I said the other day that John Edwards can't be my poster boy for an attack on marital norms. Well, I changed my mind, he's my poster boy.
The AP is saying that his political career is finished. The other night Andrea Mitchell asked a hundred investigative questions about when the affair began and where the money went. I don't care. We sacrificed a really smart guy, Gary Hart, to this sort of investigation, lost an important mind on international relations. New York lost a really smart governor, Eliot Spitzer. When will it end? When will we grow up? What sort of test is this for national service? Do we ask them to do origami competition–no. Then why is marital fidelity a supreme test, what is the connection?
Once again there's a female conversation about Edwards and a male one. The female one is the only licit one, the only one on tv, but the male one is the one that matters, because men are just going to do this kind of thing. They're answering a need. Call it bad if you like, well they are going to be bad. Good men have turned out to be bad again and again. They're going to be bad again. And it's never pretty. Yes he betrayed a woman with cancer. Does that mean he'd be a bad policymaker? No.
Better change the rules. People are supposed to be monogamous but what species is monogamous. Not homo sapiens. It is a myth. Politically, it's a test that means nothing. Sarkozy failed the test and no one over there cares, they got over it. Here he'd be toast. There's so much hypocrisy around marriage, why, because it's the sacred economic unit. So marriage is supposed to be sexual forever. What if it isn't? I did an article for New York Magazine after the Spitzer deal and one of the big revelations was the Sexless Marriage. A lot of my friends murmured to me about it. People feel ashamed about it. They have to be like an R movie forever. I think when you hit 50 more women bow out of the sexual thing than men, that's another strong impression I got from that piece. So where does that leave men? What if someone wants to be sexual and the other doesn't. Don't you respect that? One of my middle aged informants said, "My wife
friends are interested in sex… Do middle-aged, married women who are no longer
interested in having sex with their husbands expect them to remain faithful?
There has to be a willful ignorance. Don't ask; don't tell. They don't want it
thrown in their faces but if they think about it for a bit they have to realize
that that intense need is being met somehow. Which is worse from the wife's
perspective, having the husband see a prostitute, or having the husband fall in
love with another woman and leave the marriage?"
My generation used to have imagination around these issues. It's all gone. We should liberate ourselves from a lot of these expectations, including the one that marriage has to be sexual.
And as for Edwards's chicanery, I don't really care. The most important information we ever got about him was his failure to be John Kerry's second in '04. That was enough info. The chicanery will always be there, it's part of the picture. Eliot Spitzer had his embarrassing fiddles, too. Sex is just unseemly, that's the deal. Love has pitched its tent in the place of excrement–Yeats, I quoted that during the last scandal. How many more scandals will I have to keep quoting it thru.
