Weiner: what a lame sex scandal

How to describe Anthony Weiner? Creepy, pathetic, cringe-inducing… but even those words seem too generous.

For those outside the US who haven’t followed this story (or Americans who have been living in a cave), let me briefly provide some background. Anthony Weiner is a Democratic member of the House of Representatives for a district that covers parts of Brooklyn and Queens in New York City. He has been a minor political figure, and has expressed aspirations to be mayor of New York City one day. He has been best known (if at all) for occasional rants on the House floor and cable TV, as well as for being more of a Twitter/Facebook poster than your average American politician.

Towards the end of May, there were news reports that a photo of a man’s underpants covering an erection was sent from Weiner’s Twitter account to a 21-year-old woman. Weiner said it was not his, and that his account had been hacked. The tabloids had a field day with puns, including the New York Post with its headline ‘Weiner Exposed’. A few days later, Weiner seemed to backtrack, saying he could not say with ‘certitude’ that the photo wasn’t of him. Then this past Monday morning the conservative website biggovernment.com published a shirtless photo it said Weiner had sent to another woman, and claimed they had more salacious photos. By early afternoon Weiner held a press conference. Breaking down in tears, he confessed that the photos were of him and he sent them, and that he had engaged in ‘six inappropriate relationships’ online over the past three years. More dirt is emerging.

The general reaction seems to be ‘eww’. Weiner is almost universally held in low regard now, and many are calling for him to resign. But is this wretched story anything more than the case of one man and his Weiner? (See even I can’t resist bad puns). I think it is.

Here are a few observations:

• The Weiner story strikes me as more about social norms about how to behave online than a sex scandal. Many people today blur the distinction between public and private. The internet seems to be an arena where many people reveal private things and are oblivious to (or don’t care about) the fact that it is a public medium: you might as well be standing on a street corner. (In fact, the internet is more public than a street corner, as more people will ‘see’ you online than on the street.) There are reports that Weiner knew that his political opponents were following him online, and yet he continued with his ‘dirty’ posts.
• In fact, I believe it is completely inaccurate to call the Weiner case a sex scandal, because Weiner did not engage in sex. It seems to me to be another example of what Neil Davenport referred to on spiked yesterday as the ‘pornification’ of society, in which real private intimacy is frowned upon, but public titillation and lewdness is celebrated or at least tolerated.

  Weiner pleaded for mercy at his press conference, noting that he never met the women and they were not ‘physical relationships’. But that’s what makes it so pathetic. Comedian Stephen Colbert joked that ‘Republican politicians are man enough to hit that thing’ – and he has a point. Weiner did not have real intimate relationships (nor even a physical relationship with a prostitute); instead he engaged in cartoonish banter. It’s even a stretch to call his interactions online ‘relationships’ because they were so one-sided: a woman would ‘follow’ him on Twitter and to her surprise find that he would ‘follow’ her back, and then not long after he would send an unsolicited picture of himself. As one of the women he chatted with online, Meagan Broussard, said: ‘Talking to him was sometimes a turn-off because he was so open and just so full of himself, as if he were looking, searching for something.’

Weiner may be a sad, lonely loser, but his downfall does indicate that there are deeper problems in our society and politics.

Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation, here.