[LINK] Anthony Weiner links: Sex and the Internet and queer history

[rfmcdonald]

Anthony Weiner photo scandal

At Salon, Thomas Rogers asked an obvious question: "How would Weiner do on Grindr?"

We uploaded Weiner's shirtless shot to a phone, and logged on in midtown Manhattan. Almost immediately, men started sending him messages. "More pics," one 31-year-old man, wearing an oversized baseball cap and standing on a beach, asked immediately. When Weiner responded with the image of himself posing with his cats, and then the picture of his bulging gray briefs, the man answered by asking Weiner's age, and sending a shirtless photo of himself in his underpants.

Over the course of the next 24 hours, Weiner's Grindr profile received six more messages from people who were intrigued and interested in potentially meeting up. Their entreaties responded from a straightforward "hey handsome" to "where you at?" to a man sending a picture of himself upside down on a trapeze.

So why are gay men so much more receptive to these kinds of photos than straight women? It might be because men are simply more turned on by visual cues than women. (A point made by Cindy Meston in this interview with Tracy Clark-Flory.) It might be because gay male culture has always had a much greater emphasis on casual sex than the straight world, and if you're going to hook up with someone and never talk again, you're probably going to be more interested in what his chest looks like than how he feels about current events like, say, Anthony Weiner. Throughout much of gay history, men were only able to connect through furtive glances, behavior that remains firmly ingrained in the way we interact.

Ironically, one could actually also argue that Weiner's conspicuously hairless, gym-built torso is also the curious end result of this particular aspect of gay culture. The obsession with hyper-muscular torsos that emerged in gay culture in the 1980s helped foster a widespread obsession with the body that fed the metrosexual craze of the 1990s. Weiner's carefully sculpted, quite possibly waxed, torso belies a male vanity that would not have been acceptable before gay men managed to convince straight men that it was a good idea to spend $200 a month on a gym membership and go to a tanning salon.

Slate's Farjad Manhoo, meanwhile, enunciates "Weiner's Law": "The Web makes it easier than ever to cheat—and easier than ever for cheaters to get caught."

Is it possible to send out photos of your body parts in a secure fashion, such that they're viewable only by the many, many objects of your affection but not the public at large? More generally, how can you—whether you're a Democratic congressman from New York, a Republican congressman from New York, a pro golfer, or an NFL quarterback—set up a liaison online without getting caught?

Short answer: You can't. The Internet was built for sharing, and if you send pictures, videos, or text to one person, you might as well cc: Andrew Breitbart. This is the paradox of the Internet-abetted illicit hook-up. Digital technology has made setting up a secret relationship easier than ever before. You can find someone to love on Craigslist, use your cellphone to snap and send her photographic evidence of your deep feelings, and then log on to Hotels.com to book a place to meet. Best of all, you can do it all from the privacy of your home or congressional office, all with your wife in the next room.

The trouble is, all these tools will record a trail of your misdeeds—there's your browser history, your phone's archive of photos and text messages, your damning e-mail inbox. If you're careful, you can minimize the danger that any of this stuff will leak. But being careful is inconvenient, and it's likely a turn-off to your paramours. Plus, however careful you are, you'll never eliminate the chance of getting busted. Call it Weiner's Law: As the volume of your X-rated tweets increases, the probability of your genitalia ending up on TMZ approaches 1.