How do we tell the children?

Among the many angles on the Eliot Spitzer the media are chewing on is how parents should talk to children about infidelity. Forget prostitution for the moment—I’m not ready to figure out how you explain to children the buying and selling of sex. What about infidelity?

Having grown up the child of a single mom, I always thought one of the grosser things about marriage as mythologized in our culture was how it muddled up the parents’ sexual relationship in their relationships with their children. Ick. My mother had boyfriends and partners over the years, but I always knew that had nothing to do with my relationship with her (and that ultimately I came first). And I think that’s a good thing.

Now, against all my expectations, I’m married. Which raises for me the question of how I make sure that my children know that my relationship with them is one thing and my relationship with their father is another. I’m pretty confident that infidelity and divorce—let alone prostitution—are not on the horizon for us, but I’m sure there will ups and downs in the marriage and I hope my children will understand that that’s about me and their father and not about them. My relationship with my children is unconditional.

But I lack models for how you convey this within the confines of heterosexual marriage. Perhaps one element is generally conveying that mama and daddy are separate (and imperfect) people and that our lives extend beyond our children, so there’s never any shattering of idols. My partner and I each spend time caring for our daughter alone, so I hope that we are cultivating equal and separate relationships with her. Still, we are a family unit—which is pretty wonderful, I think—and that is all she knows. I guess I just hope I never fetishize that unit. We’re still, also, individuals.

Any thoughts, gentle readers?

Do we all work at the Emperor's Club?

Get a load of this angle on the Eliot Spitzer story (thanks, Broadsheet):

Telephone operators at the Emperor's Club criticized one of the women for cutting sessions with buyers short so that she could pick up her children at school. 'As a general rule,' one said, 'girls with children tend to have a little more baggage going on.'

Sound familiar, girls?

Do I care if Eliot Spitzer hires prostitutes?

I so wanted to like “Who Cares If Eliot Spitzer Hires Prostitutes?”, Glenn Greenwald’s post on the hour’s hottest scandal at Salon.com. Purchasing sex is decidedly—shall we call it tacky? No, let’s be honest and call it morally bankrupt. But it’s not an abuse of public trust or public power (although I have to assume that it’s power that corrupted Spitzer into thinking he could get away with it and probably power that got him thinking it was cool to buy sex). I’ve always been ambivalent about prostitution laws, since although I consider the purchasing of sex abhorrent, I don’t think criminalizing women who sell themselves is a good way of dealing with the practice.

And I always thought of Eliot Spitzer’s raison d’etre as opposition to corporate malfeasance and greed, not private sexual behavior, as has been the case with so many of the right-wingers caught in sexual scandals, so I haven’t really seen the hypocrisy as all that direct. Still, he’s branded himself as “Mr. Clean” and he did prosecute at least one big prostitution case. And give me a break with Spitzer's wrapping himself in the righteousness of the progressive causes he's championed (come to think of it, that's kind of like the way he apparently used a friend's name to register at the hotel where he brought prostitutes).

Anyway, I was prepared to hear Greenwald sympathetically. He approvingly cites another blogger writing that if two consenting adults have sex and once gets paid, that’s illegal, but if several consenting adults have sex, film it, and they all get paid, that’s just business—ridiculous, says Greenwald. This is a funny point. Except that it misses the main point. It’s precisely the one-sidedness that makes prostitution a moral problem. When one person purchases the body of another, you’ve got a sin. When whole classes of people can purchase the bodies of whole other classes of people, you’ve got one sign of a social evil. To be a woman in this world is—to riff on Catherine MacKinnon—for your sexual body to be purchase-able. Which, I think, harms all women. I’m not with MacKinnon on outlawing porn, because I do think there’s a difference between word and act. And I’m not sure I’m even for outlawing prostitution, precisely because the law treats buyer and bought as equally to blame, which misses the point just as Greenwald does. Prostitution is not, as Greenwald claims, a victimless crime.

Still, I can’t get myself worked into too much of a moral lather over Spitzer’s deeds. I don't expect politicians to be personal saints. Mostly I think Spitzer's an idiot. He got caught by Bush’s Department of Justice and some banks that noticed suspicious transactions. Did it not occur to him that these two groups were likely to be out to get him?

And unlike some self-righteous liberals noting the disparity between Spitzer’s treatment and the retention in office of accused sex criminals David Vitter and Larry Craig, I thought Spitzer rightly had to go. There’s a difference between the legislative branch and executive branch. As an executive, Spitzer wouldn’t have been able to get anything done.

What I’m maddest at Spitzer for is his treatment of his wife. I’ve had it with political wives being forced to stand up with their husbands and use their victimhood to help their husbands salvage some sympathy. As if having the world know your husband bought sex (possibly partly because he wanted some rough trade) weren’t bad enough, you have to go stand by him under the klieg lights (looking haggard to boot)? Screw that. That’s another form of prostitution, and if that’s what marriage means marriage oughta be illegal. Let him twist by himself in the wind. That’s what I call personal responsibility.

Update: Gack! Apparently Silda Spitzer is getting lots of judgment thrown at her. According to Broadsheet, at least one commentator blamed her for the scandal (because she supposedly didn't kink things up enough). I can't do more than sputter at this. Damn them. (And Broadsheet offers some plausible and reasonable possible motivations to explain Spitzer's stand-by-your-man act.)