Eliot Spitzer had sex which he paid for

I am not surprised by the press's treatment of Eliot Spitzer. US and to a less extent Australian popular culture is an uneasy mix of puritanism and excessive sexualisation of the ordinary. Bill Clinton was a good US President but came close to being toppled because of he took advantage of a sexual opportunity that most men would accept with glee.

Natalie Angier in the NYT however gets it right:

'You can accuse the disgraced ex-governor Eliot Spitzer of many things in his decision to flout the law by soliciting the services of a pricey prostitute: hypocrisy, egomania, sophomoric impulsiveness and self-indulgence, delusional ineptitude and boneheadedness. But one trait decidedly not on display in Mr. Spitzer’s splashy act of whole-life catabolism was originality'.

In most animal species faithfulness is a fantasy. Apart from a flatworm, where male and females species are immutably fused together from adolescence, virtually no animal species displays 100% faithfulness. Moreover, prostitution is widespread throughout the animal kingdom with those seeking a mate paying more for more attractive selections that are made when the competition is keen.

Like humans, however, while other animals commit adultery widely they never seem to approve of it:

'Commonplace though adultery may be, and as avidly as animals engage in it when given the opportunity, nobody seems to approve of it in others, and humans are hardly the only species that will rise up in outrage against wantonness real or perceived. Most female baboons have lost half an ear here, a swatch of pelt there, to the jealous fury of their much larger and toothier mates'.