In America, only sex is sacred

It's hard to live in New York right now. It involves head-shaking. It involves shrugging. It involves heaving yet another sigh at the realization that politicians are unreliable idiots.

Yesterday Eliot Spitzer resigned as governor of New York, after having been elected by 70% of the population on a reformist platform--in other words, he gave people hope. New York has one of the most defective and corrupt state governments in the country, and, after Spitzer's crusader years against corruption while he was attorney general, it wasn't so unreasonable to think his governorship would clean and heal some of the festering sores of backroom deals and corporate strangeholds of our state legislature.

Alas, it was not to be. Instead, we watched his political ambitions going down in flames (with his wife idiotically standing by his side--why don't these women just tell their philandering husbands to shove it?) after a federal wiretap revealed him as a regular customer of a high-priced prostitution ring (incidentally, why a ring? it's set up as a legitimate company, after all).

I'm not outraged about his having hired a prostitute. Outrage should be for the exclusive use of his wife (if she's got any ovaries). I'm pissed off that someone with the potential to do so much good could have been so monumentally stupid, letting his hopeful constituency down because sex felt so much better if you paid over $4000 for it.

Matt Frei, the head correspondent for BBC America, has posted the best comments I've yet seen about this issue, which I won't repeat here. As expected, though, he indicated that the news of a politician hiring a prostitute in Europe would hardly get citizens to raise an eyebrow at their newspapers.

Here, though, at least in New York, it's a different story. There's plenty of shock and disgust, some feigned but much real. And it occurs to me that it's really all about what a society considers sacred. Or individuals.

Me, for example. I couldn't care less about a politician's sex life. But the environment? Tell me that a political figure has OK'd more coal mining or has worked to lower pollution standards for corporations, and I'll see red. I don't care if they've adopted fifteen orphans and paid off the debt of a small African country. The environment is my sacred.

In Europe it would be the health system or--heaven forbid!--trying to chip away at the 4-to-6-week yearly vacations. Those are sacred. I've lived there, I've seen it. In Austria you might find a politician tarred and feathered for messing with their ultra-pure water or installing a nuclear power plant. In France it might be wanting to get rid of nuclear power plants that gets a member of parliament shouted down.

In America it's sex. We have a twisted relationship with sex. We suppress it, ignore it, criminalize it, and do it in seedy hotels, preferably with strangers. Why? We puff ourselves up with indignation at someone taking photos of their own kids--practically babies--running around naked, but slap scantily clad barely pubescent girls on the covers of magazines. Europeans, by the way, are often shocked at the way Americans look at their children as possibly sexual creatures. They run around naked in Europe because they're kids.

In any case, sex always gets Americans up in arms. Politicians can take bribes, trash people's air and drinking water, hand public money to their cronies, and legalize torture. But God forbid they admit to shagging anyone except their legally wedded spouse, and then only in the bedroom, in the approved missionary style, as a release of tension (if they're male) or to procreate (if they're female). We shiver at the thought that anyone in public life might have sex for fun. What a deeply shocking thought. Stop the clocks, pull down the shades. Our children might find out that sex can be enjoyable. Shh.