Today in a Salon video post, Farhad Manjoo calls the MySpace dimension of the Eliot Spitzer scandal “interesting and kind of fascinating and cool.”
Really? I’m not so sure MySpace makes this scandal any different than the old ones. At the end of the day, the media is doing exactly what they always do: backhandedly blaming the object of a politician’s lust for bringing about his downfall with her sluttiness.
At the risk of alienating my friends in the Facebook Generation, here’s the thing: I could give a crap about the “true identity” (if that’s what a MySpace page is) of the young woman whom Eliot Spitzer paid for sex, let alone the fact that she once sang “Respect” in the shower at her boyfriend’s house.
And now, as Feministing points out, we’re also supposed to believe that she’s into it. That Dupre is under the impression that this turn of events is going to make her into the superstar she’s always wanted to be.
Simmer down, Kiera, commenters will undoubtedly say. Who wouldn’t want to know about the sordid details of an admittedly beautiful woman involved in a high-class prostitution ring? Well, I think it’s more complicated—and insidious—than that.
When I read the New York Times piece about Dupre, my first thought was, she sounds totally annoying. I found myself blaming her for her irritating narcissism (“I am all about my music and my music is all about me. It flows from what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen and how I feel”), and her delusions of grandeur. This girl sounds insufferable, I thought.
And all of a sudden I had forgotten a key point: Dupre didn’t do anything wrong. Spitzer did.
