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Philip Weiss' article,
"The Affairs of Men", while "fair and balanced" as these things go, isn't terribly original in recycling stories of Europe's more "evolved" attitude towards adultery, nor in pimping Kinsey Institute propaganda as if it was solid research.
But the article's primary shortcoming was in being blind to the obvious: that the Ashley Dupree's must come from somewhere if they are to be made available to the Eliot Spitzer's, and that "somewhere" is at the expense of other men. We can't all keep a mistress; this realization is, to me, the most forceful non-moral argument against the practice, and NY Mag is blind to it.
3 comments:
That's an argument against polygamy, but not what Weiss is talking about necessarily. In Weiss's world, the Duprees are not necessarily monogamous with the Spitzers.
I oppose what Weiss is talking about on both moral and social grounds, though not for Woman Shortage reasons.
Yes, I believe Ashlee's services were available to any willing and able to pay the market rate. It seems that prostitution would ameliorate any supposed "Woman Shortage" rather than exacerbate it.
Spungen & Trumwill: fair enough. But don't overestimate the, um, "carrying capacity" of the young Miss Dupree. I would be surprised to learn that her client base exceeded a half-dozen.
So one and one-fifth is still more than one. But okay, the market impact of this transaction, where everyone knows the terms going in (STS), is to be preferred to Spitzer stringing along some naive thing with tales of how his-wife-doesn't-understand-him.
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