in a much more traditional notion of family (including not only evangelicals but Hispanic and white working-class Democrats) would no doubt balk at the very details in this piece that made me hoot “Right on!” One friend of Ms. Soetoro’s, discussing her two divorces, muses, “She always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly essential or important.” Another friend, an anthropologist, references a “Javanese belief” that if a couple is unhappy, “It’s just stupid to stay married.” Word up, sister—but I wonder if those beliefs won’t ring an alarm bell for family-values voters already wary of Obama’s complicated racial and cultural back story.
Elsewhere in the article (which is a font of killer quotes), Obama’s Kansas-born grandmother, Stanley Ann's mother, is cited as saying “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me.” That skeptical xenophobia sounds like a much closer match to the worldview of most Americans than does Stanley Ann Soetoro’s brand of brainy bohemian globetrotting.