Whitee - Purveyor of Fine Beats...Provider of Lyrical Treats
Music, culture & politics. We'll also update Whitee's recording progress.Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Wow. I was going to post my two cents about the Elliot Spitzer stupidity. I had the gist swirling 'round my head. But then this article from Lauren Berlant was in The Nation and it said everything in my head better than it was in my head. So there.
Read the whole thing.
Less than forty-eight hours after revelations that he had hired a prostitute emerged, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer announced his resignation. Whatever happens to him now--the ultimate force of the story is not, once again, why big men do stupid sexual things. It's not about how righteous moralists always create noise to distract us from paying attention to a dark secret they have.
It's not really even a good opportunity for dancing in the streets because one more powerful person has come tumbling down. After all, some powerful people are better than others, and when powerful people fall from the mighty, naughty force of their appetites, nothing about power is changed at all--quite the contrary. The law, the family, marriage--exit polls suggest that all of these will be the winner here, after being horribly maligned by a man who forgot his oaths to honor them.
Instead, what stories like this really do is to damage the reputation of sex.
Read the whole thing.
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Really? I don't know, somehow I didn't see the whole Spitzer "stupidity" as a sex scandal at all. I saw it much more as a breaking-the-law "scandal," with maybe a side of
using-one's-power-and-vast-wealth-to-buy-human-beings-and-treat-them-like-shit. I love sex as much as (okay, far more than) the next person, but I think it's hardly sex-negative to point out the problems with Spitzer's actions. Sex isn't going to become a more carefree and pleasant topic simply because we stop talking about how it can be wielded against people. Maybe if we actually change the power relations that allow for these kinds of exploitation (for starters, by ditching guys like him), then sex will stop earning itself a bad name.
So, yes, I guess I was sad that someone
who had seemingly been wanting to do the right thing in a lot of policy areas--including, to some degree, prostitution--was eventually brought down by his hypocrisy and "naughty appetites," in sort of a reverse larry-craig. But do I think he should get a pass because he was sorta a liberal in public? Fuck no.
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using-one's-power-and-vast-wealth-to-buy-human-beings-and-treat-them-like-shit. I love sex as much as (okay, far more than) the next person, but I think it's hardly sex-negative to point out the problems with Spitzer's actions. Sex isn't going to become a more carefree and pleasant topic simply because we stop talking about how it can be wielded against people. Maybe if we actually change the power relations that allow for these kinds of exploitation (for starters, by ditching guys like him), then sex will stop earning itself a bad name.
So, yes, I guess I was sad that someone
who had seemingly been wanting to do the right thing in a lot of policy areas--including, to some degree, prostitution--was eventually brought down by his hypocrisy and "naughty appetites," in sort of a reverse larry-craig. But do I think he should get a pass because he was sorta a liberal in public? Fuck no.
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