Re: Fidelity, Dignity and the Internet (2 Douthat blog posts)

Yeah, well Sully has some experience with online "come -ons".  He once ran a 
personals ad with talk of "glutes", "milky loads" and other sexy-time talk.   
After saying something that pissed another blogger off said blogger went and 
searched Andrew on some online forums and found the personals ad and proceeded 
to publish it.    


Mike F.  




________________________________
From: Peter Chattaway <[email protected]>
To: Daniel Amos off-topic listserver <[email protected]>
Sent: Thu, June 16, 2011 10:57:06 AM
Subject: [DADL-OT] Fidelity, Dignity and the Internet (2 Douthat blog posts)

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/fidelity-dignity-and-the-internet/

June 13, 2011, 4:48 pm

My column today starts from the same premise as many of Andrew Sullivan’s 
interesting posts on the Anthony Weiner scandal — namely, that the congressman’s 
online conduct has opened a window into the potentially radical changes Internet 
culture is working in manners and morals — but comes, as you would no doubt 
expect, to a somewhat different conclusion. Here is Sullivan last week, mounting 
a quasi-defense of Weiner’s behavior by placing it in the context of the online 
world’s come-ons and confusions:

    We have discovered a new way of living socially, and we haven’t quite 
figured out how to square it with our other lives …

    The online world creates an outlet for the feelings that sexual adultery or 
sexual adventure create – but without actual sex, without actual intimacy, 
without our actual full selves. For gay men, it’s win-win – a harmless online 
playground where you flirt the hours away and never really get your feelings 
hurt and remain, as they say in the brutal jungle of online sex, “disease-free”. 
For straight men, it’s tougher to find willing partners who don’t think you’re 
creepy (most men and women are just wired differently in sexual matters), but 
still win-win until wives or girlfriends find out, and they do not see the 
virtual/real distinction. But, to my mind, the appeal of anonymity and of losing 
oneself in a virtual sexual encounter is so powerful and easily available it 
will never cease being popular. It’s as irresistible a mindless outlet as bad 
television or Angry Birds – and much more interactive and addictive. You can 
even send pictures of people other than yourself and pretend to be utterly 
other. Does that make it better or worse? Discuss …

    All I can say is that we’re adjusting, slowly, and Weiner was a victim of 
this shift. Maybe more married or committed couples would do well to talk about 
it, set some rules, and make some preparation. Judging by the “shocked! 
shocked!” responses of some writers like Megan McArdle, there are a lot of 
conversations still to be had.

It’s a fascinating and important question: When a new and extraordinary form of 
temptation presents itself, do we go halfway with it, accommodating the older 
moral standard to the new technology-generated reality? Or is it better to 
resist the change, insofar as we are able, on the grounds that the perils 
associated with the new temptation makes the old standard that much more 
important?

Sullivan would argue that the case for straightforward resistance is naive. When 
virtual sex becomes so easily available, so much like blogging or playing Angry 
Birds, it’s better to find room for its tamer, safer manifestations than to 
attempt to circumscribe it altogether. (So get ready to have those awkward 
conversations, ladies!) Not surprisingly, I would argue the reverse: The idea 
that it’s possible to incorporate just a little bit of quasi-adultery into your 
online routines and then go no further seems to me deeply untrue to the way 
temptation actually works. Of course there may be some individuals and couples 
who can make the “it’s just the occasional sex chat, honey …” solution work: 
Human nature is diverse enough for that. But for the greater part of mankind, 
sins tend to compound rather than forestall one another, and giving in a little 
bit is usually a good way to ensure that you’ll eventually give in all the way.

But the deeper issue is the one I try to get at in today’s column. Set aside the 
debates over fidelity, monogamy and marriage for a moment. Just take Weiner’s 
behavior on its own terms, without reference to his marriage vows. Here is a 
middle-aged man sending photos of his erection (clothed and unclothed) to women 
he’s never met, aping the panting misogyny of hard-core porn in chats with 
near-strangers, snapping preening photos of his pecs coming out of the shower 
and sending them to some of his more eager Twitter followers. Do we really need 
the additional ratchet of adultery to say that this is inappropriate behavior? 
That it’s gross, undignified, and unbecoming of a serious adult? I know that 
there’s a cultural libertarianism afoot now that sneers at somewhat-nebulous 
concepts like “dignity” and “shame,” and that reduces morality entirely to 
issues of consent. But I don’t care how ubiquitously tempting virtual sex 
becomes: A culture that “adjusts” itself to accommodate grown men in positions 
of authority tweeting their endowments (because hey, he was just “texting while 
male,” and anyway it’s as addictive as Angry Birds!) would be adjusting itself 
into a kind of barbarism.

- - -

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/privacy-and-the-weiner-scandal/

Privacy and the Weiner Scandal

June 14, 2011, 12:02 pm

Michelle Goldberg frets about the threat to sexual privacy inherent in Anthony 
Weiner’s public humiliation:

    It’s understandable why his actions leave people disgusted. It would be less 
skeevy if he met his cybersex partners in cybersex forums, instead of enlisting 
his political admirers into masturbatory exchanges. The brazenness of his 
exhibitionism is unsettling; it appears at once narcissistic and, as Laura 
Kipnis has written, masochistic. He’s embarrassed his pregnant wife and his 
Democratic colleagues. Worst of all, from a strictly partisan point of view, 
he’s revived the credibility of the odious Andrew Breitbart.

    But the core of his transgression was a small and mundane thing—engaging in 
sexual fantasies on the Internet. The fact that this has led to a salacious 
national excoriation has disturbing implications not just for Weiner, but for us 
all.

Actually, I don’t think that it does. However blurry the public/private line may 
get online, I’m pretty sure that it’s possible for the average politician (to 
say nothing of an ordinary citizen) to engage “in sexual fantasies on the 
Internet” without reaching the point where he finds himself “tweeting the photo 
of his erection to a Seattle college student by accident, intending to send it 
to the porn star who was alphabetically just beneath her in his contacts queue” 
— to borrow Goldberg’s summary of the scenario that probably led to Weiner’s 
downfall. (Or, for that matter, without acquiring a raft of virtual paramours 
who are happy to leak examples of his online come-ons to Radar, Andrew 
Breitbart, and Co. as soon as they realize that there’s an an interest in them.) 
Yes, politicians probably deserve a greater zone of privacy than they currently 
enjoy, but as Ramesh Ponnuru puts it, “privacy requires discretion,” and Weiner 
failed the discretion test egregiously. Ponnuru’s non-digital analogy is a good 
one:

    If an open mic caught a politician trying to seduce someone, or he had 
accidentally sent an email intended for his mistress to his press list, what 
possible justification could there be for not reporting it? And if he then spent 
a week lying about it. . . . In other words, this isn’t a case where reporters 
have followed his every move looking to see what hotel he is checking into and 
with whom.

Unlike Andrew Sullivan, Goldberg concedes that people are right to be 
“disgusted” by Weiner’s behavior. But if something disgusting-but-legal becomes 
unavoidably public, is the press supposed to avert its eyes and just pretend it 
didn’t happen? She analogizes the Weiner case to the fate of Dave Weigel, who 
lost his job at the Washington Post because of comments he made on the private 
(but not really, as it turned out) Journolist e-mail round-robin. But what made 
the Weigel case so unfortunate was that 1) his e-mails were leaked by his 
enemies rather than through his own blundering and 2) the comments themselves 
were mostly (again, to quote Goldberg) bits of “obviously jokey hyperbole that 
no one would have noticed had Weigel said it at a bar.” Whereas unless the 
establishment in question was part of the sex club circuit, I’m pretty sure that 
most people would notice if they were sitting across from Anthony Weiner at a 
bar and he suddenly flashed them — intending, of course, to only reveal himself 
to the fetching porn star at the table nearby.


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