I know someone, who knows someone, who knows the Spitzers, and my source tells me that their source says the Spitzers have a sexy marriage. (Or had one). That they’re into one another, they both are sexual people.
This is an achievement. As anyone who’s been married 15, 20 years can tell you, or not tell you, it’s hard to keep the pilot light going. No one warned us about this when we got married, I assume because in the previous generation, people didn’t expect to have sex when they were in their 50s. But that was before the 1970s, the sexual revolution, my selfinvolved generation, which defines itself sexually. Sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll was a real credo. And there is a high expectation even as we get old that We Should Be Having Sex. Amazing sex, into our 50s. The culture is hypersexualized, as I observed in my last post on this issue.
Some of us fall by the wayside. There are a lot of sexless marriages out there.
I am someone who defines himself sexually. I have a handful of very close guy friends who I can talk about sex with, and my impression is that there are a good number of people like me out there: guys (and women too–though I don’t talk about this stuff with women, beside my wife) for whom sex is a core matter, guys who would feel lesser, or not whole, if they weren’t having sex regularly. The day may come when I don’t have regular sex and have to redefine myself, and I am frightened by the prospect. And this is true for other friends of mine.
Again I say, this is a difficult thing to achieve, a sexual life in your late 40s, early 50s. There are a lot of hazards. There’s parenthood (one guy I know said he didn’t feel the same about his wife after he’d seen a baby come out of there); there’s midlife depression; there’s menopause; there’s the general drift of domestic values (one friend once told me that foodies, people who put a lot of energy into cuisine, say buying the perfect pancetta to make the perfect sauce for their handmade pasta, weren’t having sex). There are marriages of convenience. Or marriages that were never that sexual to begin with, maybe on one person’s part, not the other.
I’m not a sex therapist (though god knows I talked about these issues in therapy when I was in it), but it’s my feeling that to maintain sex in a marriage you have to be a sexual person. You have to bank the fire and maintain it, don’t let it go out. Talk dirty, buy sexy lingerie, rough stuff, whatever. Look after your body. One thing I know is that you have to keep your fantasy life alive, which is to say, you have to maintain the belief that you are sexually attractive, which means not just sexually attractive to your wife, but to the world of women. This is dangerous. The hazards include divorce, sexual addiction, infidelity. Drawing the line here is a hard thing, but I would maintain that it is an essential task if you’re going to keep your marriage sexual.
Gay guys I know don’t seem to have a problem with jumping the fence now and then, and not informing their partner, of course. I think they say it’s worth it because the guy is staying sexual, and you need the partners to believe they’re players if you’re going to keep the home life going. Of course, they’re both guys, so they don’t have to go through the difficult translation of trying to explain their sexuality to the other. It’s harder between a man and a woman, who are from Mars and Venus.
There’s a point coming. If it is true that the Spitzers had a sexual marriage, one reason they did is that Eliot Spitzer continued to regard himself as sexy at age 48, with that lantern jaw and big bald head. And maybe one way he did so is in the way that is now so famous and shameful. Legalize it.
Is Phil's point really that Spitzer went to prostitute's so that he could feel attractive to his wife?
I don't think he has a point, but maybe that's because he just ain't glad to see me.
It is confusing.
Different marriages have different agreements.
Spitzer's failing wasn't that he was sexual, or even that he had extra-marital relations (not nothing in consequence either, agreements are not just between consenting individuals). It was that he invested in illegality, and invested time and money to set up multiple legal entities to hide the use of the money.
All conducted by someone who's job had included to investigate shell companies used for criminal activity.
When someone's sexualness gets to that point, its not sexuality, its addiction of some sort, mid-life crisis or not.
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"Is Phil's point really that Spitzer went to prostitute's so that he could feel attractive to his wife?"
I don't think so. The point is that arousal starts in the brain, not in the gonads. Fulfilling one's sexual fantasies in real life can be more powerful than Viagra, and with longer-lasting effects.
Misguided laws have severely restricted the legal options for those who want to pursue this route. Prostitution is legal in most of the world's advanced countries. The United States (except for Nevada's bunny ranches) is the outlier.
Richard Witty is completely off base saying that Spitzer set up multiple legal entities to hide money. The prostitution ring did that. Spitzer merely structured his wire transfers to those entities, to evade the $10,000 reporting theshold.
This is what happens to those who believe "cause is a lazy word" — subject, verb, object, cause and effect get hopelessly scrambled. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. (I'm crying.)
Jim,
You use the word "cause" in a lazy manner.
The word itself has meaning, but in a small percentage of the cases it is actually used.
"saying that Spitzer set up multiple legal entities to hide money. The prostitution ring did that. Spitzer merely structured his wire transfers to those entities, to evade the $10,000 reporting theshold. "
Is that the case that he didn't set up the entities? I had read that he did.
Do you think that participating in a scheme to intentionally EVADE detection, is incidental, and NOT a conflict of interest of office?
Philip's point is one that I've made a couple of times when people natter on about what they think goes on between Mr. & Mrs. Spitzer. Several times I've seen people blithely stating that the marriage is sexless. Why do they assume this?
Why does anybody assume that because one partner gets sex outside the marriage, that there's no sex in the marriage?
It's a very naive perception of sexual behavior.
I'm not at all surprised that the Spitzers had a "sexy" marriage. She is vital and takes care of herself; why wouldn't she have sex with him? And how does that keep him from having his own private urges/compulsions?
.
"Do you think that participating in a scheme to intentionally EVADE detection, is incidental, and NOT a conflict of interest of office?" — R. Witty
What I said was that it shouldn't be ILLEGAL, but it is. If bankers were not spies, structuring would not exist.
Rep. Ron Paul made a statement about Eliot Spitzer to the House on March 13th, which I completely endorse. Excerpt:
"No matter how morally justified his comeuppance may be, his downfall demonstrates the worst of our society. The possibility of uncovering personal moral wrongdoing is never a justification for the government to spy on our every move and to participate in sting operations. For government to entice a citizen to break a law with a sting operation – that is, engaging in activities that a private citizen is prohibited by law from doing – is unconscionable and should clearly be illegal."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul443.html
Unlike Ron Paul, Eliot Spitzer — even after resolving his legal situation — is unlikely to make such finely nuanced points. Like Bill Clinton, Spitzer needs to preserve his "viability within the system," which requires suitably elastic principles. And I'm not referring to his sex life.
The investigation into Spitzer's payments were not part of a sting operation. Ron Paul has a lot of nerve to state so.
Do you think that it is "loyal" or "disloyal" to participate in assisting others to evade taxation, and/or assisting other to perpetrate a criminal enterprise?
Bah, the cold has arrived here, so springtime is near at your hands, you frozen northern monkeys. Stop the fretting and go catch the girls! You don't need prostitution, all you need is frost dilution.
Love the aside about foodies. And basically the thrust of the entire post. A comment from a colleague across the hall:
"If you could interest Phil in golf, his blog would be about all of your favorite things."
Richard,
I love this statement you made, and far too few people, Phil included, are focusing or even mentioning this aspect of ES's transgressions.
"Different marriages have different agreements."
After all, marriage is between two people.
Phil focuses too much on drives and appetites, too little on self-control. I too have those appetites, and I find myself consistently looking at the bodies of young women and having to detach and control the primal urge. If my wife and I had an agreement that our marriage was sexually open, I'd probably be pursuing them. We do not, and I do not.
Jim Haygood,
You're exactly right about ES's "crimes". I put that word in quotation marks because I too feel that bankers should not be spies. I support Ron Paul's statement on the case.
From Reuters:
"Spitzer, who came into office in 2007 promising to clean up state politics, faces the possibility of federal criminal charges over how he may have paid for prostitution services, specifically charges of structuring, which entail payments made so as to conceal their purpose and source.
Another violation may involve money laundering, if payments made to the suspected prostitution ring's shell corporations are found to be part of a larger conspiracy, legal experts said."
An important aspect of a sexual relationship is emotional intimacy. When Jennifer Anniston was married to Brad Pitt she knew something was going on when he was making a movie with Angelina Jolie. When she tried to talk to him he wouldn't share with her the way he used to and became emotionally distant. She realized that he was doing this because he was sharing his feelings with another woman. To Anniston, as with most women, this was on a par with sexual infidelity and she knew the marriage was effectively over.