Watching the media hump Andrew Weiner …
Posted By Jeff on June 7, 2011
… is a little like watching a sexual assault, at this point. Which is to say, it’s not sexy, and not about sex. Now it’s about violence and humiliation.
Along with everyone else, I wrote about it (a bit) yesterday.
The only (other) person who I think caught the story right is Hendrik Hertzberg at The New Yorker, who had this to say, among other things:
“On MSNBC, the cable-news “home page” of my political tribe, one commentator said that one of the things Weinergate shows is that powerful politicians assume they can get away with things that regular people can’t. If they do assume that, they’re wrong. It would be more accurate to say that they can’t get away with things that regular people can. Look around you. Consider your friends, your work colleagues, your relatives, maybe even yourself. It’s likely that a nontrivial proportion of them have some sexual secret (at least they think it’s a secret) in their lives. If their secret comes out, if they get caught in an embarrassing lie about it, the whole world isn’t going to hear about it. It won’t be national news.”
In other words — what Weiner did was commonplace. It really was. Get together with 20 random acquaintances of yours and the odds are that at least two or three, maybe more, have done or are doing what Weiner did.
Tracy Clark-Flory has a nice take on how the Web has changed notions of intimacy and betrayal at Salon.com.
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