I was kind of relieved to see see this article this morning. It's the first piece, however fluffy, about the fallout from the Eliot Spitzer-prostitution scandal (which had us all, as they say in the article, "chattering" last week) that gets at the inward-turning tendency I've found in conversations about it. The shock and righteousness quickly gave way to abstract fear or doubt. The article is a bit dramatic and in-New-Yorky, but it vindicates, somehow, the conversations I've been having, which boil down to a series of questions:

1) What is worse, having your partner fall in love with someone else (standard affair) or pay for sex (Spitzer)?

I was feeling a bit strange about how much it bothered me, how much I thought about the whole thing -- being a little lonely and in a foreign country can make you mull things you might not ordinarily mull, my thinking has gone. But where I usually think you can't put yourself into a news story and figure out how you would feel, what you would do -- mostly because, hey, I've never been a steriod-using pitcher or a kidnapped child or a troubled bank exec. Neither have I been married, but I am in love, have friends whose marriages I can identify with, am a daughter of a long marriage, and so on. And so, it seems, has everyone - the conversations have inevitably turned to putting oneself into the situation.

But the article captures a bit better the quandary of the above question -- as my friend put it, learning that your partner had pulled a Spitzer, because of all of the moral and ethical mess, would be a "do I really know you at all?" sort of matter, rather than a "you want someone else more than me" sort of matter. While I'm sure high-powered New York wives are checking their husbands' day planners and looking over tax returns extra-carefully this year, the fact that the scandal can be drawn in terms of women and men, marriage and betrayal, can put it at practically anyone's breakfast table. And most of the conversations I've been having have had nothing to do with Schadenfreude, but about who we are and why we do what we do.

Which, digging deeper, gets at:

2) how does it work out that, implicitly or otherwise, Silda Wall Spitzer has been seen as inadequate (for which a friend said Dr. Laura should "have her woman card revoked" maybe even her "person card", I can't remember), or, on the other hand, as a patsy, the bad sort of modern woman?

3) why is it always, inexorably, stupid, high-risk sex that brings down public figures like this? Counting, at least, that stupid = you could have chosen not to, but you did it anyway, cognizant of the repercussions.

Or, basically, 4+) is this a sex thing, a power thing, an "I can get away with it" thing? Leaving aside the money and the network available to Spitzer, for a sec...does this reflect a human tendency? Does everyone deserve to have all of their needs fulfilled? And is, therefore, monogamy an unreasonable expectation?

I have little patience for questions about what the Spitzers should do next. Most of my friends and I have drawn our own personal analogies pretty starkly, but in terms of a final decision, when pressed, there's a loss for words. Our modern and somewhat relativistic willingness to put ourselves in someone else's shoes, to understand why a particular choice was made, somehow just evaporates here. You can't really say. But the relativism also evaporates in a different sense, at least for some of us: you make a promise, you keep a promise, and there are consequences for both keeping and not keeping. What the Guv did is definitively not okay, it is un-rationalize-able.

But all of this focusing on the marriage leaves aside the damage of prostitution - which, whether it should be legal or not (it is in Germany, and there does seem to be a bit of a more healthy cultural relationship with sex, I have to say), is arguably linked to some pretty hefty psychic and emotional stuff. This kid, all over the papers, she's the same age as my students. And far from demonizing her or pitying her, at arm's length or better, better to have a good, hard think about where we are, culturally, with gender and sex on the table. The Spitzers bring up the moral, ethical, personal, the what-if-this-happened-to-me. "Kristen", and the other women involved peripheral to their marriage, I would argue, pose a bigger quandary in the legal, social, and cultural arena.

For all that I'm ready to not have to think about these things for a while, and go home happy to my Kolz this Saturday (!!!), I'm coming around to thinking that the public conversation is a healthier one, although more fraught, because there is no easy happy ending for any of the three (or more) people involved here. Someday it may be alright, but for now, it's too complicated, and the messed-up runs too deep.

And so we mull. But I think that covers it, finally, for me.