Excerpt from The Virtual Stain: Political Sex Scandals in the Age of Social Media

Jeremiah Granden: Georgia Tech University

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Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Introduction Political sex scandals, while of profound interest to the press and the general public, do not attract much scholarly attention. This is a shame because this is a subset of political life in desperate need of thoughtful analysis. Under present conditions sex scandals begin with news story that clinically reports the blowjob or foot tap in a bathroom stall in all it salacious detail, followed by a rapid descent into a nadir of scorn and lamentation that the guilty party can only dig himself out of (they are almost invariably male) with a public apology and an invocation of rehab. Little is ever drawn from these common mishaps beyond the maxim to not do those things, and if that maxim fails, to not get caught. In the social sciences one is trained to look for puzzles. The key puzzle here is why human beings, whose own erotic lives are without exception awash in a forbidden history, both lived out and imagined, buried beneath the more socially amenable and easily expressed facets of sex would expect their politicians to be uniquely chaste. Furthermore, can this expectation survive in an era where virtually anyone can use digital technology to record and broadcast sexual experiences to an unparalleled degree? Unfortunately, these puzzles are too sweeping to be solved here, but what will be addressed is the problem of the political sex scandal in the era of digital media. Is it really reasonable for a politician to resign if he or she is caught up in an indiscretion; particularly when the cheapness and ubiquity of digital technology and social media means that these scandals will remain commonplace? Does something like an affair or a homosexual encounter in a bathroom stall, as damaging as these illicit activities may be to an
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individuals personal relationships, represent an insurmountable violation of the public trust? Do the staged pleas for forgiveness and the obligatory surrender of ones erotic desires to the sad world of rehab represent a desperate roll of the dice that arbitrarily saves some careers while failing to save others? Is a sexual life that does not explicitly revolve around family, procreation, traditional roles, and monogamy unacceptable in the public sphere? This paper argues that the answer to all of these questions, at least in the West, is no. Politicians, by and large, should not default to falling on their own sword over something as petty as a sex act. Doing so posits that what these individuals do with their bodies is more important than the political and social vision they were voted into office to pursue. While the pursuit of sex may lead to a violation of the public trust, violations like these are not the operative component found in the lions share of sex scandals. Furthermore, what decides the fate of an individual political career is unlikely to be sheer luck nudged along by a plea for mercy and flight into rehab, but rather a set of expectations that transcend commonplace sexual mores. Most importantly, there is indeed room for a sweeping variety of sexual expression in the political sphere, from the outrageous to the chaste, and it can be argued that all types have something to offer if it can be said that the sexual realm of human experience is a significant concern at all. While at one time it may have been naively believed, to cite an analogy that my Republican father used to wryly throw out during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, that Ronald Reagan wouldnt take his suit jacket off in the Oval Office the social media explosion means that peoples sexual lives, including those of politicians and young people who may someday want to be politicians, will be exposed digitally at increasing levels and there will be less room for the assumption that our leaders are sexless servants of the flag. The nexus of eroticism and

public life therefore has to be reckoned with and a more mature response than the typical fingerwagging will need to be sought out. This paper will first outline the main technological drivers of digital sex scandals. It will then assess the relationship between sex scandals and two other classes of public figures: traditional celebrities and individuals in the public trust who are not politicians. From there, a theoretical framework for judging political sex scandals will be laid out. This framework will be applied to a sampling of male and female political figures. The findings will be summarized and the implications of the research will then be given. Main Drivers of Digital Sex Scandals According to the 2010 census seventy-five percent of all Americans, or approximately 221,767,000 people, live in a household with Internet access. Sixty-five percent of these individuals claim to actually get online in the privacy of their homes, rather than doing so exclusively at an outside location or foregoing Internet usage altogether (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). Presumably, most of these people (excepting perhaps children and adults who are unable to operate a computer without assistance) can use the Internet either freely or with a degree of privacy at some point in the day. This infers that the majority of Americans have at least some opportunity to transmit and receive whatever data they like without being monitored or interfered with. Furthermore, in 2011 there were 95.8 million active smartphones in the U.S. (Goldman 2011). Since even the cheapest of these devices come equipped with a camera, Americans now have the ability to capture, transmit, and receive images while on the move, without having to rely on a film development lab or even access a computer. Cell phones can be taken anywhere; be it a nightclub, a mall, or a locker room, and their small size and ubiquity make impromptu and clandestine picture taking an easy task. A cursory search of amazon.com indicates that digital
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cameras, which produce better images than cell phone cameras do, can be purchased for a hundred dollars or less. Webcams are a common feature in laptops and can be acquired separately on amazon.com for as little as twenty dollars. To summarize, the evolution of digital technology gives a wide swath of Americans the unprecedented ability to document their lives and share photographic information with minimal censure or supervision. It will thus come as no surprise that this technology has been used to capture sexual life. Pew Research and the University of Michigan found that four percent of cell-phone owning teens and six percent of adults have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves to others. Approximately fifteen percent of teens and adults have sent and/or received these sexts. Sexting takes place under three primary contexts: as a private activity engaged in by couples where the images remains private, as an activity between couples that is shared with others outside the relationship, or as a form of courtship where an individual pursues a relationship or sexual activity through sexting (Lenhart 2010). A peer-reviewed study of adolescent sexting published in 2012 suggests that sexting is even more common than the 2010 study indicates; with eighteen percent of males and seventeen percent of females having transmitted explicit images of themselves, and fifty percent of males and thirty percent of females having received such images (mean percentage of all grade levels at a high school in the American Southwest) (Straussberg et all 2012). Sexually suggestive and/or explicit materials can also be placed on mainstream social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter (although explicit material is forbidden on some platforms), incorporated into blogs, or posted on pornographic websites like Pornhub and Imagefap. Adults with homemade erotic photographs or videos stored in a camera or on a hard drive may fall victim to theft and have private images transmitted across the web, as has recently happened to the hip-hop artist Kanye West
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(Goodhand 2012). The Girls Gone Wild video series features unpaid and often intoxicated young women flashing and performing sexual acts for the benefit of film crews that gather around bars and spring break settings. Some of the captured footage is available on the Internet. There is also the so-called upskirt phenomenon, where voyeurs take non-consensual photos of women in public places. In short, there are multiple scenarios, not all of which are listed here, where individuals can either sexually expose themselves, or be exposed, digitally. Any data of this nature, regardless of the degree of intentionality and consent that may be associated with it, has the potential to go viral over the Internet. There is a dearth of information on how many and what people participate or have participated in this digital sexual ecology. If eighty-eight percent of Americans own cell phones and thirteen percent of people younger than age thirty have sent sexts (using Lenherts more conservative findings) then the numbers run into the millions within this context alone (Smith 2012). The aforementioned sexting study indicates that this behavior is evenly dispersed across gender, with minorities and lower-income Americans displaying a marginally higher participation rate (between eight to fifteen percent depending on whether one is a sender or recipient) than other groups. While this statistic is suggestive, there is anecdotal evidence that indicates that this behavior is not racially or socioeconomically determined. A sampling of Girls Gone Wild videos indicates that volunteers are almost exclusively young white females, with many of the participants being college students (Girls Gone Wild 2012a and 2012b). Beyond this, Yost and McCarthy report that a substantial minority of college-aged women (thirty-three percent) have kissed each other publically at parties, with a full sixty-nine percent of the studys participants having witnessed this behavior at least once (Yost and McCarthy 2012). Open sexual displays like this are prime candidates for covert or overt digital recording by witnesses,
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although the prevalence of this practice is not known. While sexually exposed males tend to command less interest than females tend to, instances of male participation are perhaps more common. A search of the Atlanta metro area in the Casual Encounters section of craigslist.com using the search term man for woman (m4w) with the has image option flagged generated 2,500 hits on October 29, 2012, the maximum number of results available. The oldest listing was dated October 17, 2012, a mere twelve days prior, and a random sampling of results indicates that many of the attached images feature male genitalia in some capacity (craigslist 2012b). A search for man for man (m4m) yields similar results, however the oldest listing here is dated October 25, 2012, which means that gay men in the Atlanta area are using craigslist for sexual ends at a significantly higher rate than straight ones are. The image results are largely the same, with either penises or buttocks featured on multiple listings (craigslist 2012a). The racial makeup of participants on both the heterosexual and homosexual side suggests an ordinary distribution with a skew toward younger users. Coincidentally, a search for woman for man with image yields a mere ten results (craigslist 2012c). While a more exacting methodology will be needed to encapsulate the described phenomena, it seems clear that the digital sexual ecology in the United States is quite vast. If access, multiple contexts for digital exposure, and a wide and diverse participant pool have been sufficiently demonstrated then the question remains as to if the overall phenomenon is a reversible trend or a permanent state of affairs. While the Strassberg article indicates that sexting as a discrete context may be on the rise when its results are compared to Lenharts, an overall lack of data means that the trajectory and permanence of these behaviors is hard to determine quantitatively. However, it is clear that the digital sexual ecology as a whole is going strong. The Software as a Service (SaaS) provider Optenet conducted a 2010 study which found
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that thirty-seven percent of all online content is pornographic in nature (Optenet 2010). A 2008 study indicates that thirty-six percent of Internet users access a pornographic site each month. The same article studied billing patterns for online sexual services and found that American usage is not divided along red state/blue state lines, with conservative strongholds such as Utah and Mississippi scoring high on a total Internet users to subscription rate metric (Edelman 2009). Participation also takes place overseas, with little regard for cultural mores and religious edicts. Google Trends reveals that Internet users in the socially conservative South Asian countries of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan lead the world in the use of the word sex as a search term (Google Trends 2012a). Also, a search of the sexual terms sex fuck and pussy in Saudi Arabia indicates a continuous decline in use from 2004 to present (Google Trends 2012b). This can be attributed to more robust Internet censorship rather than an organic shift in user activity (Burrows 2008). The Saudi Arabia case is instructive, as it indicates that legal and technological restrictions are the only effective means of separating the public from the realm of Internet sex. These factors coalesce to an easy digital sex environment with scores of participants and manifold scenarios where an individuals erotic life and/or body can be exposed. It is expected that an increasing number of people will find their private sex lives intersecting their virtual identities. These intersections will range from anonymous bodily exposure (e.g. a faceless photo on craigslist) to intentional public displays of sexual activity (participation in Girls Gone Wild), but virtually all of these captured activities have the potential to be seen by multiple individuals, if not go viral, if someone has the impetus and means to transmit the data. Even something like a court document or rumor, if it is of sufficient interest, can go viral and create a scandal rooted in this phenomenon of digital sexual exposure. This trend will continue to affect people from all walks of life.
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