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Pajamas Media has a fascinating post (over 40 comments already) written by a madam who solves the Spitzer Equation:
Part I: The Customer
One high-powered New York attorney explained it to me like this: "Of course I love my wife. Escorts have nothing to do with that. She comes to my hotel room and I don't have to know her name, because they all use fake names like Amber and Kimberly. I don't have to worry about how she feels or what she wants. It's a simple exchange: I give her a thousand bucks, we have a good time for a couple of hours, she goes away and we never have to see each other again."
See, he "doesn't have to worry about what his lover needs or wants" yet he feels it's appropriate to say "we have a good time for a couple of hours." Not "I have a good time," but "we." He's able to convince himself she's having fun.
Part II: The Sales Girl
Then they got addicted to the money and the lifestyle. And then one day, usually between the ages of 25 and 28, once they'd developed that knowing, experienced look that clients instinctively disliked, they found that themselves in a classic bind: they were addicted to high living but could no longer pay for it; they had no marketable skills; and years of late nights and lazy days had left them with no self-discipline. What to do? The really smart ones pulled themselves together and, with the help of a sympathetic client, started some kind of a business. Others married rich, cynical, older men in a sort of paid-wife arrangement. Those were the most common stories. I did not inquire into the fate of the girls who sort of faded away. I did not want to hear about their loneliness and poverty.
She doesn't have any fun in the room, but she thinks its worthwhile anyway because of the money. Just like people think smoking is worthwhile, right up until they're diagnosed. Then suddenly a light comes on.
So there you have it, mutual delusion ending in destruction for both sides. Cue Lyin' Eyes. The equation has been neatly solved by an expert. Fade to black.
UPDATE: Nicholas Kristof reminds us why prostitution is illegal.
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Comments
Artfldgr says:
actually she did have fun... thats why it was no big deal.. and why she thought that it would always be fun... when you do fun for work, as the woman said, eventually you get this look.
so the truth is that the ride lasts for as long as one kind of fun can be fun.
how many times on a roller coaster till you despise roller coasters?
live in ny and not in a nice area and you know the 'game' as its been called for a few hundred years at least.
the girl that spitzer was with, i feel sorry for in so many ways, but also, she may just be sociopathic, and this is her way to use people. though i doubt it because the men are sensitive to them not having fun.
ask the men here... her fun is important to most decent men. maybe not in a, i am going to research her and rock her world way, but that they dont have as much fun if your not.
this would explain why he may go to such. because his wife has the look of the person who stopped having fun, and is imagining that there is greater fun of that type someplace else (or not).
he goes out to get a feedback loop going.
if you read the article in the daily news "tricks of the affluent trade", you get a very different look, and i was very surprised. they had the usual made up feminist drivel the next day that sounded like a sex in the city, vogue confessional article where a bevy of anecdotal examples with names like kyle were easy to find and ridiculous in their characatures.
however, this article the quote they put in the window from a professional call girl was
"i was expecting all kinds of bondage scenearios and costumes... but for most men the fantasy was to have a really really nice date... which i found amazing and a little sad" - jaeanette angell
which makes sense. i wrote about this somewhere else but i cant beleive that everyone has swallowed the propaganda whole.
these ladies go from 1200 to 31,000 a night.. (as the article said). the latter probably being somewhat famous.
there is a rich history that tells you whats going on, but the best we can come up with is the propaganda that its about sex. whats teh difference between 300 dollar sex and 4300 sex?
if we believe that its about sex, then what do women do to compete? welcome to the race to the bottom.
but history says its aobut something else.
geishas did not have sex, but its interesting how in the west they do. they knew languages, song, jokes, they were great company.
sheharazade stayed alive by being a great date everynight (bumping the harem girl out of her place).
old wealth still send their daughters to a finishing school in geneva... who teach cooking, and other skills as well as language, deportment, maintaining staff, and more.
delve into this and you will find that they want great company... the big time fantasy for men would be their version of the white picket fence. (they would keep the girls if they could, which is why so many can be as a later sad option, but its not the same because its not real. to hear such a couple argue, which i have, wow)
the madonna whore doesnt fit here either... especially when the whore is refined company that can hold her own in discussion and topics and not be competitive at it.
do you really think that 4300 would be paid for 3 hours of strawberries and cream, running around a hotel room like a juvinile idiot? LIME IN ALL THE MOVIES...
misha says:
I would suggest that we can judge a society by how well it meets the needs of its people. By this I mean their physical needs, but also their spiritual, social, medical and other needs. Man is not a compartmentalized animal, with each department of his life tied off in its own tidy corner, but rather he is a unified being, a whole.
By this standard I think American society and culture falls far short of any genuine humanistic ideal. Let's remember that we are talking about a country where the school children routinely go on violent rampages to kill their classmates and teachers. When confronted with such obvious absurdities, the right wing will go back to its standard lines talking about "evil" and "the devil" and "free will" and so forth. But they will carefully avoid drawing the obvious conclusion, which is that life in America for millions of its people is a violent and desperate experience which pushes people to the edge and over the edge every day.
As I said, a society and a culture are judged by how well they meet genuine human needs, physical, psychological, emotional and even sexual. A healthy society is a society populated by healthy people, in all of those regards.
So what I suggested is that one of the main roots of American evil is to be found in its puritanical protestant tradition. We can't forget that the very first Americans (the shiny-belt-bucked Pilgrims) were Puritans of the worst sort, and kicked out of Europe precisely for that reason. Now lots of other people have come to America since then, besides just the Pilgrims, but somehow America has never gotten beyond the initial puritanism of its early founders, in a way that is noticeable to Europe and the rest of the world.
A society does not judge its people, but rather the people judge the society, and the basis of judgment is how well that society responds to the genuinely human needs of its inhabitants.
I understand that the concept of one man one wife is deeply rooted in Christian moral values, but those moral values are really ideals more than they are reality. After all the bible also strictly prohibits taking interest on loans, but that's a contradiction that American society seems to have come to grips with.
Societies are judged by how well they meet human needs, but the first prerequisite is to understand human nature and to tell the truth about it. A society that constructs an "ideal citizen" which is for all practical purposes unattainable by the real men of flesh and blood who populate this earth isn't even moving in the right direction towards constructing a truly humanistic culture.
So how many of these "sex scandals" have we seen in recent years then? I seem to remember the famous one involving the American president William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton, of course. But there were also scandals involving prominent republicans as well. What about Jimmy Swaggert? Or Tom Foly (who pursued young boy Congressional pages for sex). What about that preacher man, Merle Haggard, or whatever his name was. He was the leader of the largest church in the USA, and he was brought down when it was discovered that he had a thang for young men and methamphetamines.
Of course the most recent scandal was the one involving the "toe tapping" right-wing gay-bashing conservative Senator Larry Craig. And now we have this scandal involving NY Governor Eliot Spitzer. By all accounts he was a man with an accomplished and distinguished career, one which which is now ruined thanks to the scandal.
What I suggested is that the greater tolerance of human failure in the Orthodox tradition (both Catholic Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox) in some ways makes Orthodox society and culture more tolerant and ultimately more humanistic than its ultra-Puritanical protestant counterpart. I can hardly believe that I am the first one who observed or suggested this, as it is so blindingly obvious.
I am just "justifying" a man cheating on his wife, or any other human shortcoming. What I am suggesting is that the full Christian tradition understands the existential reality of human frailty and sin, and the need for punishment, but it also makes an allowance for human redemption too. There must always be a pathway for the sinner to find reconciliation, redemption and peace of mind again, after he has broken the covenant with his fellow man though his sin.
The idea that a man who commits a sin is simply utterly destroyed and tossed to the outer darkness of society, beyond any possibility of redemption, as if he is Satan himself, is detestable and inhumane. That would imply that there is such as thing as a sinless man, but we all know that is not the case. A society that expects and demands its leading citizens to be sinless will never get such citizens, but rather it will only get a society of hypocrites, who all pretend to be sinless (until their particular devil is unmasked, if it ever is). It's a society of sinners, as all societies must be, but sinners who are all too willing to pick up and cast the first stone at others. This is an anti-humanistic, lifeless and detestable culture.
America bills itself as the richest and strongest country in the world, the "city on a hill" that stands as a shiny example for the rest of the world. But scratch just beneath the surface of American life and its seedy underbelly becomes visible. This is a society that proposes its own model as having "universal validity" for everyone everywhere, even to the extent that many Americans do not cringe at the suggestion that they should impose their ways on others by violent force.
But in truth America is no Shangri-La of humanistic values, but rather it is a deeply disturbed society and one that is desperately lacking in basic humanistic values.
Links:
http://www.endthiswar.org/amputee2.jpg
http://www.thewe.cc/weplanet/news/armed_force/some_us_soldiers_speak.html
http://www.williambowles.info/gispecial/2006/0506/180506/image003-01.jpg
http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/jpg/15-2.jpg
http://blogs.trb.com/news/politics/blog/Obama%20gives%20Iraq%20speech.jpg
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