Men (12 page)

Human opportunity
indeed
. Isn't it the perpetual lure of such “opportunities” that keeps imploding people's careers and marriages? In the case of Weiner's Complaint, it's we the electorate, watching these implosions unfold in the headlines, who are tasked with reprising Dr. Spielvogel's role—in case you've forgotten, the whole book-length rant was addressed to Spielvogel, just as Weiner's Complaint is, arguably, to us. “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” is the sole thing the doctor says—one of those tightlipped Freudians, you infer—in the book's mordant closing line.
2
And what would Spielvogel have made of Weiner's Complaint, had he managed to get the congressman on the couch? We'll have to proceed by inference—or, better yet, turn to the more voluble Dr. Koestenbaum for direction.

Though equally a student of shame, Koestenbaum is less interested in the motives for seeking humiliation than in an
ethics
of humiliation. He wants us, when witnessing spectacles like Weiner's Complaint, to refuse to shame the already shamed, even those who seem to be vigorously seeking it out; the ethical position in such cases is to minimize humiliation, not inflict it. “We're all in the business of cleansing ourselves of shame,” he diagnoses, putting us on the couch along with the humiliation seekers. However skillful the provocation, he's determined not to participate. His brand of therapy involves forging allegiances instead: with sexually disgraced politicians or anyone with “a complicated sexual agenda.” Presumably this would include the complicated Congressman Weiner, as even former senator Larry Craig, the longstanding gay-rights foe caught making solicitations in an airport bathroom, gets a reluctant sympathy vote from Koestenbaum. No one should be humiliated for sex, not even sexual hypocrites.

Of course where Koestenbaum has the advantage over Weiner, or sad sacks like Craig, is that writers get a lot more social leeway when it comes to expressing potentially humiliating proclivities than do politicians—gay, straight, or indeterminate. Indeed, not only has Koestenbaum devoted much of his career to exposing himself—his obsessions with opera divas, and Jackie O., and in
Humiliation
, his sexual fantasies about students—and shows no signs of stemming the flow of radical self-exposure, he hasn't been punished for these preoccupations, or forced to resign his position as a Distinguished Professor of English. In fact he's been steadily promoted. Unlike Weiner, he had the foresight to choose a line of work in harmony with his being.

Lacking the same self-acuity, Weiner chose the nonstop scrutiny of politics as his arena of achievement, consigning himself to what can only have been a painfully fractured existence. Yearning to express more dimensions of himself to someone—to anyone—grasping for sympathy and affirmation from the universe, he seized on the new communication technologies as an outlet. The digital gadgetry pervading our lives does offer all sorts of possibilities for creative perversity, opportunities many of us have indeed explored, with occasionally humiliating outcomes. (A word to the wise: the impulsive cell phone video you make with today's beloved is tomorrow's revenge porn.) But creativity and perversity have always been kissing cousins—Freud thought they have the same instinctual origins, by the way. Thus where others have stressed the icky perversity of Weiner's photographic pursuits, I'd like to take a different route, and consider their self-expressive dimensions instead.

Creative expression does often put unconscious elements into play; you invariably reveal more about yourself than you know or can control. Consider the photo of Weiner holding up a handwritten sign with an arrow pointing to himself, labeled “Me,” sent to one of his online friends. I suppose he meant to be proving to the ostensible recipient that he was indeed who he'd claimed to be, an actual Congressman, though when I saw it my immediate thought was: It's like he's picking himself out of a lineup.

For what crime though? It was an uncanny image, prophetic of the exposure and shame to come. “This is who I
am
,” it also seemed to say. The message was a dual one. Koestenbaum writes that humiliation has the structure of a fold; the inner and outer realms change place, as in folding a napkin, though another of his examples is more pertinent to our inquiries than a well-set table: “Think of a defendant, in a trial, seeing his or her underwear presented as evidence by the prosecutor. An object that should be private and unseen is suddenly visible.” It's an apt way of describing Weiner's uncomfortably self-prosecutorial photographic style. Indeed, the first photo that surfaced
was
of his underwear—or, more precisely, of an erection thinly concealed behind gray boxer briefs.

Inner and outer realms changing places is also a good analogue for what tends to happen in the artistic process: interior life finds its way into some kind of exterior object or product. Reading this photo the way a critic or curator might, one would say its overriding aesthetic feature is the oscillation between concealment and exposure: the erection is apparent, but not fully visible; the body is exposed, but the face isn't. Who is this artist? Someone flirting with visibility? Someone for whom excitement is defined as risk-taking, who staged this performance for that reason? The photo
is
obviously taken by the person who's portrayed: he's the auteur—scriptwriter, stage manager, costume designer, star (in other words, every element is there by his design).

And the intended audience? It's evident the photo wasn't contrived for the recipient alone; there was a larger audience in mind, or the rest of us wouldn't be looking at it. Or let's say, in
some
corner of his mind. As befitting a man whose name is a sexual pun, the performance turns on a sort of pun too: he's exposing himself to
expose
himself. The humiliation didn't come after the fact—after the public outing, the hasty lies, the eventual mea culpa—it was there from the very beginning, it's written all over the photo. As with the erection itself—apparent, but not completely visible; like the famous purloined letter, hidden in plain sight. Note another bit of punning: being “caught with your pants down” isn't only an idiom, these photos tell us, it's literal too. It so recalls the awful dream of showing up at a dinner party (or giving a lecture or walking down the street) in your underwear—the variations are endless—but this time it's for real, in front of the entire world.

You have the underwear dreams too, right? I've been haunted by them as long as I can remember. Why can't we scrape these images out of our psyches? Koestenbaum recalls the indelible sight of a third-grade schoolmate, pants around his ankles, being paddled across his naked buttocks by the teacher as punishment for some infraction. The buttocks were pimply; girls could see the boy's penis. The queasy mixture of fascination, horror, and shame provides the model for every humiliation to come, Koestenbaum says, which is the reason he's come to think of humiliation as a contagion. When we're witnesses to other people being humiliated we share in it; we
catch
it. Even the teacher administering the paddling was humiliated; she'd abandoned her dignity, she'd “dragged the class into a turgid, low zone.”

Would Koestenbaum say that's where Weiner dragged us too? But did we catch something from him, or did we propel ourselves into that low zone by playing eager witness to his public shaming? This is my question: what should our relationship be with people who arrange for us to catch them doing shameable things, especially if you think, as I can't help thinking, that Weiner sent that photo to
us;
the college student was just an intermediary. Or is this too unequivocal—is it kinder to say that he “accidentally” sent it to us; he “meant” to send it to the student and somehow pressed Send All instead? (This was Weiner's explanation for how the first photo went public—clumsy typing.) But why quibble over details: exposure was inevitable. He merely sped the process along, as though impatient for Judgment Day to arrive.

So in Koestenbaum's terms, Weiner humiliated us as well as himself, though Koestenbaum would probably add—with his usual mischievous perversity—that this kind of thing can be strangely exhilarating. And also unsettling. What I find myself wondering is whether Koestenbaum's mercilessly shamed third grader evolves into the defendant whose underwear incriminates him in court or the congressman flashing his crotch shots in public until the hammer of social punishment crashes down. Do the disciplinary horrors of childhood somehow transmute into the grotesque self-inflicted injuries of adulthood?

When the sex photos first surfaced, and Weiner was still maintaining that his Twitter account had been hacked, he tried brushing the whole thing off as a joke on his name. While denying that he was responsible for sending the photos, he was weirdly intent on linking his name to the mysterious hacker's purpose. Except there was nothing to suggest any connection. Nevertheless … On CNN he said, “When you're named Weiner, this happens a lot.” “When you're named Weiner, it goes with the territory.” By my count he mentioned his name five times in a four-minute interview. I couldn't help wondering what it was like growing up with that taunt-inspiring name—what sort of playground mockery was involved, what humiliations imprinted on his psyche.

So why set yourself up for a reprise of childhood humiliation—wasn't once enough? Here we enter murky territory. The experience of humiliation plays a larger role in sexuality than we like to think, says psychiatrist Robert Stoller, writing about what he calls “the theater of risk” in erotic life. What looks from the outside like risk-taking sexual behavior—exhibitionism is the example he gives—can be a way of transforming early humiliations into triumphs. The risk taker seeks out dangerous situations as a proving ground, to measure his success at avoiding a greater risk, humiliation. It's what's
concealed
that's the crucial missing piece of information: namely, the mark that humiliation has left on the person's erotic life. As in Weiner's photos, there's an aesthetics of the visible and the hidden. Needless to say, it's a treacherous strategy; the real-life consequences can be devastating. Weiner didn't convert humiliation into triumph; all he managed to do was relive it.

The more you nose around the subject of humiliation, the more perplexed you become about what pleasure actually
is.
To say that people don't always use sex exclusively for pleasurable purposes is a pretty vast understatement. Yet how much can we grasp about the alternative purposes? Those “caught with their pants down” aren't typically very forthcoming about what they hoped to accomplish. Weiner, once exposed, said, “I don't know what I was thinking,” after he finally admitted sending the incriminating photos. “This was a destructive thing to do.” He further non-elaborated, “If you're looking for some kind of deep explanation for it, I simply don't have one.”

No doubt anyone in possession of a libido has experienced the occasional fissure between brain and groin, and knows how carefully both must be monitored to avoid personal catastrophe. “I don't know what I was thinking” is a phrase many of us have had cause to utter on occasion. Alcohol, that great disinhibitor, is a convenient after-the-fact explanation. Still, the general view is that when the brain suspends operations, it's in the pursuit of enjoyment, not pain and humiliation. “I wasn't thinking” is the customary code for “I had to stop thinking to have some fun.” The idea that we're pleasure-seeking animals tragically constrained by the encumbrances of civilization is a lot more palatable than the idea that we're destruction-seeking animals pursuing opportunities to degrade and humiliate ourselves in front of the world.

*   *   *

Koestenbaum's novel strategy is to do it deliberately instead of inadvertently. Embrace your humiliation! Along with the hapless Senator Craig, public bathrooms provide the settings for some of his most memorable humiliations too—so we learn here—as he's not just a theorizer of the subject, he's also performing it page by page, offering his readers “some details about my own penis and its proclivities” to amplify humiliation's universality. Take the time he was snubbed by a catheterized wheelchair-bound man in a train station men's room who, though positioned hopefully in front of the urinals, was clearly waiting for someone sexier than the author to arrive. Koestenbaum ups the ante by telling us that he snubbed the wheelchair guy too—they were both waiting for someone sexier to arrive. He's not just a reject, he's an
ableist
, which in today's climate is far more humiliating than just being an ordinary pervert.

Spinning out such episodes for maximum possible embarrassment is his show of solidarity with outcasts everywhere. As is writing about them to begin with, since writing is deeply humiliating for him too. You're begging for a response that may not be forthcoming, and unreciprocated desire is always humiliating.
Any
reader's dislike of your work is an injury: you've offered yourself to them, like offering your body to be caressed, and being refused is shaming. When he writes of editors rejecting commissioned essays and reviews (“a botch,” one declares nastily), or a publishing-house acquaintance taking unseemly glee in having shot down a submitted manuscript, or books he'd warmly inscribed to a revered poet turning up at a used-book store—now he's tapping my own deepest reservoirs of shame. I find myself doing a quick mental inventory: has this happened to me? It's like checking your limbs after witnessing a car accident to reassure yourself that you're still intact.

Humiliation
concludes with a numbered compendium of Koestenbaum's lifetime humiliations, from a disgustingly messy sneeze in fourth grade, up through more recent mortifications, like being told he has a flat ass. He may find writing humiliating, but he's also lucky enough to be excited by the creative dimensions of humiliation. And here's where I get off the bus—constructing a list of my favorite humiliated moments would be impossible for me, let alone publishing it. Even the thought makes me physically uncomfortable. Would I be a better writer if I cherished my humiliations more? I
don't
cherish them, even though I suspect that every accumulated wound and misery seeps out onto the page in every sentence you write. Writers are compelled to flash their underwear around in public too, camouflaged to varying degrees by form or craft, with critics playing the sadistic teachers, camouflaged to varying degrees by attacks on your form or craft. Yes, it's back to the third-grade classroom with every sentence you write, which is part of what makes it so excruciating. Sure, writing has its moments of sublimity—grasping after the ineffable, realizing something just out of reach—yet at every instance modulated by the chronic substratum of shame about having taken a dump in public.