SOCIAL SUICIDE
Why Weiner’s digital sex scandal was ultimately more ruinous than Bill Clinton’s real-life affair
HE self-destruction of Anthony Weiner is something entirely new. It is a phenomenon of the social-media age. Weiner has been undone both professionally and personally by a very specific fetish that could not have existed at any other time in history — one in which he takes a photograph of his private parts and instantly transmits that photo to a woman he doesn’t know as part of a virtual flirtation that evidently never goes further than salacious texting.
The Weiner fetish can only be indulged with a digital camera attached to a cellphone that transmits pictures instantly to websites. Consider this: Twenty years ago, the sentence you just read would have made no sense to anyone (except perhaps the visionary novelists William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, who seem to have predicted everything that was going to happen in the Internet era).
Back in 1996, there were digital cameras, there were cellphones and there were websites, but they were all still somewhat exotic— and they were certainly not yet bound together in an eternal golden braid.
It took the creation of Facebook in 2004 and the release of the iPhone in 2007 to unite them all.
It took only four years more for Weiner to make a mistake, sending a private message of his privates and inadvertently making it a public tweet everyone who followed him could see.
After the scandal came out, he did something weird. He quit Congress. It’s never been clear why he did.
Sure, he had become a laughingstock and he’d lied through his teeth, but life is long and he wouldn’t have faced voters in his very safe district for 16 months.
David Vitter, a very conservative Republican senator from Louisiana, actually hired hookers during his days as a congressman, confessed it in 2007, and got re-elected in 2010. If Weiner had apologized, said he was trying to spare his wife the embarrassment and then said he was going back to work for his constituents, he would have done something normal. Something, dare I say it, Clintonian.
For it was Bill Clinton in 1998 who kept saying, during the year he was besieged by the Monica Lewinsky revelations, that he was only trying to get back to work to fulfill his deal with the people who elected him — and that his pursuers were working to prevent that.
Why couldn’t Weiner have adopted that line? Though his wife, Huma Abedin, did not go out and do active damage control for him the way her boss Hillary Clinton did for Bill in 1998 by blaming his troubles on a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” she did not throw him out or end their marriage on the spot. Couldn’t Weiner have survived his own selfie sickness?
In 2011, I think he could have, and so I’ve long wondered whether Weiner’s resignation was an act of damage con- trol not for him but on behalf of his wife, Hillary Clinton’s closest aide. Abedin is a political staffer of a sort rarely seen in our time; her loyalty is absolute, she avoids the spotlight, she does not claim credit for anything and does not wish to be known. It’s clear Abedin’s utility to Mrs. Clinton rests in part on her anonymity, and Weiner’s continued presence in the public eye would have made it impossible for Abedin to remain anonymous. When he quit, Abedin could go back to being invisible. That may have been the deal they struck together to save their marriage. And when, two years later, he insisted on making a comeback effort in the New York mayor’s race, Abedin no longer needed to be anonymous because Hillary Clinton was no longer serving as secretary of state. If my theory is right, Weiner had been a good soldier for her and it was her turn to be a good soldier for him. But then the extent of his compulsion was revealed yet again when we learned in the middle of the summer of 2013 that he’d continued to send selfies of his privates — the revelation of which torpedoed his candidacy. The jaw-dropping documentary “Weiner,” released earlier this year, shows how entirely detached Weiner is from the demon inside him. His inability to come to grips with his fetish meant he could not withstand its grip over him.
And now, because of its hold on him, Weiner has not only destroyed his professional life, but his marriage as well — and threatened his continuing relationship with his very young son, the only genuinely tragic victim in this exceedingly peculiar story.
One thing the cautionary Weiner tale reveals is just how blessed Bill Clinton was to have had his sex scandal before the advent of social media.
Lewinsky was terrific at keeping their secret, erring only in choosing Linda Tripp as a confidante.
“It’s all too much for one person,” Lewinsky sobbed in one of the phone calls Tripp taped between them, and in part she was referring to the burden of having to keep this thrilling and painful connection entirely to herself.
What 22-year-old today could be so discreet? Could a 22-year-old in the age of Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat keep such a huge secret so well?
Wouldn’t today’s Monica let slip some little bit of cryptic information — the kind sometimes called a “subtweet” — that would serve later on as a confirmation of the truth when the media combed through her social-media postings?
In 1998, a president survived a sex scandal in which the proof of his involvement was on an actual, existing blue dress. But Anthony Weiner is ruined even though it appears that he can honestly say he “did not have sexual relations with those women.”
There’s no evidence anything was exchanged between him and the three females we know about other than texts and direct messages and photographs.
In 2016, how we conduct our virtual lives may be more important than how we conduct ourselves in the real world.