BOSTON -- To think that I had never focused blame on this particular part of the male anatomy. But there was anthropologist Helen Fisher on the Today show, explaining that Client 9's destiny was in his eyebrows. And his cheekbones. "All you have to do is look at Eliot Spitzer," she said authoritatively. "He's got very high cheekbones and a very heavy brow. And these are signs of extremely high testosterone." Who knew?
Of course, this anthro-babble was not as bad as what came from Laura Schlessinger, the guiltmeistress of talk radio, who located the cause of infidelity entirely outside of the male body and onto the wife.
"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," she said. "The cheating was his decision to repair what is damaged and to feed himself where he is starving." At, say, $1,000 an hour?
While eyebrows were being analyzed, jaws were dropping across the face of the nation. Even in a cynical age, when one politician after another leaves his reputation in a bathroom stall or a D.C. madam's book, the New York governor's fall from "Eliot Ness" to John of the Week was stunning.
But if anatomy is really destiny, this scandal laid bare a gender gap in attention. Across the blogosphere and dinner table, men were asking, "How could he do it?" But women were asking, "How could she do it?"
The female focus was Silda Wall Spitzer, the Harvard-educated lawyer and wife of 20 years. It was on the "stone-faced," "ashen-faced" woman, her "eyes puffy" and "visibly shaken," who stood by her husband's side. Not once, but twice.
The frustrated wish that echoed through my real and virtual neighborhood was that "just once" some politician's wife would say no to the ritual public humiliation, hit the jerk upside the head, and yell, in blogger Amy Ephron's words: "And another thing, I'm keeping the house." The closest anyone had come was the woman who once warned, "I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me." Alas, that was Wendy Vitter, who did not walk away when her husband's name, Sen. David Vitter, was found in the D.C. madam's black book.
