I’m a 52-year-old man with sexual issues, and all I feel for Eliot Spitzer tonight is sympathy.
I wonder how many other guys my age can identify with his lusts, and how many of the male journalists reporting on his troubles have similar feelings that they are guiltily suppressing, or have struggled with, even as they wring every detail they can out of his misery. That is the worst hypocrisy here, a lot worse than Spitzer’s for having once prosecuted prostitution: the widely-upheld pretense that bourgeois American marriage resolves sexual life for all men.
No, I don’t think most women get this. The conversations I had with women today were fake and vaguely insulting, while the conversations I had with men were real. One guy wondered if Spitzer was getting laid. Another said another New York governor, Roosevelt, had sex outside his marriage and maybe this will finally allow the country to have a genuine conversation about male sexuality. When I say insulting, I mean the derision there is for male sexuality in the culture: the condescending or mocking columns we are about to be flooded with, about bad judgment and male sexuality. I’m not going to the barricades, but I do hope this case opens up awareness. Gays had their liberation, women had theirs, what about straight married guys?
The only guy I could respect on television tonight was Alan Dershowitz. Execrable on Palestinian human rights, he was eloquent on Spitzer’s. In the end this was about a man and a woman having a consensual relationship, he said. Our society is primitive about these matters compared to the Europeans. Good for you, Dersh. A friend of mine pointed out that our society is now so uncorrupted, i.e. innocent, Spitzer couldn’t turn to procurers. JFK had procurers, so did Clinton as Arkansas governor–the state police, who felt used by him. (Maybe that’s when the culture was turning.)
But Spitzer had to go to the ATM by himself, apparently, and do the emails by himself. In Europe his needs would have a place. Not a place of honor, but a place. In the U.S. we make marriage a sexual stronghold in the midst of a hypersexualized culture, then stoke the men with Viagra like hormone-fed cattle, stroke them with internet porn, politicize married sex as a kind of covenant of citizenship. When sex is actually a dirty thing. "Love has pitched his tent/in the place of excrement," Yeats said. Or read Disgrace, the modern classic by Coetzee. I’m not complaining about marriage, it’s the best thing in my life. I’m saying that sex and marriage are not congruent entities. There’s privacy in a marriage, or ought to be. Read Rilke:
questions of love, even more than everything else that is important,
cannot be resolved publicly and according to
this or that agreement; …they are questions, intimate questions
from one human being to another, which in any case require a new,
special, wholly personal answer
I feel like Spitzer’s case may open up the discussion and pull us forward. It couldn’t happen with Clinton because the guy was such a pig and the cases were so messy. The Supreme Court was justly involved, 9-0, I remind you, on a question of a woman’s civil liberties, and Clinton gamed the law at every turn, and the women were threatened. This time it’s clean. So let people snicker. I feel that other men will join Dershowitz and me, and there will be a little progress…
