When the first Anthony Weiner scandal broke out waaaaay back when in 2011, I was disappointed because he was one of the louder progressive voices always seen on political TV. He was my political crush at the time, though I feel uncomfortable admitting that now. I thought he was smart, funny, and, yes, sexy. Look. I said I’m ashamed of it now, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that. The scandal itself wasn’t particularly surprising, and I was on the fence as to whether he should be made to step down or not–side note: I find it very ironic that the party of moral/family values (Republicans) can have affairs willy-nilly and suffer no consequences, but when a Democrat does it, off with his head! By the way, I’m not saying the Democrat shouldn’t be remonstrated if need be, just that Republicans love to talk about how full of values they are, so they should be held to at least the same standard, if not higher than are Democrats who don’t act all holier than thou about morality.–until it turned out that he sent lewd pics to women who didn’t specifically ask for them. That is harassment, and I had a hard time watching some people on the left dismiss it or ignore it altogether. I’ll get into that more in a minute.
I don’t give a shit about affairs in general. Someone’s marriage is their own business, even if that person is in the public eye. I only care if it was not consensual/has problematic power dynamics or if there is hypocrisy involved. Larry Craig (hypocrisy). David Vitter (hypocrisy). Mark Sanford (hypocrisy and the misuse of public funds). All the other Republicans caught doing the wide stance in the international Minneapolis airport bathroom*. Speaking specifically about Weiner’s sexting, if it weren’t for the unwanted pics, I wouldn’t care at all about Weiner’s sexting, nor would I have thought he needed to resign over it. People have affairs. That’s a fact of life. In addition, he and his wife, Huma Abedin, may have had some kind of agreement that they can have outside partners. I will say that I thought there was something desperate about the way Weiner sexted other women–it made him seem so empty inside. The fact that he used a fake name and it was Carlos Dangerous just made him look pathetic to me.
I was uncomfortable with the way some on the left treated it like it was a big joke. Yes, his name begged to be laughed at, and lord knows, I did it myself more than once, but I didn’t think what he did was a laughing matter. Again, imagine if it were, say, Chuck Grassley, who had been caught doing the same thing. By the way, he’s a great follow on Twitter because it’s as if your grandpa were tweeting. One time, he tweeted that he was at Dairy Queen doing “you know what”!!! The quotes and the exclamation points included. Apparently, he’s tweeted it before, and this particular tweet was from October of 2014, but I didn’t see it until May of 2015. I tweeted back:
No, Chuck, I don’t know what. Tell me. Why is “you know what” in quotes & what’s up with the 3 !!!? I NEED TO KNOW. https://t.co/mn46GZUcp8
— Yoko MoDo (@asiangrrlMN) May 4, 2016
He’s really kind of poetic on Twitter, but that’s neither here nor there. Imagine that he was caught sexting several women and sending them lewd pics of himself. Imagine how Democrats would have howled in indignation and demanded his resignation. But, because it was one of our own, we had to hunker down and protect him.
I am not comfortable with that at all. I’m not a very moral person in the traditional sense of the word, but I’m highly moralistic in other ways. One of them is that an ideal isn’t worth shit if it’s not the same for everyone. I do understand that there can be extenuating circumstances, but if we’re going to say that Republicans need to be held accountable for their sexual misconduct, we need to hold Democrats to the same standard, even if the media have different standards for Democrats and Republicans.
Fast-forward five years and Anthony Weiner had been sent down the memory hole. During the heat of the presidential campaign, he suddenly surfaced again because, surprise, surprise, he’d been sexting with a woman (probably women) who wasn’t his wife. Of course, the Republicans had to crow about it while the Democrats once again went into defensive mode. This time, I was more sympathetic to the notion that it wasn’t anyone’s business but Abedin’s who was Hillary Clinton’s right-hand woman by this point. The only thing that gave me pause was that he sent the woman a pic of his four-year old son snuggled next to him, which was just gross, and the fact that the woman was a Trump supporter, which made my already-low opinion of Weiner plummet even further. But, I was uneasy with the fact that all the texts were published because it really wasn’t any of my business. I was also pissed that there were questions about Abedin’s judgment that she had left her son at home with Weiner. It seemed sexist to me because who would have said that if the positions had been reversed? If Weiner was the one being on the campaign trail with Clinton and Abedin was the one sending pics to some random dude with her son sleeping beside her, no one would have questioned his judgment in leaving his child with her because it’s still the norm for the woman to be taking care of the children. If anything, she would have been raked over the coals for her bad judgment, and he probably would have garnered a lot of sympathy, albeit sprinkled heavily with cuck jokes.
I felt slimy for reading anything about the situation because it really had no business being public except for purely prurient reasons. Even the picture of Weiner and his son, while in bad taste, wasn’t illegal or a threat to public safety. I don’t believe that if you’re a public person, you lose all rights to privacy. And, as I stated earlier, a marriage is unique to the people involved in it, and no one on the outside knows exactly what is going on inside of one. I wouldn’t be surprised if Abedin and Weiner had some sort of agreement, even if it was only tacit, that he could cat around outside the home. I doubt it included dragging their son into it, however, and it wasn’t a surprise when Abedin announced she was separating from Weiner. I felt sorry for her that she had to be dragged through the mud like that in a very public way, and I know I would be furious if my supposed beloved did that to me–especially if he brought our child into it. I don’t think there are enough swear words in the dictionary for what I would have said to him if he were my husband and I read this shit on social media.
Still. I didn’t see it as a reflection on Abedin or Clinton, and it went away after a day or two of trending on Twitter. That’s another thing that bothers me, the constant poutrage that is ever-shifting, but that is another post for another day. I didn’t like how vociferous some Democrats on social media were, blaming the media for blowing it out of proportion, because I knew they would have been up in arms if, say, Melania Trump had done the same thing. By the way, can we not slut-shame Melania for being a nude model and/or escort? It’s another example of Democratic hypocrisy that makes me uncomfortable and upset. You cannot champion sex workers on the one hand and then tsk-tsk Melania for having done that kind of work on the other. I mean, of course you can, obviously, but you won’t have much integrity afterwards if you do. Anyway, I didn’t think Weiner not being able to keep his dick in his pants was not newsworthy when he was no longer in public service, and I was glad when it went away.
Until today. Weiner was back in the news because he sexted with a fifteen-year old girl. Several of the texts were revealed to the media by the girl who decided to go public because she felt bad about what she was doing and because he pressured her to keep it quiet. She heard of him because of the first sexting scandal, and then she became obsessed with him. She contacted him through Facebook, but he’s the fucking adult in the situation, and he should have said to himself, “You know what? I should not text this girl back.” I read the whole thing for some reason. I’m not sure why, but I was sick to my stomach by the time I finished. If she had been his age or even twenty or thirty, I would have maintained that it was none of my business. Because she’s fifteen, however, that changes things. He knew she was fifteen, by the way. She talked about being in high school and not being able to Skype with him until her parents were asleep. Those were some of the tamer texts that had been revealed to the media.
I don’t care what this means politically. I still don’t think what he’s done should have any impact on Clinton or Abedin, but I’m not naive enough to think it won’t. I do care, however, that he took advantage of this young woman without any care what it would do to her emotionally. He was sexting other women at the same time, which he took great pains to tell this girl. I’ve probably said this before, but I hate narcissists and sociopaths, and Weiner is definitely the former, if not the latter. I can’t help wondering if he actually wanted to be caught on some level because he’s not a stupid man, but he’s certainly acting like one. Or, more likely, he simply didn’t care about anything other than what he wanted at the time. Putting on my psychology cap for a minute, he has an emptiness in him that can’t be filled no matter how hard he tries. The fact that he needs this constant validation from women is sad and pathetic.
I don’t want to have to care about Anthony Weiner and his roving dick.** I wouldn’t at all except for the gawking at the accident on the side of the road aspect of it and the fact that this girl is underage, which makes it detestable, if not technically illegal. Internet laws aren’t always caught up with reality. I hate myself for reading the whole story on this, but I’m glad I haven’t seen any Democrats defend his reprehensible behavior. I’m sure I will or that there will be bleating about how the media wouldn’t report on this if Weiner were a Republican. I. Don’t. Care. I do want an equal standard from the media on how they report on Republicans and Democrats, but not by lowering the standard for Democrats. If I think something is wrong for a Republican to do, then it’s also wrong for a Democrat. I know it’s natural to want to defend someone on your own team, but I expect better than that from my team. Otherwise, I don’t want to be on that team at all.
*Yes, I’m still bitter he chose to do that here.
**I know he’s never actually physically cheated on his wife, but I feel that’s splitting hairs.