Here’s my take on the Eliot Spitzer “scandal,” for the Village Voice as seen through the eyes of someone who has open relationships on my mind clearly: In (Partial) Defense of Eliot Spitzer.

Just in case you’re not totally sick of all the coverage (a lot of which is redundant) of the Spitzer “scandal,” here’s a fabulous piece called “Against Sexual Scandal” by Lauren Berlant. She calls the mainstream media to task for its neverending sex-negativity. A little snip: “I felt sorry for sex during the Larry Craig brouhaha last summer. What if he liked being married and procreating and giving anonymous head? What if that was his sexual preference? What if he really was not gay, as he claims, but had sexual desires that seemed incoherent? Some of the response to Craig was like the response to moralists like Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard and now Spitzer–moralists deserve to suffer the same force of negative judgment they wielded on others. Shame on us? Shame on you, ha ha! But lots of the response was sheer homophobia. And all of it was sheer erotophobia.” I love her line about having sexual desires that seemed incoherent. Because in reality, a lot of us are way beyond gay/straight, kinky/vanilla, etc. and Berlant calls for us to embrace that rather than continue the cycle of shame.

With word of Eliot Spitzer’s link to a prostitution agency and his subsequent resignation, monogamous marriage is back under the media microscope. Here is an interesting article by David Barash in the Concord Monitor. He’s the co-author of The Myth of Monogamy, which I cite in Opening Up.