Tweeting ain’t cheating? Sure, it is

Maureen Dowd weighs in on the Weiner situation:

Tweetin’ ain’t cheatin’.
In his sensationally surreal apologia, a weepy Anthony Weiner had only one thing to brag about: “I’ve never had sex outside my marriage.”
No congress for the congressman. In the new, mega-political Internet sex scandal, the 46-year-old New Yorker downplayed his phone sex and salacious sexting with female strangers as “you know, almost a frivolous exchange among friends”.
Scrabble is a frivolous exchange among friends. Taking a picture of your deal, as David Letterman dubbed it, and blasting it into hyperspace to women you’ve never met is, you know, something more creepy and compulsive.
When Democratic front-runner Gary Hart had his vertiginous fall in 1987, after his photo with Miami model Donna Rice on the Monkey Business hit the papers, feminists were irate that this progressive pol was treating women as objects. They found it especially galling that Hart had married up— winning the daughter of a former president of his college— and then got caught dating down.
The weenie Weiner married up to Hillary Clinton’s aide, the glamorous and classy Huma Abedin, and only eleven months later got caught edating down with a Vegas blackjack dealer, a porn star, and a couple of college students.
This time, no feminist umbrage rang out, and not merely because Weiner is a liberal Democrat. Women have been conditioned by now to assume the worst.
In five decades, we’ve moved from the pre-feminist mantra about the sexual peccadilloes of married men, that boys will be boys, to post-feminist resignation: men are dogs. And there’s no point in feminists wasting their ire at women being objectified, because many women these days seem all too ready to play along.
We’ve traded places with France. There, after Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a spirited feminism has blossomed, an urge to stop covering up seamy incidents of droit du seigneur. Now we’re the world-weary ones, with little energy to try to reform relations between the sexes: Is there any point, really, in trying to fix men?
This scandal resonates less as a feminist horror story than an internet horror story. Are men, as New York magazine recently suggested, losing interest in having sex with their real partners because they’re so obsessed with porn, sexting, and virtual partners? The lazy man’s way to sex, where a billion women are a click away.
After seeing a cascade of famous men marrying up and dating down— Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Dick Morris, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Tiger Woods, David Vitter, John Ensign and Arnold Schwarzenegger— and with Dominique Strauss-Kahn being supported by his prominent, elegant, and wealthy journalist wife as he fights charges that he assaulted a 32-year-old hotel maid, maybe feminists have learned that male development stops at power.
This scandal seemed like an insane cat’s cradle, with Spitzer commenting on the bad judgment of Weiner, who was a beach-house buddy of Jon Stewart and who was married by Bill Clinton to Huma, who was a White House intern for Hillary (who ran against the two-timing Edwards) when Monica was an intern for Bill.
Sometimes powerful men are secretly insecure, needing constant reassurance about how important and attractive they are. The waxed bare-chested picture Weiner sent to Meagan could have been captioned: Geek who buffed up. As Orwell noted: “Any life, when viewed from the inside, is simply a series of defeats.”
Often powerful men crave more than love and admiration from The Good Wife. Sometimes they want risk, even danger. Sometimes they’re turned on by a power differential. They adore a fan reaction like the one from Lisa Weiss, the Vegas blackjack dealer, who flirted with Weiner on Facebook: “you are sooo awesome when you yell at those fox news” pundits, and “I bet you have so many chicks after you! you are our liberal stud.”
In her book, Elizabeth Edwards wrote that she would have bet her big house that her husband would not fall for a cheesy line like the one Rielle Hunter tossed at him: “You are so hot.”
But clichés work. As Weiner wrote to Weiss: “What are you wearing?”
Meagan Broussard, a 26-year-old college student and single mom from Texas, wrote on BigGovernment.com, conservative Andrew Breitbart’s site, that her relationship with Weiner began when she wrote on his Facebook page that one of his speeches to construction workers was “hot”.
“Within an hour,” she wrote, “we were sending messages back and forth.” Broussard lost her sense of awe pretty quickly: “Talking to him was sometimes a turn-off because he was so open and just so full of himself, as if he were looking, searching for something.”
In some ways, internet sex has fewer risks, like disease. But there’s the risk of exposure, in all its meanings, and ruining your real life before a global audience. That’s what Weiner, who ensnared himself in a web of lies outrageous even for Capitol Hill, is finding out.