Spitzer Unbound

I've seen a lot of explanations for Spitzer's practice of hiring prostitutes. One explanation I haven't seen anyone propose is that he didn't see anything wrong with it.

Note that I'm not saying that he didn't see anything wrong with hurting his wife, or damaging his career. And he probably accepted conventional public morality, meaning that if everyone said something is wrong, he went along. But saying that he went along with a prohibition doesn't mean that he felt any guilt or revulsion about violating it. It just means that he paid lip service without questioning whether his commitment to the prohibition had any depth.

Periodically, someone will do a survey about sexual morals in the US, and roughly one fifth of the respondants will state that they see nothing wrong with exchanging sex for money. (That figure is from memory.) I read a statement recently from a sociologist who studies sexual behavior who said that only one fifth to one sixth of men in the US have ever bought sex from a prostitute. Assuming that the men who think it's OK to pay for sex are the ones who are paying for it, it appears that men who don't think it's OK to pay for sex don't do it. I don't have any data to confirm that, but it seems reasonable that if one fifth of men think it's OK to pay for sex, and one fifth of men have paid for sex, then the two groups consist mostly of the same men. And if four fifths of men don't think it's OK to pay for sex, and four fifths of men haven't paid for it, then it also seems reasonable to suppose that the two groups are also, roughly, the same.

The web site Letters From Johns contains anonymous descriptions of various mens' experiences with prostitutes. This is hardly a scientific survey, but it does describe how a small group of men responded to the experience of paying for sex. Generally, the men who tried it once and never did it again report feelings of shame, guilt, or revulsion. The men who continued doing it report no negative feelings. These types of feelings convey our values; in other words, they're an expression of our morality. Someone who has no feelings of shame or guilt over paying for sex doesn't see it as immoral. They may pay lip service to the morality of the eighty percent who oppose paying for sex, but it's not part of their own morality and it doesn't drive their behavior.

Spitzer was a repeat customer for the escort agency he dealt with, and newspapers report that he hired prostitutes from other sources. So he apparently had no feelings of revulsion about paying for sex. He may be strongly committed to his own moral principles, but he based his career on being the representative of a public morality with a different set of principles. Even now that he's been forced to resign, he's talking about himself as if the public morality were his own; he talks about failing to meet his own standards. He had the misfortune to be unbound from a publicly accepted moral principle, but to be unable to acknowledge it. He had no feelings of moral guilt to prevent him from revealing his unbound state.