The Penis Mightier Than The Sword

The Spitzer thing had me thinking. It had me thinking about how prevalent hanky panky is, and how no one ever talks about it except when someone juicy gets caught. Every day we love to have our fragile illusions shattered. My God! How could he do such a thing?! And now the great thing isn’t that he really wasn’t the only horndog in Albany getting some on the side -- his replacement had him some girlfriends too, and you don’t have to be legally blind to appreciate them either, and you know damn well everyone else up there is busy too -- the great thing is that he probably was the only one paying for it. Snicker snicker.

And that’s what got me to thinking. Sure, it’s real bad to dishonor your family that way. Especially when Oh my God, he has daughters! For some reason that makes it worse. But what about the prostitute thing? Every man, as is proven time and time and time again, either has to bust out of his seven-year-itch-times-three marriage and fuck someone bad, or he goes crazy. Okay, not every man. Not me, I hasten to add with neither a visible smirk nor easily-discerned irony. But a bunch of them. Especially of the sort that end up in politics. (Avoiding easy side track into why I always hated those fucking frat boys.) And so they do, and their wives are downcast and noble, and on they go into “healing” or whatever can be done at that stage, and everything’s fucked because How could you do this to me? To us? I thought you loved me! Is there really any chance that Spitzer didn’t think of that?

No, there isn’t. But there is a chance that like most guys who are roughly fifty years old, he went insane. Insane enough to have a need he could not dispense with (and don’t talk to me about porn and the M word, guys who jerk off do not become Governor of New York). Insane enough to be a little bit Bill Clinton, a little bit Gary Hart, Jack Kennedy, whomever. And people look at him and say, AUGH, he HAD to pay for it, that dude is UGly! But that’s bullshit, he had him a hot wife -- no one marries Silda Wall by being a dork -- and he was Governor, for heaven’s sake! He did not HAVE to pay for a damn thing. If he was the slick sort of frat boy we often elect to office, he’d have easily snagged all the cooz he wanted. But no, he didn’t. And that’s sort of my point.

You know he just plain needed it. Raise your hand if you don’t know what I mean by that. You liars. And he had a lot of knowledge about a certain sector of the economy, probably a lot of contacts. He figured, Damn, I can’t go manipulating some intern or legislative analyst or whatever they had around there. He just couldn’t. That Would Be Wrong. Wrong to start messing with someone else’s emotions and personal life, making her the next ex-paramour of the man in power. But it wouldn’t be nearly so wrong -- wrong still, but not nearly as much, his lust-addled mind was thinking -- to fuck around with someone for whom it’s just business. Yes, he’d still be cheating and dishonoring and all that, but hell, he did that already in his mind and soul, and some women will tell you it’s a small step for a husband to go from there to the technical matter of having sex. That he needed someone else is often a lot worse, or just about as bad anyway, as if he actually went out and fucked her. So I’m thinking, the poor stupid bastard called up his old buddies in the high-rent call girl scene almost as an act of decency. It kept him out of the life of anyone who actually cared. And when it was over, off she went, no broken hearts. Well, except for the wife and daughters whose hearts he couldn’t keep his stupid self from breaking anyway. But one less, anyhow. (Until she found out there’d be no movie deal.)

So it really comes down to the fact that men are crazy, and prostitution is always going to be highly profitable (barring the costs of legal prosecution) so long as we have societies that pretend men aren’t quite as crazy as they really are. And we have lots of such societies all over the world and always have, because when it comes down to it, men who are old and wise enough to write the law (be it via legislative action or priestly fiat) have learned it’s much more conducive to a peaceful life to keep a house and home and lifelong wife, and just pay for girls when you’re away on business. So long as no one spills the secret or gets his stupid self caught, everyone’s happy.

Remember, this is the theory established by men who are de facto crazy. And though women may have invented civilization when they invented beer and bed linens, this didn’t protect them from being suppressed and commoditized by the arm that wields the sword. Kitchen rules were replaced with the rule of law, law made by men. Sometimes laws are just meant to make people happy that there’s a law, rather than to actually change how they behave. It all works out for those in positions of power and influence. So long as they don’t get caught.