Following the news of Anthony Weiner's explicit text message exchange with 23-year-old Sydney Leathers, the conversation dominating mainstream media has centered around the former lawmaker's political future.
On Thursday night's All In, Chris Hayes addressed another side of political sex scandals: "While we all talk about whether Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer can redeem themselves and re-claim their careers, we don't think in the same terms about whether the women involved in their indiscretions will get a chance to re-build their own lives."
Are women forgiven for sex scandals the same way men are? Former sex worker Melissa Petro told Chris Hayes she thinks not. "We're really portrayed as victims or villains. And any sort of complicated story that most of us have actually fits in between that. There's little room inside society's sexual imagination for those stories." Petro insists, "we are branded by these experiences."
msnbc's Krystal Ball agreed with Petro on All In: "As soon as you turn a woman into a whore, you undermine her credibility."