Zipless cluck

I'm a little late to this party but ...

The blogosphere continues to buzz over last week's Today Show on which ''Dr. Laura'' Schlessinger basically blamed Silda Wall Spitzer for her husband Eliot's turning to premium-priced prostitutes as a release.

Quote one:

When the wife does not focus in on the needs and the feelings — sexually, personally — to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like her hero, he’s very susceptible to the charm of some other woman. […]

Who knows what went on between the Spitzers? Certainly not the moralizing ''Dr. Laura.''

Quote two:

The cheating was his decision to repair what’s damaged and to feed himself where he’s starving. But yes, I hold women accountable for tossing out perfectly good men by not treating them with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need.

Oy vey. Don't go to a marriage counsellor — assuming that was what was needed — to ''repair'' the damage. Don't even have a ''girlfriend'' who is your intellectual peer. Hire a high-priced hooker less than half your age and risk your career, reputation and family because, boo-hoo, your wife didn't fall down on her knees every time you walked in the door.

Give. Me. A. Break. Lady.

And what if the high heels were on the other feet? What if the husbands are the partners not treating the wives ''with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need?" Would you be then excusing a wife's hitting on Chippendale dancers?

Authour Erica Jong was on CNN's Reliable Sources yesterday. I loved how she talked about this, between host Howard Kurtz's interruptions.

Well, I'm particularly horrified by Laura Schlessinger, who is blaming the woman for what's going on. Clearly, Eliot Spitzer had some sort of sex addiction problem. He didn't have a super ego that was developed as it should have been.

He had been doing this for eight years, and he thought he would continue to get away with it. He had worked out a system of going down to Washington, to the Mayflower Hotel, of all places, a place crawling with politicians and journalists, and he was seeing prostitutes at the Mayflower Hotel. He must have been insane to do that, or there was a lacuna where his (conscious) should be and he thought the rules that apply to other people didn't apply to him.

Maybe the guy is bipolar. I'm not a shrink. I'm a lowly novelist and poet. But I will say that all these shrinks who are going on TV and talking about Eliot Spitzer should be disbarred, or whatever they do to shrinks.

They should have their licenses taken away. An ethical shrink does not go on TV and psychoanalyze people she or he has not met. So I'm horrified by this.

Just for the record, ''Dr. Laura'' is not a ''shrink.'' She is a physiologist. Why she is presented as anything but beats me.

What really kills me is that this moralizing, homophobic anti-feminist gets so much airtime when  much more qualified female pundits — who don't hate women — never make it into the show bookers' magic call lists.

Misogyny lives, especially in the conservative media.

Comments

[Hayley]

This whole Spitzer thing is fishy to me - why is there so much interest on this case, at this time? (Really, what he did was far less heinous than many things that many high-ranking Republicans have gotten away with.) It's awfully suspicious, given that he was a promising Democrat with a lot of enemies from his anti-corporate-greed-and-corruption work.

This is also awfully suspicious:

"This week, [the Federal Bank], for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks' mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers' bordello: Eliot Spitzer."

http://www.gregpalast.com/elliot-spitzer-gets-nailed/

I'm not defending Spitzer's actions at all, but this whole affair is extremely convenient for some vested interests.

[Antonia]

Good point Hayley.

As I understand it, Spitzer was about to burn the banks for burning so many Americans.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783_pf.html
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/15/211443/614/345/477655
and, last but not least:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/13/america/spitzer.php

''Spitzer's suspicious financial transactions at North Fork might never have been discovered if it had not been for a Suspicious Activity Report filed by HSBC about the shell companies linked to Emperor's Club VIP in October, according to several people with knowledge of the inquiry, who spoke about the investigation on condition of anonymity.

''As it turned out, both the North Fork Bank and HSBC had faced inquiries into their lending practices led by Spitzer when he was New York attorney general. In the case of North Fork Bank, Spitzer announced a settlement in 2003 requiring the bank to refund more than $20,000 to dozens of homeowners and cease what he said was its practice of charging homeowners illegal fees.

''Experts who advise banks and individuals on anti-money-laundering regulations said the two banks were just following the law when they reported the suspicious financial transactions to federal authorities.''

But the US media focus on one thing: Poor silly Silda for standing by her man, failing her man, screwing up her marriage, etc. etc.

[Chris Moorehead]

So can we presume that "Dr" Laura's then-husband was at fault for her own affair and the subsequent naughty photos of her that have clogged the internet ever since?

While the odious Laura does hold a PhD and is thus entitled to use the honourific "Doctor", the way in which she uses it implies that she is either a physician or a PhD psychologist/sociologist. By these standards, my PhD chemist father-in-law is also entitled to be seen as an authority on telling other people how to run their lives.

If Spitzer would pay thousands of dollars an hour for a vacuous, semi-literate New Jersey bridge-and-tunnel chick when he had the beautiful, glamourous Silda waiting at home, then he has problems far beyond a mere "sex addiction". A complete psychiatric assessment is probably in order. Even Nelson Rockefeller would have shown better judgment...