The Spitzer Mess - 3/12/09

Wed Mar 12 13:55:35 EDT 2008

I'm receiving MANY Spitzer articles from across the country and around the
world - news, editorials, commentaries - plus a lot of your own opinions.
Too many to share them all, but will forward a few.
------------------------
Several have pointed to the title of the prostitution service, The Emperor's
Club, with the observation about their keen marketing - that men in power
feel a sense of emperor/harem entitlement.  Someone commented that this
seems to apply whether they're emperor of a work group, a team, a
congregation, a department, a state, a country.....
-----------------------
An interesting articles was *Hotel Babylon* in yesterday's Washington Post.
John Gray and so many others talk about gender difference (men and their
caves, women and their to-do lists, brain hormones, etc) but this one talks
about how men and women see hotels differently - funny, wry, enlightening
(and, not really about hotels).

> A hotel -- whether four-star or adjacent to Red Lobster -- is for a man a
> paradise of discretion, a suspension of one set of rules for another.
For full article: http://tinyurl.com/29jrka
---------------------
Then there were the editorials and articles pondering the high price for the
escort service. One of the best was a NY Times editorial written by a call
girl explaining that it's not for the act (you can get the same tricks at
$50 an hr that you get at $500 an hr). It's because you expect the
prostitute working for a service will not be doing drugs and thus will be
cleaner, healthier, safer.  The Governor could tell his wife he was paying a
high price because he was thinking of her health. the call girl says, sadly
it isn't the case. 
----------------------
There's a column by Maggie Gallagher that asks that we as a society quit
expecting wives to punish their husbands with divorce. Also that we drop the
practice of expecting wives to bear public witness - drop the *stand by your
man at the podium* public humiliation ritual.  I don't know about the podium
ritual, but strongly agree we should honor wives who decide to keep their
vows - to try to recover from this particular 'for better or for worse'.  We
know that couples can recover from infidelity and from scandal and should do
all we can to learn how to help them AVOID infidelity in the first place and
recover if they fail.

Maggie: 
> Can we end the public practice of trying to shame these wives into divorcing
> their husbands?  
> 
> There's a reason we feel impelled to do this these days. . . . Because we no
> longer have any public punishments for adultery, we have turned wives into
> instruments of the public morality; if she doesn't punish him by divorcing
> him, he will go unpunished, which is intolerable.  (Without some punishment,
> won't all husbands stray?)
For the full article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucmg/20080311/cm_ucmg/spitzerstoptorturingthewife
----------------------------
And, this one from USA Today that quotes several experts but keeps the best
for last - closes with comments from Peggy Vaughan author of the classic The
Monogamy Myth, the upcoming Preventing Adultry, and the founder of BAN - the
Beyond Affairs Network.  You can attend a BAN workshop in SF and learn how
to start a chapter in your area plus see the Infidelity Track for a list of
workshops to help couples prevent and recover from infidelity like Dave
Carder's Close Calls - wisdom from those who fell about how to avoid the
slippery slope.  http://www.smartmarriages.com/sex.track.html

> 608 
> Beyond Affairs: Prevention and Recovery
> Anne and Brian Bercht
> Learn how to not only recover from infidelity, but to make your marriage even
> stronger, from a couple that¹s been there. Also, how to establish a BAN
> recovery support group in your community.

PATH TO SCANDAL: WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?
Experts call it hubris, thrill, entitlement
By Janet Kornblum
USATODAY
March 12, 2008

Hubris? Arrogance? The need to take huge risks?

How could someone as powerful and intelligent as New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer
find himself embroiled in such a political fiasco, accused of meeting with a
prostitute in a hotel last month in Washington, D.C.?

And how could this scenario keep repeating itself? Didn't Spitzer, 48 and
married with three daughters, see Bill Clinton get into trouble for his
affair with Monica Lewinsky? Didn't he see the public chagrin of celebrities
when they've admitted cheating? What would compel someone like Spitzer to
pursue a path that has so often led to scandal and humiliation?

"Hubris," says Rabbi Brad Hirschfeld, author of You Don't Have to Be Wrong
for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism. "The same thing that
makes a person imagine they are big enough and bold enough to go be a CEO of
a major company or the governor of the state of New York or the president of
the United States is probably the same sense of grandeur that allows them to
imagine they'll never get caught. 
 It's about being bigger than the normal
rules." 

The type of people we tend to elect to public office also are the type to
take risks  big risks, says Frank Farley, professor of educational
psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia. "They believe they control
their fate," he says. "It's the thrill of it." If Spitzer had simply wanted
to have an affair, "he could have done it in a less risky way."

It's also a sense of entitlement, says Ruth Houston, author of Is He
Cheating on You? 829 Telltale Signs. "When you see public figures,
politicians and celebrities cheating, many times they're doing it because of
who they are  and they feel they can cheat with impunity."

But Ann Rosen Spector, a clinical psychologist at Rutgers State University
of New Jersey, doesn't believe pure arrogance would explain risk-taking
behavior: "It seems more likely that he had an overwhelming sexual desire or
he had a real desire to play on the edge."

Regardless of the reasons, extramarital affairs can shatter a spouse's
world, says Peggy Vaughan, author The Monogamy Myth and founder of the
Beyond Affairs Network, a group for those dealing with a spouse's
infidelity. "The spouse is not who you thought he was, the marriage isn't
what you thought it was. The deception is still the same, and that's where
the pain comes from. (Spouses) recover from the fact that their partners had
sex long before they recover from the fact that they were deceived."

Still, many men who have affairs don't do it because they're in an unhappy
marriage, she says. Many see it "as having nothing to do with their wives.
(They) genuinely love their wives and love their families and also enjoy
these outside perks.

"It's only when it comes out and is exposed publicly that they then have to
focus on the connection."

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