Twitter’s former Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth defended former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner’s extramarital “sexting” â€" which included sending explicit images and messages to underage girls â€" in a blog post, War Room can reveal.
The unearthed blog post, deleted since its publication on July 1st, 2011, follows controversy over Roth’s past Tweets and PhD thesis for appearing to promote pedophilia. Under Roth’s tenure, Twitter also had a notoriously lax approach to censorship of child pornography on the platform.
Roth’s blog post â€" “Anthony Weiner, Manhunt, and the Behaviors of Single People” â€" is the latest example of the former Twitter employee’s curious affinity for pedophilia.
In 2011, Weiner was caught engaging in inappropriate online relationships with several women he had met on the internet despite being married to longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later began investigating the former Democratic Congressman for sexting with a 15-year-old girl, which ultimately led to him pleading guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor. He served 21 months in federal prison.
At the time of Roth’s blog post, however, there was already extensive public reporting available that exposed Weiner for messaging underage girls.
Weiner’s preferred method of communication was Twitter.
Despite Weiner’s controversies, Roth insisted that he didn’t do “anything wrong” on his blog, which was posted on Roth’s personal site “Yoel writes things.”
“Setting aside the politics of the issue — I think the sexting scandal was a sufficient distraction that his resignation was in order, even though the problem lies squarely with the easily distractible American electorate, rather than with anything former-Representative Weiner said or did — I don't know that I've come to equilibrium on the issue of whether, as a human being and a married man, he actually did something wrong,” writes Roth.
Roth notes, “Further, in my hypothetical Weinergate universe, it's possible to assert with empirical certainty that, even if the possibility presented itself (a person he sexted threw him or herself naked at his feet, begging for sex), he would never take it. He is a paragon of marital fidelity, with the possible exception of the sexting. In this scenario, has Anthony Weiner done anything wrong? The most intuitive answer is: "no."
“Marital fidelity is judged first on physical action — did you have sex with another person? — and second on intentionality. In the absence of both, reason suggests that there was no harm done,” continues the post, before comparing the disgraced Democratic Congressman to a “fucking saint”:
“If Anthony Weiner's only sin is liking himself a little too much, then he's a fucking saint, by internet standards.”
“So, by my understanding, Anthony Weiner's great mistake isn't infidelity — it's a failure to embrace married life for what it is,” continues Roth, whose post makes no mention of Weiner’s proclivity to message underage girls.
“Anthony Weiner has been sending salacious pictures of himself to some of his Twitter followers (or posting them on whatever the heterosexual equivalent of Manhunt is). He isn't, like Larry Craig, actively soliciting sex; nor, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, is he actually having an affair — he's just sending out pictures of his junk to willing recipients. In this story, he has absolutely no intention of actually cheating on his wife by meeting another person for sex; he only wants to send out dirty pictures, for whatever reason,” he continues.
Read the blog post in full:
For the first time in about three months, I logged onto Manhunt this morning. I woke up with an overwhelming urge to finally delete the account I created in England in the depths of my post-breakup depression. After all, I told myself, I'm in a relationship now, and like Grindr and Scruff (which have also been removed from my phone), there's nothing Manhunt can really offer me.
A few clicks later, my account was gone. Amusingly, along with a pleasantly streamlined account deletion procedure (which is a huge improvement over the e-mail-wait-and-pray approach you used to have to take; needless to say, this isn't my first Manhunt deletion — my disgust with the site seems to come in 18 month cycles), Manhunt displays the pictures of other users who would supposedly "miss you" after deletion. I only warranted one such user: a gentleman with the handle "friendlyotterboy," who had, hilariously, borrowed the somewhat ridiculous hairy-chested picture I posted on my profile to use as his own. Apparently, the only person on Manhunt who will miss me is myself.
Aside from the indignities of having my online identity stolen for the purposes of facilitating someone else's casual sex, revisiting Manhunt got me thinking about, of all people, Anthony Weiner. Setting aside the politics of the issue — I think the sexting scandal was a sufficient distraction that his resignation was in order, even though the problem lies squarely with the easily distractible American electorate, rather than with anything former-Representative Weiner said or did — I don't know that I've come to equilibrium on the issue of whether, as a human being and a married man, he actually did something wrong.
Here's a hypothetical scenario to use as a test case on the issue:
Anthony Weiner has been sending salacious pictures of himself to some of his Twitter followers (or posting them on whatever the heterosexual equivalent of Manhunt is). He isn't, like Larry Craig, actively soliciting sex; nor, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, is he actually having an affair — he's just sending out pictures of his junk to willing recipients. In this story, he has absolutely no intention of actually cheating on his wife by meeting another person for sex; he only wants to send out dirty pictures, for whatever reason. Further, in my hypothetical Weinergate universe, it's possible to assert with empirical certainty that, even if the possibility presented itself (a person he sexted threw him or herself naked at his feet, begging for sex), he would never take it. He is a paragon of marital fidelity, with the possible exception of the sexting. In this scenario, has Anthony Weiner done anything wrong?
The most intuitive answer is: "no." Marital fidelity is judged first on physical action — did you have sex with another person? — and second on intentionality. In the absence of both, reason suggests that there was no harm done.
An op-ed in the New York Times argues that, even in the absence of actual infidelity, sexting represents a sort of narcissistic turpitude that ought to be shunned in its own right:
The Internet era's defining vice has been thrown into sharp relief. It isn't lust or smut or infidelity, though online life encourages all three. It's a desperate, adolescent narcissism.
…
At 46, Weiner isn't technically a member of Generation Facebook, but he's clearly a well-habituated creature of the online social world. The fact that he used the Internet's freedoms to violate his marriage vows isn't particularly noteworthy. That's just the usual Spitzer-Schwarzenegger routine performed on a virtual plane. What's more striking is the form his dalliances took — not a private surrender to lust or ardor, but a pathetic quest for quasipublic validation.
Okay, maybe the internet is making us all incredibly narcissistic, and maybe that manifests itself in kind of outlandish ways, a la tweeting pictures of your cock. But — and perhaps this is my own narcissism speaking — I don't find that explanation particularly compelling. Yes, maybe we're all self-absorbed and like clicking through our own Facebook pictures for hours on end; but when did a little amour-propre hurt anyone, anyway? If Anthony Weiner's only sin is liking himself a little too much, then he's a fucking saint, by internet standards.
Elsewhere in the Times, in a profile of Dan Savage's own "monogamish" definition of marital fidelity, Mark Oppenheimer wrote,
[Anthony Weiner’s] visage was insisting, night after night, that we think about how hard monogamy is, how hard marriage is and about whether we make unrealistic demands on the institution and on ourselves.
To which I can only respond: yes! The bigger issue of the Weiner scandal, for me, is what monogamy and fidelity mean, beyond the textual limits of "don't have sex with other people." Needless to say, my views don't quite align with those of Dan Savage. For me, Larry Kramer put it best in the closing pages of Faggots when he wrote, of the cavalier gay sexuality of the 1970s, "We shouldn't have to be faithful!, we should want to be faithful!" And that's the question of Anthony Weiner: does he want to be faithful, whatever that actually means? Even if we can assert that Anthony Weiner would never violate the text of his vows, is he failing to live up to the meaning of "faithful" by sexting other women?
The answer, for me, lies in the distinction between the behaviors of single people and the behaviors of people in relationships (or marriages, for that matter). When you're single, you're accountable only to yourself — to your own moral principles, or lust, or narcissism, or whatever — and accordingly can pursue any of a nearly infinite number of possible single-person activities: you can shamelessly flirt with people in bars; you can hook up with someone from Grindr; you can seek out new dates on OkCupid; you can post pictures of your penis on Twitter or Manhunt or Dudesnude or, for that matter, wherever the fuck you want, because, hey!, you're single and who cares?
(Herein, my boyfriend remarked that this post makes it sound like I frequently enjoy posting pictures of my penis online. I don't. Seriously.)
But when you enter into a relationship, my definition of acceptable behaviors becomes a little more restrictive. The first to go, obviously, are licenses to actually do anything with other people. But shortly thereafter, I start to see things like having Grindr on your phone or maintaining a Manhunt profile or sexting as increasingly unacceptable. It's not that they'll necessarily lead to the sorts of behaviors that constitute by-the-books infidelity; it's that they represent an unwillingness to leave behind the trappings of singlehood, even while reaping all the benefits of being in a relationship. It's this one-foot-out-the-door phenomenon that frustrated me so much about OkCupid: we don't let ourselves get invested in relationships, and then we sit back and wonder why, so often, they fail to work out.
So, by my understanding, Anthony Weiner's great mistake isn't infidelity — it's a failure to embrace married life for what it is. Marriage is a symbol of commitment and compassion; while sending pictures of your penis to strangers online doesn't preclude the possibility of those, it certainly makes them more challenging to wholeheartedly pursue. Or at least it would for me. Which is why, this morning, I found myself on Manhunt, once and (hopefully) for all deleting my profile.
Where I take Dan Savage's point, though, is that it's senseless to apply those same standards to everyone. At the risk of seemingly hopelessly relativistic, I'll just say: the fact that I can't reconcile my own Manhunt or Grindr presences with my relationship is not an indication that it's impossible; it's just not easy to do. Manhunt, notably, doesn't feature any sort of field for explicitly indicating your relationship status — a seeming monogamy "don't ask don't tell" policy. Maybe, as Savage writes, it's possible to reconcile commitment with flirting, online or offline. When it's taking place online, though, the distinction between theory and practice becomes more ambiguous. And therein, by my understanding, is the root of the problem.
