The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Victims and Villains

Liza and Maureen: I guess I think that asking whether Ashley is a "victim" is the wrong question. I agree, whatever her childhood circumstances, she's a moral agent and she made a bunch of choices that landed her in that hotel room with Eliot Spitzer. Those choices weren't completely unconstrained, but they were still choices, and we can have empathy for the unique and perhaps crappy circumstances that shaped her choices without completely letting her off the hook (no pun intended) for the decisions she made.

To me, the relevant question isn't whether she's a victim in some abstract sense—we're all victims of our circumstances, blah blah blah, so who cares—but this: in that locked hotel room, who held more power, 22-year-old, 105-pound Ashley with her worries about paying the rent (and presumably with at least some anecdotal awareness of the statistics Emily cites about physical assaults experienced by high-end prostitutes)? Or Spitzer, older, stronger, smarter, and able to throw thousands of dollars around like it's loose change? It's the enormous power imbalance that bothers me—and the sense that he liked that power imbalance, and did his best to exploit it—to get prostitutes to do things women who had more power might have refused to do. (Yeah, I'm still just hung up on that "unsafe" stuff.)

Searching for an analogy here ...  Well, OK: on a more mundane level, say I employed a nanny who was an undocumented worker. (I don't, but say I did). "Favors" I might ask of an American college kid who babysits for me ("Listen, would you mind staying really really late tomorrow night? And the night after? And the next night, too?) are favors I would hesitate to ask of a nanny working without legal documents. The college student doesn't lose much if she says, "Gee, sorry, I can't," whereas the undocumented nanny is a whole lot more dependent on me—and under far more pressure to say yes. The power balance would make it hard for her to say no to my requests, however unreasonable.