With the Anthony Weiner saga dominating the news, we’ve decided to offer readers a special preview of Kay Hymowitz’s brilliant essay, “Anthony Weiner and the National Adultery Ritual,” from the July/August issue of COMMENTARY. It’s a must-read for those looking to get something more meaningful than a sensational thrill out of the whole affair:
If the headlines seem to tell us one thing about our culture, it is that we are living in the Age of Adultery. A steady line of prominent men have taken the walk of shame across our television screens and through our magazine and newspaper pages over the past decade or so; Bill Clinton (he says it wasn’t sex, but would even he deny it was adultery?), Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, the three Johns (Edwards, Ensign, and Gosselin), Jim McGreevey, Mark Sanford, Eliot Spitzer, Tiger Woods, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Anthony Weiner. These are just the 30-minutes-of-fame-ers. There are plenty of other minor-league cads who got their more commonly apportioned 15 minutes—San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin (said to have fathered the child of Casey Greenfield, daughter of pundit eminence Jeff Greenfield), eight-term Indiana congressman Mark Souder; no doubt by the time these words reach print, there will be others. Add them all together, and culture and politics seem like they’re all adultery, all the time.
To many observers, the problem is not so much the lapses of the men in question as the public obsession with them. Why, they ask, are the media and its consumers so preoccupied with these matters when we have so many important things to be pondering?
Why are we chattering about sex tapes and cigars when there are loose nukes and economic mayhem out there? These objections frequently come with accusations against a corporate media interested only in profit and indifferent to the public welfare. At any rate, sexual relationships are private, aren’t they?
Actually, no. In this bloggy, YouTube, and memoir-flooded era, people describe grazing the sexual buffet with little shame or embarrassment; oral, anal, threesomes, hookups, handcuffs, whips, or whatever else floats your boat. Adultery is one exception to this open-mindedness, especially when it involves powerful men in the public eye. If they cheat on their wives, those men will be facing the pursed lips and wagging fingers of Americans, and particularly women, in high moral dudgeon.
Of course, though it is a flashpoint, adultery is hardly taboo. Dating websites for cheaters appear on the Internet and no one is trying to shut them down. In fact, the most famous of them, AshleyMadison.com, cheekily urges, “Life is short. Have an affair.” As for cheating celebrities, we tend to go easy on them, probably because they exist in a different realm than the rest of us; they are more like bickering Olympian gods and goddesses than ordinary bottom-dwellers like ourselves.
Read the whole thing.