The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Protesting Too Much

Yes, exactly—I don't find the Spitzer debacle tedious yet, in part because the details (some prostitutes found him "difficult"—in what way?) are too interesting and in part because it's just so striking how the loudest moralizers often turn to have been wrestling in secret with the very shame they've set out to exterminate. Two years ago we had the Rev. Ted Haggard, aka Pastor Ted, the evangelizer and inveigher against "homosexual activity" who turned out to have indulged in the selfsame activity with a call guy. Now Spitzer, breaker-up of prostitution rings, turns out to have availed himself of one—and to have overpaid, at that. Shades of Elmer Gantry! This seems such an eternal type—the moralizer brought down on a morals charge—that by now we should almost assume anyone nicknamed Mr. Clean (that is, anyone who makes a point of his rectitude and prosecutorial zeal) has a dirty secret. It's a different personality type than, say, Bill Clinton. Can XXers offer other examples of Gantrylike personages, hoistable on their own petards? What I always wonder is: What is the psychological impulse that leads someone to denounce the practice they are engaging in? Is it simple hypocrisy or something more complicated?  

As for Dahlia's point: There may or may not be stricter gun control if women ran the world—only one way to find out, really—but it really does seem safe to say there would be less visiting of prostitutes in the interstices of time between governing and testifying before Congress on bond insurance.