Everyone has been debating whether Anthony Weiner is a pervert who needs to resign or, more generously, a sick person in need of psychiatric treatment. Though not as objectionable as the stock Christian conservative caught making same-sex love, Weiner surprises. But what's really intriguing is that we single people out, one at a time, for censure in a society full of people engaged in "perverted" liaisons (real or imagined) – with strangers they met on the internet. As Glenn Greenwald puts it, "Huge numbers of people prance around flamboyantly condemning behaviour in which they themselves routinely engage."
We only talk about internet sex when someone famous gets caught doing it, even though, for example, an estimated 42.7% of people view porn online. That is, in part, because only 30% of Americans think porn is morally acceptable (according to a recent Gallup poll; the death penalty is more than two times as popular, which beats out even premarital sex by five points.) A full 20% of men view porn at work – though I'm guessing this has to be top brass, senior enough to have a door on their office. Such behaviour is just a huge percentage of what anyone is doing online at any given moment. (And where do you think your partner's computer virus came from? A pornographic website is five times more likely to contain malware than a non-porn site.)
The movement of furtive hands has long been an open secret, hypocritically condemned and denied when accidentally brought to light – as dramatised in the HBO series Mad Men, when Betty Draper, divorced wife of the prolifically adulterous Don, berates her pubescent daughter Sally for masturbating at a friend's sleepover. Our secret desires have now been placed wholesale on the internet, where they are plain for everyone to see. Yet, since we hope that our personal dalliances stay private, we soldier on with our hardened Victorian morality play – even as the force of sexuality in our society becomes ever harder to deny – and all the more impossible for any one person to control.
We treat the internet like the locked hotel room of years past. But the door has long since cracked open.
Cell phones and the internet provide our libidos with this previously unimaginable extension, light years from the 1-900 numbers of decades past. And we don't really comprehend how our private lusting can be so public when virtual – how that quiet and lonely moment can go viral. Alec Baldwin writes on HuffingtonPost that Weiner "is a very busy man" who "needs something to take the edge off"; in today's world, that something is often internet sex.
Weiner is 46, and thus grew up without the internet, so the most I can say is that maybe he should possess a little more perspective on this still novel technological gambit. Today's young people, however, have only known a life suffused with instant messaging and texting ("sexting", even). The innocent flirtations and fondlings of a 1980s or 1990s teen, if fraught with sexual health anxiety, are for today's youth writ large and in digital circulation.
According to that Gallup poll, people 18-34 are way more accepting of porn and premarital sex. But it's the sext-messaging under-18 crowd that is pioneering the dick-pic revolution that swept Representative Weiner off his political feet. (Though the real prevalence of sexting is hard to pin down.)
Coquetry now often comprises a pants-down or shirt-up photo sent through a phone – face included, for the truly unfortunate and shortsighted. The teen "sext" epidemic has, of course, provoked a grownup freakout, reminiscent of the scene from John Waters' film Desperate Living, where a hysterical mother discovers a group of small children playing doctor and flees from the room screaming, "Oh God, the children are having sex!"
Sexting is a problem, immediately and permanently depriving a teen of control over an image of his or her naked body. But authorities conflate the problem with the most conventional sexual paranoia. Nationwide, prosecutors have sought to prosecute sexting teens as child pornographers – often of themselves: criminal and victim both!
The reaction to Weiner's misbehaviour is predictably lame. Older America carries on: one people by day, another nation entirely by the computer's soft glow – while young people immortalise their crotches far beyond the walls of high school restrooms. The media could better spending its time unravelling this tangled sex-knot of mass repression and compulsory exhibitionism. America has sexual hangups, and they go way beyond the graceless photo of one New Yorker's penis.
