Sex, Lies, and YouTube

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Kay S. Hymowitz

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 McGreevy, Mark Sanford, Eliot Spitzer, and Tiger Woods. These are just the thirty-minutes-of-fame-ers. There are plenty of other minor-league cads who got their more commonly apportioned fifteen 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, dildos, handcuffs, whips, vibrators, 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.

But male—they are almost always male for reasons that will become clear—politicians and role models? They're going to suffer for their adulterous ways. In fact, they will be put through what might be called the National Adultery Ritual. A politician, or in Woods's case, a role model and a valuable corporate brand, is discovered to have betrayed his wife with another woman, or as it frequently happens, women. The press circles and the shame fest begins. The sinner is subjected to a veritable waterboarding of late-night TV jokes, derisive cartoons, tabloid headlines, embarrassing interviews with the mistress and other former girlfriends, analyses by psychologists on the inner demons that drove the man to such behavior, rampant speculation on the future of the bleeding marriage. Then there are the car and helicopter chases, flashing cameras, the gawkers, the plague of paparazzi locusts and microphones, and countless replaying of all of this on YouTube: a sane person might prefer a scarlet letter.

Consider the public judgment rendered on Mark Sanford, cheating husband of Jenny Sanford, father of four Sanford sons, and officially censured governor of South Carolina. The term "laughingstock" comes from the medieval tradition of clamping a malefactor in wooden leg and arm restraints in the town square where passersby could jeer and throw things at his helpless form. Sanford was the twenty-first-century man in the stocks. Television hosts mocked him mercilessly. David Letterman (at the time an undisclosed adulterer, although as an entertainer more easily forgiven) tried this: "Governor Mark Sanford disappeared ... and it turned out he was in South America. And then it turned out he was down there because he was sleeping with a woman from Argentina. Once again, foreigners taking jobs that Americans won't do." Keith Olbermann labeled Sanford the "Wild Bull of the Pampas" and provided a dramatic reading of his e-mails with schmaltzy mood music playing in the background, lingering lasciviously over the parts about the curve of his lover's hips and her hidden tan lines.

Nor are professional comics and pundits the only ones to enjoy debasing the sinner. When given the chance, the public eagerly joins in. After Tiger Woods's wrongdoing came to light, amateur preachers took to YouTube. "Tiger 'n Whores" was one musical contribution to the golfer's punishment; "They're both pros at what they do," goes one of the lines. Another preacher mocking the golfer's dubious taste in mistresses called his video: "Tiger Woods: You Are a Man Whore!" CNN's story about the Sanford divorce was followed by angry verbal rock-throwing from commenters: "scumbag," "dweeb," "dirtbag," they scrawled. "Go crawl under a rock. Oh and keep your mouth shut because everything that comes out of it is a LIE!!!"

If details of the affair in question come to light, the public uses them to further humiliate the adulterer. Details strip the sinner of any remaining dignity by...