The XX Factor: What women really think.

Eliot Is a Rorschach Test, Too

"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.