"How Could I?"

The title of this blog is from Newsweek's cover story on Eliot Spitzer. It refers, of course, to his appointments with a high-priced call girl in DC that forced him to resign from the NY governorship.

When I saw the cover's question, I thought what possibly every guy immediately thinks: because you are a man.

When I was younger (and hornier)I thought of the problem of monogamy for married men. The solution, I thought, was to go to a high-end prostitute every once in a while, to satisfy the male urge for sexual variety, without any troublesome emotional entanglements.

Spitzer's (who was one of my father's senior thesis advisees at Princeton)actions weren't as dumb as they seem. He went to another city outside NY state to do it, and his name was kept confidential; he was Client No. 9. Unlike having an affair or a mistress, there was no danger of emotional involvement. No "other woman" would be calling his home at 3 am while he was in bed with his wife and demanding he leave her.

There is of course the fact that women are attracted to power, and that for men power provides a rush and a sense that you exist in a plane above normal people. Powerful men often have high testosterone levels and hence high sex drives.

Why a hypersexualized society insists that the private actions of its elected officials should be everyone's business is a mystery to me, unless it seriously compromises one's effectiveness as a political leader. In the old days, with a mostly male media, sexual indiscretions were kept entre nous (among us). Now you'd probably be on You Tube or somehow all over the net ten seconds after the act.

I remember telling my older brother about my solution to the male monogamy problem, and he said "would you want your wife to do the same?" I thought about it, and concluded that if it happened in the beginning stages of the marriage I'd be outraged, but if it was later on and our sex life had inevitably tapered off, and it was occasional, and she wasn't somehow in love with the "professional," well, tit for tat.