Advice From Ashley: Eliot Spitzer's Call Girl Gets the Last Word

The name, Ashley Duprè, might not ring a bell, but it will soon -- if the new "sex, love, and relationship" columnist at The New York Post manages to earn a loyal following. Miss Duprè, you may or may not recall, played a role in bringing Eliot Spitzer to his knees. (Is that an idiom one can even use in this case? Perhaps not, but it's a mixed metaphor anyway, as the indelible image of that escort service scandal was the little tidbit -- drummed into our consciousness by Spitzer's relentless nemesis Roger Stone -- about the former governor of New York doing whatever it was he was paying for while wearing nothing but his socks.)

In her debut column, Miss Duprè mentions neither the etiquette of fully disrobing before engaging in the indoors sports, nor her views on stocking fetishes. She's not unduly squeamish about discussing sexual accoutrements, however, as you can read here (and watch by clicking play below).


"Ask Ashley" made its debut in The Post on Sunday, introduced by an editor's note penned in the paper's easily recognizable style of prose:

Sure, she's made some mistakes. But now, the former escort who brought down Gov. Eliot Spitzer is sharing what she's learned in her new sex, love and relationship column -- exclusively in the New York Post. Is your husband cheating? Is your daughter on a dangerous path? Our readers asked -- and Ashley fired back with her no-nonsense advice.

Miss Duprè and her editors clearly had fun with both the question selections -- and the answers. "What are the telltale signs a man isn't happy in his marriage?" asks a reader identified as "J. Marshall, 37, East Village." The answer is equal parts Xaviera Hollander and Ann Landers. "Guys are primal," she responds. "They're proud and need to be treated like they're proud and special. Girlfriends do that for the most part."

But as she gets going, Miss Duprè remembers the wives and, more significantly, the children of these potentially wayward husbands. This is where she goes all mainstream media on the readers: "The children are a product of your love for each other," she writes. "Your relationship should always be priority. Always. Remember, happy parents usually means happy children."

Perhaps it's all in good fun. Or just maybe it's one of those milestones along the way that we'll point to when our kids' kids ask us innocently, "Grandpa, what was a newspaper?" In defense of the New York Post, Miss Duprè is hardly the first female to make the transition from Scarlet Letter to woman of letters, offering advice to the forlorn based on her own hard-earned life's experiences. Nor is she the first to resist the very stereotype of the "fallen woman." (Hollander's popular Penthouse magazine column appeared monthly under the signature line "Call Me Madam," and her bestselling memoir was titled "The Happy Hooker.")

Great Britain's version of Carrie Bradshaw (the narrator of "Sex and the City") is a high-end prostitute who wrote and blogged under the pen name Belle du Jour, and whose life story was serialized in a television show called "Secret Diary of a Call Girl." Last month, she was outed, as so often seems to happen, by a pea-brained ex-boyfriend, although the joke was on him. Belle du Jour turns out to be Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a research scientist in childhood health at Bristol University. Seems she was turning tricks to pay for her PhD.

The lessons of all this for men-women relations are unclear. At the minimum, one would hope they would cause the gate keepers of higher education in Great Britain to rethink their tuition policies. As for the lessons for political journalism here in the United States, well, we probably lost the opportunity to complain when G. Gordon Liddy emerged from his federal prison cell after serving 4 ½ years for engineering the Watergate break-in – and was given a big book contract, a billet on the lecture circuit, and . . . his own radio show.

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