Men

by Laura Kipnis

  In the interests of promoting a more emotionally attuned celebrity sector, I’d like to offer a few cautionary observations to all at-risk male celebs, at least those who haven’t yet been caught in “compromising positions.” To begin with, it’s a tough world out there, my friends. Gone are the days when a Monica Lewinsky told only a dozen or so friends and relatives about her thing with the president. These days a dozen confidantes might as well be none for someone nailing a famous guy, which is something worth thinking about if you happen to be a famous guy, or hope to become one someday.

  Also: these days everything is personal, but nothing is private. Chalk it up to the rise of narcissism, the digital revolution, the tabloid media explosion, or all of the above, but the upshot is that how we perform our roles as selves in public has radically altered in a relatively short period of time, and one of the main symptoms is that what used to be the public–private divide has become so porous as to be almost indecipherable. We’re increasingly conducting our emotional lives in public view. This has many sweeping social consequences, and one of them, sadly, is that the traditional entitlements of celebrity status come with new disincentives, namely that your one-night-standmate is likely to be tweeting about your performance or preferences before the sheets are even dry, or snapping naked cell phone photos of you while asleep, to deploy as necessary should you neglect to call the next day or otherwise disappoint (which you inevitably will).

  To return to the case under consideration, what was it that the legendary Tiger Woods—who conducted himself in a not particularly elegant manner with a string of talky paramours (more than a dozen eventually came forward with their grievances, their reminiscences, and copies of Tiger’s text messages where available)—might have missed about the women he was involved with? His wife too would soon come forward with her own grievances, reminiscences, and scrapbooks of painful marital memorabilia—we’ll return to her shortly.

  Let’s put on our psychologist hats and ponder this question: what exactly is the allure of sex with celebs, especially married ones who’d prefer to keep your existence a secret (though maybe they’ll text you next time they’re back in town if they can get away)? No doubt there’s simple animal attraction: celebs are frequently charismatic, they have an aura, sometimes they’re even quite good-looking. No doubt there’s the feeling of “a connection,” a “special spark,” though that often evaporates by morning. But the main benefit, as anyone with experience of such things knows, is that it confers specialness on the lucky recipient of the celeb’s attention: “He/she could choose anyone, and he/she chose me.”

  In Keith Richards’s memoir Life, a book crammed with sharp observations, I was struck by his passing remarks about the groupies who congregated at the hotel room doors whenever the Stones came to town. In contrast to some of his bandmates, Richards claims to have been indifferent to racking up sexual scores, though he makes use of these women nevertheless, occasionally for sex, but more often for other things. “They were providing a service … like the Red Cross. They’d wash your clothes, they’d bathe you and stuff.” Most of them weren’t particularly attractive, he notes. And though grateful for their ministrations, he still wonders why they were doing it.

  It’s a shrewd question: why indeed? Probably because people use sex for a variety of purposes, including as a curative, to assuage something, to feel a certain way about themselves.… This is fairly standard human behavior, and includes men and women both. Still, one doesn’t wish to discount the excitement of hanging out with rock stars, but the entry price for these women was a certain amount of willing self-abnegation. Maybe more than a certain amount.

  The problem with the groupie dynamic, at least from the savvy celeb’s standpoint, is that someone who craves the proximity of celebrity limelight and feels confirmed by hit-or-miss attentions bestowed under less-than-egalitarian circumstances is also likely to be someone afflicted by greater-than-usual quantities of insecurity and self-doubt, yet hopeful that a bit of the limelight will magically rub off, improving life in some unspecified fashion. Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually work that way, as the confirmation-seeker begins to realize the morning after, as the now mysteriously less-attentive celeb prepares to jet to the next city to greet the next admiring horde. Who wouldn’t feel a teensy bit aggrieved and maybe even slightly vindictive when the requisite quotient of affirmation is withdrawn? In fact, it’s probably those hoping to be lit up by contact with the limelight who are most likely to feel aggrieved and possibly vindictive in such conditions.2

  Luckily for the aggrieved, between the new consumer recording technologies, the tabloidization of traditional media, and the international market for downfall stories, the world will be falling all over itself for the details of these complaints. The groupie dynamic has undergone a revolution from below. Slut-shaming is no longer directed at women alone, it’s anyone’s weapon to deploy, as we saw in Tiger’s case, where public exposure became the tactic of choice for redressing power inequities. I’m not saying it was an entirely successful tactic, but it can inflict a lot of collateral damage along the way.

  But back to our psychology tutorial. Who are these fans most likely to feel affirmed by bathing in a celebrity’s aura, who experience it as such a turn-on or confidence builder that they’re willing to abject themselves as necessary for a few hours of horizontal proximity? Studying the photo arrays of Tiger’s past mistresses for clues about their inner lives does reveal certain commonalities. To begin with, there’s an insistent sexiness—a lot of bikinis, tousled hair, pouting, and perilously low-cut outfits. Tiger favored a certain physical type, it was widely (and leeringly) noted: blondes, and the especially well-endowed, were heavily featured. But I’d like to suggest that it was actually a common personality type the photos displayed: women whose calling card is hotness and who aspire to get things back from the world on that basis—attention, affirmation, riches, and maybe even love, though willing to settle for whatever’s on offer in the meantime.

  I don’t want to sound judgmental. Obviously we all work with what allures and talents we’ve been given in order to get things back from the world. But making hotness your chosen avenue is a more precarious route than others: it makes you a little interchangeable; newer models keep coming out. There’s also a certain amount of misrepresentation involved: the advertised hotness isn’t really about “liberated” sex at all, it’s the far more traditional variety—sex as exchange value, to get something in return, i.e., the security of a man’s steadfastness. When that proved unforthcoming in this case, two of the girlfriends were insulted enough to hire a lawyer to demand Tiger publicly apologize to them too, after he’d publicly apologized to his wife. These were mistresses with a vengeance—literally—and not about to be treated like anyone’s backstreet girl. They’d been dishonored, and they wanted the wronged wife’s prerogatives: a public grovel. (Some of them also wanted monetary damages.) Of course, there was another smidgen of limelight to seize too, and in this set, limelight is its own curative. But no doubt they did feel genuinely ill-used: injured by Tiger, they were out to return the injury.

  It’s not hard to understand anyone’s disappointment in not being uniquely chosen, though what’s missing from these grievances was any realistic understanding on their part of the man on the other side of the bed. Even through the opacity of the media carnival, you felt the poignancy of the situation, the poignancy of missed connections. What haunts these scenes is mutual misrecognition. The famously cynical quote from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan about love comes to mind: “Love is giving something one doesn’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” It’s a form of mistaken identity, in other words, inherently so: what we love are our projections. When transposed to the sphere of celebrity love, the same occlusions apply all the more—whether it’s sexual encounters or product endorsements the celeb in question is being enlisted for. Tiger wasn’t who the admiring throngs thought he was, and not who his corporate overseers needed him to be. Not
the smooth, ruthlessly disciplined winner, not the pioneering role model, but as needy and conflicted as the rest of us. Everyone misrecognized Tiger, including, apparently, his wife, who arranged a cover story in People because she wanted the world to know she’d had no idea who she was really married to.

  * * *

  It was the first and last time she would tell her story in public, People assured its readers about the “fiercely private golden girl,” Elin Nordegren. No one wants to minimize Elin’s ordeal, but it’s one of the paradoxes of our age that someone can be referred to in all apparent earnestness as “fiercely private,” even while in the midst of retailing her private pain in a mass-circulation periodical.

  Now, if I were a philandering sports celeb’s soon-to-be ex-wife, even if I were really steaming (as I’d have every right to be), wouldn’t I prefer to distinguish myself from the motley, mewling pack of “other women” and conduct my revenge in private? Isn’t that what hundred-million-dollar property settlements are for?

  Not anymore. Wronged spouses having their day in the press, “taking back their stories” in the aftermath of their husbands’ sex scandals: it’s the melodrama of our time. Melodrama is a genre that hasn’t fared so well of late otherwise—the histrionic sufferings of a Joan Crawford or Bette Davis look campy now, having been expropriated by drag queens and recycled as bitter irony. But wrap the suffering in a layer of real-life scandal and you’re back in business, which is where the betrayed wives of politicians and celebrities come in, armed with their brave stories and hindsight-tainted wedding photos. Note the familiar cast of characters: the quivering damsels in distress and the dastardly men who toy with them—it’s the melodramatic imagination updated. No doubt there’s something reassuring about the timelessness of these roles: she’s the perpetually wronged victim, he’s the devil incarnate or today’s secular equivalent—a sex addict, a serial adulterer, an incurable narcissist. As in the current story, with the messy complexities of modern marriage retold as a shipshape morality tale of innocence and guilt.

  According to the People profile, Elin was practically a candidate for immediate canonization: a “golden girl,” a near-saint. The salvation-versus-damnation theme prevailed throughout the story. “I’ve been through hell” were Elin’s words. “But I survived.” Melodrama’s signature is its overwroughtness—everything that can’t be spoken of directly finds a backdoor way of sneaking into the story, in the guise of stylistic excess. Think of Douglas Sirk—the crashing music and swooping camera movements of Magnificent Obsession or Written on the Wind signaling the return of the repressed—and compare to the moral Manichaeism of Elin’s People appearance.

  The article kicked off with a full-page photo of the exceptionally blond former model (she hails from Stockholm) posed in a darkened room, chin on hand like Rodin’s The Thinker, staring thoughtfully into the distance. A shaft of light shines through parted curtains, illuminating her hair and features, symbolizing hope—the new life of dates and degrees (she’s back in college) that await her. Or maybe it’s the newfound self-illuminations that her husband’s betrayals have forced on her? Whatever that shaft of light symbolized, you couldn’t help noticing how insistently the artfully styled visuals, along with the text itself, kept returning to the darkness-versus-light motif, another of melodrama’s big preoccupations. “She is putting her darkest days behind her,” confirmed the article’s subhead, in case anyone missed the point. That the dark days suffered by the exceeding fair Elin were instigated by a dark-skinned man—in the multi-racial Tiger’s designation, “a Cablinasian”—whom she’s also putting behind her, added an awkward racial subtext to the marital melodrama. Did no one notice this?

  Or maybe obliviousness was the prevailing condition on everyone’s part in this story, every step of the way. Why would anyone think a talent for hitting a small ball into a hole with a long stick correlates with honesty or self-knowledge? Unfortunately, deficiencies in such traits made Tiger an inadequate corporate shill as well as a bad husband—there went $22 million in product endorsements overnight. He was definitely a big disappointment when it comes to the country’s fantasies about the monogamous inclinations of sports legends, though wouldn’t you have to be pretty credulous to bank on such fantasies in the first place?

  And what of the saintly Elin: what of her fantasies, her credulity? Stepping into the public spotlight for the first and last time in People, the former model and former celebrity wife wanted the country to know that she’d been blindsided by her husband’s affairs and never suspected anything. She knew the man she was married to very little, it seems. Though to be fair, Tiger turned out to be a more multi-layered personality than his fans, his corporate sponsors, or even his wife had any incentive to recognize. But then what use would a conflicted sports icon be to any of them?

  As anyone who’s been married (or simply been in the vicinity of a married couple) will attest, marriages are emotionally awkward arrangements between two people who frequently turn out to have wildly different needs and desires. Here’s a hypothetical marital situation: one person likes sex and the other doesn’t. Or once did, but doesn’t much feel like it currently. Hardly an uncommon plight, according to anecdotal evidence. Isn’t this a form of betrayal too? I’m not saying it was the case in the marriage under discussion, since I have no idea. I’m just saying that in the actual world we inhabit, not the one where the forces of darkness battle the forces of good, sometimes it’s harder to know who’s a saint and who’s a sinner than melodrama would lead us to suppose.

  Coupledom is a pact two people make to attempt to know one another and create a life together, but it’s just as important to overlook things too. A certain amount of strategic myopia is required, or the marital enterprise would be in even worse shape than it is. Getting the balance right is tricky. Knowing someone too well can kill desire: boredom and irritation result. Knowing someone too little can lead to nasty surprises. It’s one of the conundrums of modern coupledom, or call it a “challenge” if you prefer. How do you know who this person you’re married to is “underneath”? And if you do learn everything there is to know, penetrate every secret crevice, how can you possibly continue?

  It’s a cliché to say that you never really know what goes on inside someone else’s marriage, but the hard truth is that you never entirely know what’s going on in your own: the most familiar spouse can betray you horribly, even when there’s no other person in the wings. The forms of spousal betrayal I’m thinking of include the quotidian ones, which no one entirely eludes—getting fat, getting boring, getting old, and then dying, the biggest betrayal of all. Stepping out on someone is only the most dramatic instance of all the ways there are to be a disappointment to a mate, though it’s the one around which every anxiety seems to cluster. But while we’re at it, why not hurl a few condemnations at the less melodramatic betrayals too?

  Look, I’m not saying I particularly want to be cheated on, though it’s probably happened. If I sound cavalier about it, I suppose it’s that I have a certain soft spot for restlessness and unruly desires, for wanting more as an ontological condition. Or for not knowing what the hell you want. I can understand the impulse to experiment with other emotional and sexual possibilities than domestic coupledom always delivers, though big messes certainly can ensue. But we live in complicated times and no one here’s a saint. Probably no one much wants to live with one either.

  Self-Deceivers

  The philosophical literature on self-deception is not incredibly helpful if you’re trying to learn how to avoid the condition. A recent examination of the topic begins with the following example: “A survey of university professors found that 94% thought they were better at their jobs than their average colleague.” Are university professors exceptionally adept at self-deception or is it an endemic condition, the author (a professor himself) wonders. Yes and yes, but what does that tell us? Maybe that the extent of your own self-deception is one of those dog-chasing-its-tail questions no one’s capable
of answering—how would you know that the answer you came up with wasn’t just another instance of your talent for self-deception?

  I came to be perusing this useless genre of pseudo-expertise because I was writing a book about scandal and why people keep blowing up their lives in such flamboyant ways on the national stage, acting out their weird psychodramas and tangled anti-social desires, generally leading to grisly forms of humiliation. Society gets vengeful when its norms are violated—a fact you’d think would require a rather skillful form of forgetting to ignore, since it’s one of those basic truths of social existence. Still, despite the many disincentives there’s no shortage of humans lining up to do it all the time, fueled, it seems, by this fateful capacity for self-deception.

  As we know, many of those in line are male politicians who, despite their buttoned-up demeanors, keep getting exposed to the world in farcical sexual situations. Or it’s our habit to treat these episodes as farce: the late-night comedians go to town, the pundits take a jesting tone. Even so, there’s nothing so uproarious about being the butt of late-night comedy; it’s more like the modern equivalent of a town square pillory. It’s not being shunned the exposed politician has to fear, it’s being turned into a hapless schlemiel and getting laughed out of town.