Inevitable Tiger Woods post
A friend confesses that what he finds most disturbing about the Tiger Woods saga is the “Jacobinism of monogamy” on display in the public reaction. There are certain parts of his lament that I don’t share, but he nails something with this term. Not only is the current regime of American marriage quite modern, it’s utterly contemporary. The moralism that attends the idea of marriage is – per my friend – a moralism of public order. Like many other things in American life, the idea of marriage got tightened up after the 1970s. This was partly a response to the upswing in divorce, and it took on bits of concern with growing illegitimacy, especially through the 1990s, but it was also fueled by the new feminist expectations of gender equality in the private sphere. “Traditional marriage” was stripped down and then reloaded with several new and pressing ideological purposes and burdens. Stable marriages have become an explicit interest of the state – of public policy and criminal law. And, now, even evangelical marriages have to navigate expectations that originated in the feminist revolution. (Now, I’m happily down with monogamous marriage on a personal level, and I share both the conservative concerns with family breakdown and the egalitarian liberalism of the new marriage model, but an event like this makes me face some implications of this cluster of beliefs. I never thought of myself as a Jacobin.)
Anyway, it’s this that frames my reaction to the reactions to the Tiger Woods revelations. (Warning: Rank culture-studies-type speculation ahead.) People want to say that the public outrage owes to the fact that Tiger is black and his wife (and/or his roster of paramours) is (are) white (and, in the most important instance, blond!). This was a backlash that was waiting to happen. I think this is simplistic. I think the proper metaphor is not of a backlash, but of a bubble bursting. Woods was the repository of a huge number of fond thoughts and expectations. His excellence as a golfer was easy to project varieties of safeness and niceness and respectability onto (partly because he is, well, a golfer). That’s why he was such a valuable pitchman. When he got married and had two beautiful kids, that just deepened his public identity as a paragon of bourgeois virtue. He was a paradoxical ideal of normality. He was – to borrow a line from Laurie Anderson – a person exactly like you are and I am, only much, much better. This is how it would have to be in America. Just ask Tocqueville.
So, when people – idealizing and identifying in the same mental gesture – thought of Tiger Woods’ marriage, they thought of it as they thought of their own marriage, or their own ideal of marriage. Not only was he married, but he was married to a gorgeous but sane and wifely-seeming wife. And he had two beautiful multiracial kids. Now, in a less willfully naïve time, his freakish wealth and status would have complicated the assumptions we made about his sexual life and marriage. Monogamy was optional, traditionally, for men of that wealth and status. But not now. So not only would we take him to be – per the ideal – faithful to his wife. He, as the bourgeois ideal, would be more faithful, more monogamous, more excellently ensconced in home and family. The gleaming molecular bonds of his marriage would themselves be the stuff of television commercials.
So the prevailing sentiment unleashed over the last few weeks is not, in the most immediate sense, some reflex of racial loathing that we white people have been holding in store in anticipation of this moment. It’s disappointment – disappointment in Tiger Woods as a higher sort of regular guy, disappointment that what he seemed to illustrate about the essential soundness and stability of our most important and worried-about institution, he didn’t illustrate at all, that he was living in the bad old days we’re constantly telling ourselves we’d left behind, and living it up. Now does this disappointment have something to do with his blackness? I think it does, but that’s another post.
Interesting first paragraph. I have to disagree with the Woods speculation, though, because before the scandal I had precisely zero opinion about Tiger’s marriage. If you had asked me, I would have said something cynical to the effect that all (male, married) superstar athletes cheat on their wives. Politicians too.
“All” is exaggeration, of course. There are athletes about whom this kind of revelation would really disappoint me. But outside of his golfing, I never held Woods up as any sort of ideal. Frankly, I’m surprised that anyone else did, considering that his image was so bland and corporate.
So I’m asking, is there really widespread outrage over this, or is it just a juicy story being fanned by the media? If the former, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve missed the boat on the public mood.
— dj · Dec 15, 08:31 AM · #
I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it.
It’s a new thing in America to expect public figures not to screw around? Really?
You’re right that the reasons for which monogamy is expected have evolved because of feminism.
If in the 1950s (or even the 1850s) a public figure had been caught sleeping around with cocktail waitresses like Woods has been, he would have been publicly humiliated and his career destroyed.
Perhaps these indiscretions would have been overlooked, filed away, or only hinted at, but this is more a function of how much more pervasive and obsessive 24-hour media has become, but that’s different than evolving views on monogamy.
— PEG · Dec 15, 09:08 AM · #
“It’s disappointment – disappointment in Tiger Woods as a higher sort of regular guy.”
I vehemently disagree here. The emotion most Tiger Woods fans and/or followers express is shock about the nature of the allegations behind the scandal, with respect to how Tiger has handled himself in the media so far in his career.
If you polled most golf analysts and Tiger fans and asked them to name the one characteristic they believe Tiger has that makes him – as you so aptly put it – a “higher sort of regular guy,” my money is that the overwhelming majority of responses would be “discipline” or “mental toughness,” or some combination thereof. This entire scandal completely contradicts the aforementiond qualities we assumed he possessed.
Not only do the allegations reak of an undisciplined and mentally weak human being, but they call into question how smart we all felt Tiger is/was. Is this just an example of a man succumbing to his inner demons? Or is it an example of someone who felt he was much smarter and more powerful than he actually was, primarily because we aided and abetted him? I suggest the latter. Thus, we are not disappointed that Tiger is not a “regular guy” (he is certainly not the first pro golfer to be a serial adulterer, and I promise he won’t be the last.) We are shocked that of out all the popular athletes in the world, the one who is linked to having unprotected sex with porn stars while his wife was rearing his infant children is TIGER WOODS – Mr. Mental Toughness.
Tiger, and his wife, are the product of parents who have had broken marriages/relationships (Tiger has half-siblings.) Statistically it was likely that these two people would eventually get divorced, and Tiger’s status as a mega-star only made that likelihood stronger. If a story broke that Tiger and his wife were simply splitting up because they had “irreconcilable differences,” few would be surprised and few would care. It’s the nature of how his marriage and private life are crumbling around him that possesses us. This is a guy who has a military-like schedule for every day of the week. This is a guy who reads the angles and grain of half-inch-high grass and accounts for it in his putting stroke, sometimes with millions of dollars and history on the line, in front of thousands of peope. Detail and focus do not escape him. Pressure does not affect him.
Or so we thought.
— Matt C · Dec 15, 04:48 PM · #
But see Alexander Hamilton and Maria Reynolds.
Btw, celebrity trumps race, spectacle trumps meaning. This is about celebrity and spectacle, not race and meaning.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Dec 15, 05:13 PM · #
“Like many other things in American life, the idea of marriage got tightened up after the 1970s … Stable marriages have become an explicit interest of the state – of public policy and criminal law.”
“After the 1970s”? “Have become”???
If stable marriages weren’t an explicit interest of the state, why did states bother investing in the bureaucracy of civil marriage — and civil divorce — in the first place?
Certainly the history of e.g. adultery as a criminal offense is long and widespread, in antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity. I’m not sure what you think happened “after the 1970s” apropos “criminal law.”
— SDG · Dec 15, 05:41 PM · #
Thanks, Matt, for an interesting post. I agree quite a bit, especially about the “regular guy, but better.” The way I’ve put it is that I think that Tiger Woods would be better at my job than I am. (I’m an organic chemist.)
— Klug · Dec 16, 01:49 AM · #
So, if the uproar is, as you note, rooted in race, would it then be a “blacklash”?
— Joel MaHarry · Dec 16, 09:06 AM · #
President Obama, who has played golf more than two dozen times this year, modeled much of his public image on Woods’ image.
— Steve Sailer · Dec 16, 12:16 PM · #
Matt Feeney:
Care to support that claim with some facts? I’ll grant you that certainly France and probably England were traditionally that way, but the US? If there’s any chance at all that you’re right, it was well hidden from the people of the United States. I think you’re making a hugely wrong assumption.
— jd · Dec 16, 02:43 PM · #
He will recover from this after a few months.
— torpedo gratis · Dec 16, 03:27 PM · #
“He will recover from this after a few months.”
If by recover you mean “continue to be a very rich and successful pro athlete”, sure.
If by recover you mean “return to his status as a transcendent media/cultural/economic figure”, no.
Mike
— MBunge · Dec 16, 05:15 PM · #
Sailer points to an important connection predictably overlooked by the press. After all, Woods and Obama each have a black parent, and before Obama, try to name an American president who played golf.
I hope Palin is paying attention. Along with hippy anarchists and treasonous preachers, she can now add philandering millionaires to her dangerous associations list.
Judging from Sailer’s observation, he’s clearly attempting to model his public image on the the Massengill 6 oz disposable douche.
— turnbuckle · Dec 16, 05:25 PM · #
Anybody remember this from the 1997 Esquire profile:
Whole thing here including a recent meditation by the author in the wake of the collapse of the Tiger Woods mythology.
— Noah Millman · Dec 16, 05:41 PM · #
“…and before Obama, try to name an American president who played golf.”
OK…how about George H.W and George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and JFK?
Your guy is not as special as you think…
— tomaig · Dec 16, 06:03 PM · #
Good work nosing that out, tomaig. I guess we agree, then, that Sailer made a goofy implication when he suggested that Obama’s recreational golfing is evidence that Tiger is Obama’s role model. Maybe it’s just evidence that he’s President.
— turnbuckle · Dec 16, 06:15 PM · #
Regarding Presidential golfers, and I s’pose also regarding the way that ‘golf’ is perceived in the U.S., I recall a famous put-down of the JohnBirchSociety’s claim that Pres Eisenhower was ‘a conscious agent of the CommunistConspiracy’. Someone said, ‘Ike isn’t a communist; he’s a golfer’.
— JohnMcC · Dec 16, 07:33 PM · #
Noah Millman:
I wonder how often that thought has been repeated regarding Barack Hussein Obama? It’s not working out quite as planned. How stupid are the people who believe this tripe?
I just heard a whacked-out liberal talk show host accusing Obama of selling him out because the health care bill isn’t liberal enough. He believed the hype and change rhetoric. That’s the position that liberals put themselves in. By putting so much faith in a politician, this guy is now efectively accusing Obama of lying the whole time he was running for office, rather than allowing for the possibility that Obama was mugged by reality when he became President.
I am convinced that if Obama is viewed as a failed president (which he probably will) along the lines of Carter, that he will do tremendous harm to the race dialogue. I fear that too many people will simply say that he failed because of racism.
Try reading Eugene Robinson’s latest post regarding Tiger, and you’ll see the kind of thinking that will obtain if Obama crashes.
— jd · Dec 16, 07:54 PM · #
It’s far more likely that he was mugged by the Senate, since, you know, we’ve been able to watch them mug him. Yglesias has had a pretty compelling series of posts on how Congress in general and the Senate specifically represent far more veto points than are really needed.
Funny joke. You, I mean.
— Chet · Dec 16, 08:38 PM · #
I am amazed that people are shocked that a rich successful athlete screws around.
If you want to speculate about how marital expectations have changed I think think you should consider the varied reactions to Eliot Spitzer and Rudolph Giuliani.
Spitzer’s career was ruined when he was caught cheating even though he has stayed with the mother of his children. Giuliani is still considered a potential candidate by the “family values” party even though he had his lawyer trash the mother of his children in a press conference and has had a divorce that destroyed his relationship to his children.
Why is it considered worse to see a hooker than to ruin your children’s home life. This was not always the case. In the past divorce was a major stigma.
— Mercer · Dec 16, 09:59 PM · #
Why bring Obama into this? Where recent presidents are concerned, Woods’ nearest equivalent is horndog-in-chief, Bill Clinton.
Both are serial chasers; both have fed a dose of disillusion to fans who naively assumed their professional discipline would extend to all arenas of their lives; both are married to beautiful blondes.
One parallel that’s really interesting is the kind of public scrutiny/scorn both sets of girlfriends have received. Colin Quinn put it well when he described Clinton’s paramours— in contrast to Kennedy’s more glamorous stable— as the types you see stumbling drunk in acid-wash jeans out of a Fudruckers. In Woods’ case, a lot has also been made of the cheap type that lures him. His girlfriends may paint up nice and have better bodies— in many cases thanks to plastic surgery— but they’re still perceived as low quality sluts. Which is kind of funny, when you consider that this hot tramp type is precisely the girl magazines like Maxim and Esquire encourage their readers to woo with overpriced champagne and cheesey Tiffany bracelets, the better to get laid.
Woods is getting publicly embarrassed by the very stuff he would otherwise be bragging about to his buddies with subscriptions to Details magazine. Before his luck ran out, he was living a dependable variety of male fantasy: he’s the best in his field, he’s young, he’s rich and he’s famous. He’s married to a a smart, gorgeous woman, yes, but he has many, many other options. Women are available everywhere. They may be a little tarty and fake, always with that annoying tattoo over the coccyx, but consider his schedule— courting Penelope Cruz is not in the cards. So, cocktail hostesses it is, and who is he to refuse them? What rock star turns away his groupies?
— turnbuckle · Dec 16, 09:59 PM · #
A rather selfish note: I am mildly relieved to note that Woods is a Buddhist and not an evangelical.
— Klug · Dec 16, 11:13 PM · #
is that laurie anderson line from “language is a virus”?
— sean · Dec 17, 03:31 AM · #
I can understand the shock that our “good ‘ole boy” isn’t who we thought he was, but what baffles me is the publicity this is receiving.
It would seem to me that our troops and the people in need this holiday season would take a higher priority in our media than a celebrity cheating on his wife.
Seems this is distracting us from what is really important.
— Scentsy Wickless Candles · Dec 19, 12:45 PM · #