I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, The Promiscuity Edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, May 21st, 2008.

On today's program, we're going to talk about male promiscuity. Is it hardwired?

The death of Robert Rauschenberg

was he somehow too promiscuous as an artist? And Obama and his perhaps dangerous taste for another

man's promiscuity, namely Philip Roth. Joining me is Slate culture editor Julia Turner and our film

critic, Dana Stevens. Hey guys. Hi. Hello, Steven. Let's start with this

quite provocative, I thought, Philip Weiss article in New York magazine, in which he mounts a defense of

Elliot Spitzer's private behavior, if not his public behavior. Let me just read a little bit from the

beginning of the article to give our listeners some sense of the flavor of it.

When the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke in March, I had only sympathy for him,

writes Weiss, another middle-aged married guy tormented by his sexual needs.

I'm 52, and I've always struggled with the desire for sexual variety.

Julia, I won't ask you whether you've always struggled with the desire for sexual

variety.

Thank you, but I will ask you what you made of this argument, which I have to say, I was

waiting for someone to come out and say and was wondering who would have the, let's just

say, nerve to do it.

Well, it's a provocative piece and I'm provoked. I actually think that the piece itself

doesn't do much service to the idea that you were, the argument that you want someone to make.

I think there is an argument to be made that our society places too much of a premium on monogamy,

but this piece, it felt uncharitably edited to me.

...