And It Must Follow As The Night The Day, Thou Canst Not Then Be False To Any Man
I’ve been trying to figure out something interesting to say about the two weird scandals of the moment. I will admit, as a blogger, the second story – one man pretending online to be a lesbian and running a lesbian news site outs another man pretending online to be a lesbian and to have been arrested by the Syrian regime – has proved a lot more fascinating than Antony Weiner’s twitpix. But I feel like there’s a connection between the two stories.
Both are stories about fantasy, and about how the tools of the online world facilitate the decision to fully embrace and enter into a compelling fantasy – and temporarily forestall the consequences of the embrace.
Weiner always struck me before the recent revelations as an exceptionally annoying Congressman. That’s not a comment on where he stood on the issues – sometimes I agreed with him, sometimes not – nor about his performance in his duties – he was, by all reports, somebody who took his job seriously, and is highly regarded by his constituents. I just mean his personality: his voice, his speaking style, his body habitus. The news that he obsessively sent a variety of women photos of himself in the nude or seminude makes me feel pity toward him for the first time. Not pity that he had such a pitiful hobby, but pity that this was the fantasy that he desperately wanted to enter into. He was the guy with the pecs, the guy women would get all hot and bothered by pictures of, the guy who didn’t just follow porn stars – but who counted porn stars among his followers. Because you don’t fantasize about being someone you already think you are.
(That’s one explanation for why Weiner didn’t take such elementary precautions as, I dunno, not including his head in the pictures. Maybe that’s just arrogance; maybe that’s a subterranean desire to get caught. But I suspect it’s really because, if this is a fantasy about “being known as the guy who” – well, you can’t really enter into that fantasy while keeping yourself anonymous.)
Andrew Sullivan has been calling the Weiner situation a case of “texting while male” which suggests that most men would do – or do do – pretty much what Weiner did. But there’s a difference between having a fantasy and taking the plunge to enter into the fantasy. And most guys wouldn’t do the latter. Is that because they don’t have the guts? Because they have cooler heads? Because they aren’t intoxicated by power into believing they were immune to social consequences? Or because the fantasy just isn’t as important to them as it was to Representative Weiner?
The two pseudo-lesbian bloggers were also entering into a fantasy. I don’t know whether that fantasy was particularly sexual in nature – I don’t know whether an important part of the thrill had anything to do with typical heterosexual male fantasies about lesbians. It’s entirely plausible to me that the fantasy had more to do with voice, with being heard. In any event, what these two men did was an extreme version of what, to one degree or another, everybody who presents themselves to the world in a mediated format, from bloggers to news anchors, does. They created personae that were not really them, and that represented who they wanted other people to see them as when they spoke.
I remember what that felt like when I started blogging. The sense that I was creating a self without the baggage of my actual self, a self that could actually be who I wanted people to think I was. I blogged under my real name, but I’d have to say, in all honesty, I wasn’t blogging as me but as some notion of myself – as a persona.
What’s most interesting to me is the way in which I changed as a result of blogging. Far from walling off my fantasy blogger persona from my actual self, I was confronted almost immediately by ways in which the two were in conflict, faced with the need to reconcile that conflict. When you don’t put yourself on the record, in front of other people, you can finesse in your own mind what you think, what you’ve said, how you felt about x or y or z. When you do, the record is there to confront you. To pick a silly example, I can’t deny that for about 15 minutes (okay, maybe as much as a day and a half), I thought Sarah Palin was a great idea. I can’t revise the narrative of my life so that that judgment is expunged – whereas if I hadn’t blogged, doing so would be trivial.
We all walk around with fantasies in our heads, and many of them probably don’t matter, but some of them do. We spend, when you add it up, thousands of hours living inside our heads in those fantasies. When they stay there, we don’t have to confront them – and neither does anybody else. We can say that that’s a success: we don’t want anybody to know what’s hiding in there, whether it’s banal fantasies of cheating on our wives and husbands, or something with a higher “smirk” factor like standing naked in Times Square and being adored by throngs, or something really terrible and dark like drowning our children. But I think these things, if they really do matter and aren’t something fleeting, gnaw at you when you don’t confront them. They only grow more powerful in the dark.
I started blogging at the high-point of my doctrinaire right-wingery. Before the real world began to push back in the form of the fiasco of Iraq and other catastrophes, the simple fact of having to put words on (virtual) paper pushed back. I’m too good a reader not to be able to tell when I’ve written something that isn’t grounded in truth – or, let’s say, in a justified belief. Putting it down in words – and, much more important, putting it out there for other people to see – forced me to ask myself: what do I really know? What do I really believe? And I learned some things about myself in the process.
Anthony Weiner probably did, too. There’s an “oh brave new world that has such people in it” quality to some of his language that’s almost touching. Clearly he was having too much fun indulging in the fantasy to ask himself what he was learning. But learn something he did.
That’s why I’m very resistant to both the moral and medical responses to these kinds of stories. The moral response (“you mustn’t do that!”) amounts to a call for repression the medical (“he must be sick to want to do that!”) feels almost like a pathologization of the inner life itself. There are a lot of pieces to the impulse involved in these cases, but a big piece is the simple desire to know oneself, to find out who we really are.
That impulse is an admirable one. Obviously, the idea is to find out who you are without humiliating your wife or enraging the lesbians who you clearly want to treat you as a fellow sister. But the key to avoiding winding up in the paper, it seems to me, isn’t repressing the fantasy, but acknowledging it – before you actually take the plunge of trying to live it out.
If I were Anthony Weiner’s wife, I’d feel betrayed by his behavior. If I loved him, I’d want him to understand that – and feel it. But I’d also want to understand why he did it. Because he did it for a reason, and that reason, I don’t think, should be reduced to a condition. And if I loved him, I’d want to understand the reason and figure out whether there might not be a better way to satisfy it.
If I were any of the women who thought Amina Arraf was real, I’d feel betrayed. I’d also feel betrayed when I discovered that the editor of “Lez Get Real” was just as fake. I’d want Tom MacMaster and Bill Graber to understand that. But I would like to think that someone who really connected with one of them through their personae, if I believed that they believed in what they were saying and doing, if I believed that their personae, while false representations to the world, were also true representations of something about them – I would like to think recognition of that fact would also shape the way I felt about them, that my response wouldn’t be limited to rage and condemnation.
The online world has made it easier than ever before to fully commit to one’s fantasy life. That’s a fact that has consequences both good and bad. Because our fantasies can be important, having a space to explore them can be a very good thing – an opening to greater self-understanding. But because we can pretend our online selves are separate from our real selves, we can, instead of pursuing self-understanding, simply build a shadow fantasy life and live there in secret. And, whether or not we realize it when we first start playing this game, these days it’s harder than ever to keep people on the internet from finding out you’re a dog.
Why only the women who thought Amina Arraf was real? Tom Ricks seemed sorta pissed, and rightly so.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jun 15, 11:02 PM · #
I take the point, and I think it’s a pretty good one.
All the same, what wrong with a little rage and condemnation now and then? Anthony Weiner is a sleazeball, no matter what his psychological reasons were. And the fake lesbian guys are liars, no matter why they did it. I think it’s absolutely okay for our first reactions to be loathing of such things.
If some people want to take them as jumping off points for deeper psychological inquiry, or if they have friends who love them enough to look beyond their behavior and try to figure out how to understand and help them, that’s absolutely wonderful. But I’d say it’s a pretty tall order to expect that from their victims, or from random observers on who hear about it in the media.
The strong, emotional social taboo against publicly lying about one’s identity or concealing one’s disgusting misbehavior is a healthy thing.
— Ethan C. · Jun 15, 11:08 PM · #
What fantasy life? Who has the time? Once people grow up (assuming they do) and start working, commuting, buying groceries, etc., life gets to be a process of functioning. I have never thought of fantasy as functioning. It is yearning, but unreal. If someone has the time to be unreal, he is either a professional actor, or very rich and unemployed, or very poor and unemployed. Read Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy.” He was a “child of scorn” who fantasized his life away, dreaming of being a famous medieval warrior, and kept on drinking. Or read “Elmer Gantry” who preyed on other people’s fantasies to game them for his own purposes. Fantasies are lies whether publicized or not. Why would someone choose lies over the truth? One of the great advantages of yoga as well as martial arts is the emphasis on present-mindedness. It is part of meditation but is also important outside meditation. It is total concentration on the present. Jerry Brown when he was previously governor of California famously made the Zen statement: “Do what you’re doing. Be where you are.” Great wisdom in that. We cheat ourselves of real life by hiding in whatever format we choose, whether lies, or obsessions, or artificial stimulants. If you are not in a prison cell being beaten up, what’s wrong with life?
— LDM · Jun 16, 12:56 AM · #
“What fantasy life? Who has the time?”
I’m not sure I can even conceive of how much less interesting and beautiful the world would be if everyone thought that way.
Mike
— MBunge · Jun 16, 03:09 PM · #
@Kieselguhr Kid:
The people on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” yesterday examined “Gay Girl in Damascus” through the lens of “white privilege,” and perhaps answered your question in part:
Inelegantly put perhaps, and I don’t know that I agree with it all, but there’s a real-world analogue for why women could get particularly mad about fake lesbian bloggers.
Also, to Noah: this was a great post.
— donald · Jun 16, 03:58 PM · #
Saw this article on FB and here’s my comment from there:
He has a point about fantasy and the online world. What I’m uncomfortable with is his is excusing of that fantasy life in this case, and the lack of awareness that we live in a culture dominated by male fantasy, the constant exposure to which is what allows a man like Noah Millman to excuse a man like Anthony Weiner. It is male privilege that makes a man like Weiner think he can get away with treating women, especially young ones, this way, and male privilege which drives that male fantasy phenomenon Millman alluded to. Male fantasy and male privilege are inextricably linked, and the latter will have to come under some control before the former is adapted to more egalitarian purposes and the equal exchange of power in sexual relations. There’s no accounting for that from Millman, because he’s not aware of it, or if he is, he’s too busy benefitting from it to want to address it honestly.
I was particularly put off by his trying to draw some parallel between his adopting an online persona to blog (something most entertainers do, be they writers, actors, trapeze artists, etc. and a long tradition to boot) and Weiner adopting one to sexually stalk young women. Way to muddy the waters on that one, Noah. I have infinitely more respect for someone who does that for professional advantage than for sexual exploitation and advantage. There’s a real difference, he just doesn’t want to see it. Judging from some of the comments I’ve read all over the place online, a lot of people don’t want to see it, but the majority of those people are male.
Anyway, the signals all over the place on this one are that Weiner did no wrong, the subtext of which is that it’s okay to treat women like this. You can bet Weiner would have a problem if someone his age and stature did it to his young niece or daughter, just as many of the men commenting in his defense would have a problem if it happened to a young female relative of theirs. But part of that male privilege is seeing some women as not okay to treat sexually and seeing others, especially those that are young or are of lower economic class, as perfectly okay to treat in ways a man would not treat the other group of women. It is okay for him to fantasize and sexualize conversations and to do much worse, because he feels entitled to do it. It does not matter to me that Weiner broke no laws. He showed his character and in doing so he exposed the ugly underside of sexual relations in this country, just as Clinton did and so many others. It has to stop. If it doesn’t,[your daughter and my daughter] are the next round of victims.
— Lovelalola · Jun 16, 08:36 PM · #
Yeah, but appealing to the male sense of ownership of women doesn’t make a very feminist case against the mistreatment of women. When men object to their female relatives being sexually harassed, it’s not because those are the only women they conceive of as having full personhood and the right not to be harassed in that way; they object because the other man has transgressed and harmed their property.
Learn to make an appeal against rape and victimization that doesn’t rely on women being important only because they’re related to men.
— Ch3t · Jun 16, 10:30 PM · #
Being present-minded does not make the world less interesting and beautiful, Mike. On the contrary, by revealing what actually exists to the person who is living in the present and not in some fantasy (sexual or not), the perceiver can actually see the beauty, wonder, and fascination of the world. I applaud the latest blog commentators on their perception of male apologetics for fantasizing sexually about lots of women and excusing it as their prerogative. As we all know, the perception by some men that women are sexual objects eliminates the personhood of women. Even the Yahwist who wrote Genesis 2 and 3 gave a name to the woman God created for man. He was Adam, from the earth (adamah). She was Eve (the mother of the living). And in an extraordinary (for the time in which the Yahwist lived) exposition of the importance of women in marriage, the Yahwist writes the comment about marriage (becoming one flesh) that this is why the man leaves his family to live with the woman. The reality in ancient Israel was that the woman left her family to live with the man. But the Yahwist had the inspiration to describe an equality that was God’s intention, even though not lived out in that time or fully in our time. The problem with Weiner, now resigned from his job, is not so much that he lied but that he expressed the almost pathologic need for admiration that the card-carrying narcissist craves. Once he stepped over what male fantasizing even sanctions, he was gone. When you think how Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky changed the history of the world, it is mind blowing. If only he had sent her packing with the empty pizza carton, Al Gore would have gotten the majority of the electoral vote, we would not be in Iraq, our deficit would not be this large, and who knows what else. Disaster by way of male chauvinism.
— LDM · Jun 17, 02:39 AM · #
“It is male privilege that makes a man like Weiner think he can get away with treating women, especially young ones, this way”
What? Is there any evidence that the women involved, even the young ones, were really bothered by Weiner’s attentions BEFORE all this nonsense started? Feminists need to get over the knee jerk reaction of defining all male sexuality (even the stupid stuff) in predatory terms, for the way it infantilizes women if nothing else.
Mike
— MBunge · Jun 17, 03:31 PM · #
Well, Mike, there is some evidence that the women were bothered, in that at least one of them handed off his stuff gratis to Andrew Breitbart. The other explanation of course would be that she was fishing for that stuff in he first place, which makes Weiner a colossal, dangerous-to-himself-and-those-who-trust-him, ass. Or it could be both.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jun 19, 05:59 PM · #
I did what Weiner did for a few years — I showed strangers naked pictures of myself. I’m female, and I’m not a public figure, and I hope it won’t come out and ruin my career, but I wanted to take the risk at the time. I was a late bloomer, and I wanted to feel attractive for once, and experience sexual excitement. It was a bit dumb, and there are parts of that period of my life that were morally wrong and I won’t repeat.
But the thing is, it’s not a medical condition and it’s not some kind of alien thing that only strange people do, and it’s not only men. It’s something that appeals to any person with a reckless streak, a big libido, and a helping of neurotic vanity. It’s part of human nature — which doesn’t mean it’s all good, but it’s not as foreign as Millman makes it out. There is a brutal side to sex; there is a dirty, animalistic form of sex; and some people like it, and haven’t been self-aware to admit it to themselves and include it in their marriages. My best guess is that’s what happened to Weiner. What he wanted didn’t match the marriage he had. And when that happens, the Internet is the obvious temptation. Honestly I feel bad for him. It’s a mistake a lot of people make, in one form or the other — building a life that has no room for gratifying your desires honestly, and then ending up gratifying them dishonestly.
— src · Jun 20, 04:49 AM · #