I Think Better of Men

This is a particularly interesting article - I agree with her re: although much freedom has come to women, is it really enslavement through sexuality simply disguised as choice? She observes, "I am not so stupid as to say that women don't enjoy power too, but ours is still exclusively sexual and entirely tied to the relentless ticking of the clock....And so long as there are plenty of women willing to do both(standing next to men like Spitzer and being prostitutes who sleep with men like Spitzer), men will have all the power..."

I don't disagree with this, however:

I think one argument which is rarely if ever discussed??? Why is there not an expectation for men to be better men...meaning - even though there are women who offer their bodies for pay, if there was no consumer, there would be no incentive for those women to stay in that market. Have we signed men off as the weaker sex by allowing or accepting or justifying their sexual desires as 'natural' if acted upon without restraint or self-mastery?

I think better of men.

Saga shows this is no country for old bags
Christie Blatchford
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
One of my girlfriends always says that before she dies she would like, just for a day or even an hour, to have a penis and so understand the incredible glory that is male power.
On this side of the gender divide, we all figure it must originate with the private bits, there being no other explanation for that astonishing sense of entitlement.
There are so many variations on the theme, New York Governor Eliot (Ness) Spitzer just one of them.
We all have our stories - the flabby, middle-aged guy who believes that if he can "get" this good-looking woman here, there's no reason he can't also "get" that better, younger one over there; the way the least attractive dude in the world confidently will parade naked before a new lover while she won't make a move without concealing one imperfect part or another with a towel; the very ordinary Joe who should count his lucky stars that his bed was graced by some far more accomplished, attractive dame but who behaves, afterward, as a horrid wretch.
Silda Wall Spitzer's tale - her hubby revealed as an alleged regular customer of a high-priced call girl outfit called the Emperor's Club - is an old familiar one, interesting only because of his high office and his carefully, and abrasively, staked out claim to the moral high ground as governor and before that, as crusading attorney-general.
In one brief period a few summers ago, two male acquaintances of mine separately popped into town and demanded we have dinner, only to separately regale me with stories of how at the age of 50 they were just barely reaching the apex of their attractiveness to women.
Both are fine and talented fellows, but the one I quite like is an overweight, sweaty guy with a reputation for hired girlfriends (at our dinner he announced that his next one, who should be as pretty as the last one, would have to pay her own way), and the one I don't much care for is a skinny nerd with an enormous ego.
Several years younger, no more or less physically repellant than they are, with what I judged to be no more or less baggage, and no more or less successful, at the time I hadn't had a date in years. I wanted desperately to believe they were blowing smoke out their respective lumpen and saggy butts, but knew they were not, alas.
Eager to get out of there, and not wanting by any measure to be in the debt of either one of these two clowns, I paid the tabs - without a murmured protest from either one - and rushed home, there to contemplate why I should not slash my wrists.
Big fat cheap old guy: Sex symbol. Skinny weirdo cheap old guy: Sex symbol. Unfat, not cheap slightly younger old bag: Old bag.
The 47-page official complaint from the assistant U.S. attorneys who prepared the file - God bless America, the whole kit and caboodle is easily accessible on the Web - is replete with evidence of male power and how women variously aid and abet that universal aggrandizement process.
Forget the few pages that detail the arrangements with "Client No. 9," the man identified as Mr. Spitzer.
My favourite bit, perhaps because I know several men who are fascinated by strippers and/or prostitutes but who always insist the women are all also bright intellects simply fallen upon hard times - I get what men like about them, but abhor that they also need to paint them as hard-working entrepreneurs, let alone nascent rocket scientists - is a magnificently illiterate Jan. 24 e-mail from the young Englishwoman the Emperor's Club was trying to recruit and who was quibbling over the proposed fee of £500 an hour.
"I have just spoke to a friend of mine who done her first job for you," she wrote. "Unfortunately I wasn't very happy to find out that its only 500 ph + over 50 per cent commission fees ... I was little bit shock and confuse that she had a sex with him twice in an hour and without [him] taking her out for dinner before.
"So I am very sorry but I don't think this is my kind of thing ... I was told by your assistant in London this is more like a dating agency than an escort ..."
Then, in delightful mimicry of that very old joke, the young woman wrote, clearly aggrieved, "But to provide sex for £500 an hour, I just thing [she meant, poor lamb, "think"] this is not a price I would ever consider of doing it for ..."
But also in the complaint is Mark Brener, the alleged kingpin of the ring, describing one prostitute as looking "like a butcher in my opinion"; there's the client complaining that a prostitute was "more sex than sexy" (methinks she was too efficient, and did not act enough like a real girlfriend); there's another of the owners, worrying that a prostitute may have rushed a client, noting, "we just found out the other day that she has children and she went to pick them up from school immediately afterwards ... the girls who have children tend to have ... a little more baggage going on"; there's the client who wanted "multiple girls for multiple hours."
I am not so stupid as to say that women don't enjoy power too, but ours is still exclusively sexual and entirely tied to the relentless ticking of the clock. It lasts a New York minute, not a lifetime.
Only a very few of us choose to actually make money from our money-makers. More, like the hooker who thought she should get a nice dinner too, settle for being kept, one way or another. Ms. Wall Spitzer, who ditched her own career as a corporate lawyer to raise their three children while Mr. Spitzer pursued his political goals, seems to me to have made a variation on that ancient bargain.
You couldn't pay me enough to have stood beside that man this week, as she did, when he faced the press and confessed, sort of, his sins. You also couldn't have paid me enough to have sex with him (or anyone else) either, as the prostitute Kristen did. And so long as there are plenty of women willing to do both, men will have all the power, and it will continue not to matter in the slightest what old bags think.