I'm having a lot of trouble being not upset by the Spitzer scandal, and the subsequent announcement by Paterson that he had himself cheated on his wife. Not prostitution, not so bad, right? Sure. Frankly, it's not the illegality of Spitzer's at that bothered me so much, but the willing betrayal of his wife and family with girls only a few years older than his three lovely teenage daughters. Why does the virgin-whore dichotomy persist today? Why must women choose which to become? Or do men choose for them?
Jerry Hall's famous quote is only famous because many people view it as good advice. Chef in the kitchen, maid in the living room, whore in the bedroom. What if you don't want to be a chef, what if you don't want to be a maid, what if you don't want to be a WHORE? Is the degradation of women somehow necessary to a man's happiness, and if you won't be party to it, they go elsewhere to get it?
Either way, Paterson's romantic trysts at the Days Inn are not much better. They are a degradation in their own way, a way of reducing the sex he was having with these women to something sleazy. Anyone who has passed by that particular corner on the Upper West Side knows that. It's a place the neighborhood gentrification committee forgot to fix, a landscape out of the movie Metropolitan. Taking his wife there to work on their marriage was not an act of bravery or contrition, but an attempt to transfer his need for a borderline setting for sex to his relationship with his wife.
The big sad question is: why do these women go for it?
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