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player ready...It has been almost two weeks, and I’m still grappling with my responsibility in the Eliot Spitzer affair. Not that I had any personal role in the New York governor’s outsourcing of sex and utter public humiliation of his wife. It’s just that whenever a male makes such a gaudy show of bad behavior this way, I feel guilty.
It’s especially uncomfortable when I’m watching the news with my wife and news like this breaks. Not only do I feel shared male guilt, but I also get nervously defensive: “Man, what a jerk. Sheesh. Boy, what a creep! How could he do that?”
It’s guilt by association. There are only two genders, and I happen to be the same one as the guy who just did this terrible thing. And we just keep making the news. I used to think this guilt-share was a personality disorder until I asked a few other guys, and they said they felt the same infection of shame.
So then I asked a few women if they feel guilt when a woman does something awful, like drowning or poisoning her kids. The answer was no, but one of them did add this: “I just wonder what man drove her to do it.”
Now, I’m not going to debate which gender is more evil. We’ve got the Adam and Eve story to fall back on, after all, and I think Eve owned the lion’s share of that guilt, unless you want to argue that the serpent was male.
I will concede, though, that men do have a tendency to be naughty. After all, when young women are naughty, it’s remarkable enough that it becomes a multi-zillion-dollar industry, such as with “Girls Gone Wild.” When young men are naughty, we call it high school.
I can tell you exactly how Spitzer went wrong, however. I noticed it when I saw a photo of him and his wife after his you’re-not-going-to-believe-how-silly-I’ve-been news conference. They were leaving their apartment in New York. She was wearing that same tortured expression, and Spitzer … was … smiling.
Maybe it wasn’t a genuine smile, but the edges of his mouth were pulled upward, and it didn’t say “grimace” to me. If I’d been in his security detail, I would have decked him and said, “Man, get that thing off your face fast before she sees it! You’ll be a dead man.”
Right there it struck me. He had lost the thing that keeps most males honest: a fear of women or, more specifically, a fear of his female life partner. I have such a finely tuned sense of this that when I saw his wife’s face, I wanted to duck.
When I suggested this scenario to my wife, she corrected me and said it’s not fear, it’s respect.
I flinched and quickly agreed with her, because, once again, I was wrong and she was exactly right.
And this is how you live happily ever after.
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