Some years ago, before “Weiner” was a verb or a “-gate,” I got an email out of the blue from a guy I knew in high school. I had had a crush on him at one point, but our interactions were confusing and ultimately not the most pleasant. But this email was very cordial, and I answered him back, thinking “Good, we’re both grown up now; I can smooth out this little rough patch in my memory.” Pictures (the ordinary kind) and brief histories were exchanged. I was glad to be able to demonstrate that I had grown up sane after all (I was a flaky teenager) and had a successful, exciting career.
He turned out to be a Washington poobah. (No, not Anthony Weiner.)
I enjoyed our casual exchanges about politics and what had been happening in life, but started to notice a sexual undercurrent in his messages. I began to suspect he had not changed all that much from high school, where he had seemed a little overly hormonal even for a teenager. At first I thought he was just teasing me and I refused to take the bait, deflecting the sexual banter with what I hoped was dry humor, and making it very clear I wasn’t interested. Eventually I was moved to state flatly that he did not seem happily married. He wrote back that he and his wife were very good friends, but had not had a sexual relationship for some years. This struck me as bullshit, and I thought maybe I should wind down our correspondence. Maybe one of us was not so grown up after all.
Emails kept coming, most of the messages conventional and interesting, but nearly always containing bits, usually at the very end, that became more and more flagrant, a few including “funny” suggestive pictures (not of him—frankly he wasn’t that hot). Most of this I ignored.
Early on I had had a political issue I thought he could shed light on, and fired off a question from my desk at work—stupidly—and messages would sometimes arrive there. One day I got an alert in my work inbox that a message from him had been quarantined because of inappropriate content. Great. I emailed him saying, essentially, WTF? I was royally pissed off. He protested that he hadn’t written anything obscene (more bullshit, I thought); I made it clear that it wasn’t to happen again and to delete that email address. Then one day I got a really disturbing message from him—at work—in which he described in detail a sexual encounter that he said he had just had in his office. I frankly couldn’t help responding that I didn’t believe a word of it, and told him to stop emailing me.
His response to that—at work—was such an outrageous putative description of my personal anatomy that I had to wonder how it got past the quarantine people. I didn’t respond. After some weeks in which I simply deleted his emails, he gave up. So that was that—not of Weiner magnitude, but I have no doubt that upon the lifting of an epistolary finger, I could have summoned an avalanche of crotch shots, with or without underwear.
Did I tell anybody about this? My husband, certainly, I had been giving him commentary from time to time. Did I contact the wife and “tell on him?” No. Was I tempted to? No. Did I alert the media? No. He wasn’t all that famous. If he had been, would I have been tempted to? No.
Now all this Weiner shit has hit the fan. Whoa, déjà vu. There but for the grace of God go you, my old jackass friend, if you were only famous enough.
I gotta ask, though: who participates in and encourages something like this for a considerable time, and then turns around and broadcasts it to the public as Meaghan Broussard did? I cannot wrap my brain around that.
Apparent Non-Sequitur (for the Purpose of Providing Some Little Relief from Sordidness)
Say that I tweet you this picture of my grandbaby: Copyright (c) 2011 kelley74ny
This is a cute picture. It is so cute that you might be tempted to download it and go sell it to a baby calendar company for $100. Or even give it to them. But you can’t. Because I would have your ass on a platter. Because it’s my effing picture.
End Apparent Non-Sequitur
(Back to Sordidness)
Editorial note: It was making me queasy to have my actual grandson's innocent little face in the middle of all this so I changed to a cartoon baby. It is not actually him, and of course, not nearly as cute.
Further editorial note: Okay, okay, people are telling me I should slap a copyright on the cartoon or somebody might be able to steal it. I don't think they can, but I might as well.
Jessica Logan was a 16-year old whose ex-boyfriend maliciously forwarded intimate pictures she had sent him, and who was then taunted by classmates and friends until she hanged herself in her bedroom, where her mother discovered her body. Hope Witsell, a 13-year old girl, sent a topless picture of herself to a boy she wanted to impress. Same consequences, same exact terrible ending. And then there’s Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide after a video was broadcast of him with another boy.
All these and similar cases resulted in agonized soul-searching and editorials and sermons about teen bullying…and in some cases criminal charges and lawsuits.
There are a number of instances of image abuse between adults, including one case in which a man maliciously posted nude pictures of his ex-wife on a porn site. Probably the most high-profile case is the $10 million lawsuit Pop Star/Movie Star Jennifer Lopez instigated against her ex-husband who was allegedly planning to sell a sex tape that they had made on their honeymoon.
It is so obviously NOT COOL and probably illegal to shatter the privacy and mental health of someone by broadcasting pictures that were intended for one person’s eyes alone. It would be another thing if the pictures were intended to harass, but from what I hear, Broussard participated fairly enthusiastically in the Weiner escapade. And here the issue becomes murky—what kind of relationship do you have to have with somebody to assume that a picture is an intimate exchange not meant to be shared with anyone else? What kind of expectation of privacy could Anthony Weiner have had with Meaghan Broussard?
The original crotch shot on the Twitter feed was Weiner’s own fault, to be sure. And yes, he is a jackass and I’m so mad at him I could spit. Mainly because I don’t think any of this is any of my business, and yet unless I go into seclusion it’s rubbed in my face day in and day out. Weiner deserves the pain. (And now it turns out his wife is pregnant??? OMG.)
Notwithstanding all this, here is my point: There is more than one moral trespasser confronting us in this affair.
Weiner, according to who tells it, did something incredibly stupid, or he grievously sinned. But what he did (the original sin before the lying-about-it part) isn’t any of our business. And, jackass though he is, he apparently never intended to hurt anyone. What Breitbart did, and Meaghan Broussard did, is our business and I think there’s a lot that could and should be said about it.
Why is it OK that Andrew Breitbart acquired and published these pictures? Or that somebody gave (sold?) them to him? And that Breitbart is now holding an allegedly X-rated picture over Weiner’s head, threatening to publish it in case he, Breitbart, is “attacked?” Is blackmail is okay if you do it in public?
So much energy is being expended on trying to get our technologically-fixated and ethically-challenged youth population not to spread around dirty pictures of each other, and to refrain from bullying, cyber- or otherwise.
I ask you: What does it do to our credibility with these young people that Andrew “The Vindicated” Breitbart and his associates have publicly, ostentatiously and self-servingly cyber-bullied Anthony Weiner, intentionally damaging him and causing tremendous collateral damage to his wife and family, apparently with impunity?
I'm just asking.