The Right To A Secret Life? Wrong!

The media’s response to Tiger Woods’ attempts to get back in their good graces prove once again that there is no right to a secret life.

Here’s a piece John Feinstein at the Washington post, who says, out of one side of his mouth, that of course Woods has a right to privacy, and out of the other says that Woods owes it to the people that made it him rich to tell all. Oh, and don’t yell at the media, either, Mr Adulterer:

- John Feinstein, Tiger Woods’s half-apology

He apologized to almost everyone he had ever crossed paths with. He looked sad and choked up at times. He said that he had learned from his mistakes and is still learning after spending 45 days in a rehabilitation center — though he never specifically mentioned where he had gone seeking help. He tried very hard to sound humbled.

He didn’t pull it off.

At a moment when the arrogance that makes him a great golfer should have been put aside, he couldn’t do it. Seconds after delivering his various mea culpas, he started lecturing the media. He expressed anger that his wife, Elin, and his two young children had been harassed by paparazzi and declared that any conversations between himself and his wife should remain private.

No one is arguing that point. Of course his wife and children shouldn’t be harassed, and it’s a shame that his infidelities brought the tabloid media into their lives. No one is going to ask him to go into specifics about his attempts to repair his fractured marriage. Even if someone did, he can refuse to answer.

But Woods refused to answer any questions. After saying he has learned that being a great athlete does not entitle him to do whatever he wants — on or off the golf course — he conducted what amounted to a televised news release. The only people in the room were, to quote his agent, “friends and colleagues,” in addition to a handful of selected media members. To the credit of the Golf Writers Association of America, it opted to boycott the Tiger-and-pony show when Woods’s agent, Mark Steinberg, informed the group that it would be “allowed” to designate three writers to sit in the room with the rest of Woods’s cheerleading squad.

Let’s be sure we have this straight: Woods, who says he now understands that he’s not above the rules of common decency, is still above answering questions from those who are paid to represent a public that has helped make him a billionaire. He still insists he’s entitled to a private life when no one has said he’s not. What he is not — and was not — entitled to is the secret life he led while passing himself off to the public as the devoted husband and father. [emphasis mine.]

But of course he lives in a society where you have to live a secret life if you want to do anything outside the bourgeois norms. Woods is simply a glaring case of why a secret life is hard to pull off, when you are famous. If he were merely rich, it would have been a breeze. But as a famous person, he is breaking so many of the unwritten societal rules that he had to be dragged through the mud.

Here is the true list of transgressions:

1. Do not try to manage the press who gave you those billions of inches of newshole in the past. Now that you are down and bleeding, we want to be close enough to smell the iron in your goddamn hemoglobin, and if won’t let us, we will call you names you won’t like.
2. You didn’t apologize to the women you were fooling around with, which you should do, although we think they are skanks. (Hold on a second. They knew he was Tiger Woods, right? They knew he was married, right? They were accepting the dinners, the trips, the diamonds, whatever. They knew what they were doing, at least to the extent that anyone knows what they are doing.)
3. And finally, he is not admitting that he has no right to a private life, or even more scandalous, that he has no right to a secret life. Anyone keeping secrets is implicitly saying that the societal rules are wrong, and we, the arbiters of the societal rules, hate that more than anything.

While the press — and the populace that they represent in some bizarro fashion — may grudgingly agree that a figure like Woods, or you and me, have the right to a private life, they don’t hold with secrecy.

A private life is the life that you share with your intimates, those that you trust enough to share your political views, your hopes and dreams, your plans for the future. But since these topics overlap so much with what make public figures interesting to their publics, they aren’t really private. That’s what Oprah gets them to talk about. Or what a former friend discloses their views or comings-and-goings in a tell-all piece to Rolling Stone. So that puts an end to privacy.

And the stuff that Woods or Paris Hilton doesn’t even share with their intimates? Their deepest secrets, like a clandestine love affair, or liposuction, or a morbid fear of Chinese people? That is immoral, in the current American political and ethical climate.

You have no moral or ethical right to a secret life.

You are expected to share everything with your intimates, or at least your partner. Otherwise you are doing something dirty, immoral, and probably illegal. And if you are doing something that you would like to keep secret, the act of secrecy itself is immoral.

So we have no right to secrecy, anymore, therefore.

At the same time that a rising number of people have extramarital or extra-relationship affairs, or sign up for Ashley Madison for ‘married dating’, we have, paradoxically, a growing prudishness about sex, or other non-sexual secrecy in our lives. It is a wonderful thing sex, as long as it takes place within the bounds of acceptable relationships, like marriege, or reasonably monogamous relationships. Then it is the expression of our deepest love, and the pleasure is then a representation of our place in an ordered world. Otherwise, our society condemns sex as a filthy, demeaning, and probably exploitative act, and anyone who pursues it is basically perverted, beneath contempt. And if you have sex with someone while in a committed relationship, especially marriage, you are shit. It doesn’t matter if it is consensual, casual, or undramatic. It doesn’t matter if the spouse or partner is aware of the conoodling: that is immoral, too. There is no acceptable sex other than what society says is acceptable, and this isn’t it, brother.

And that’s why paparazzi feel that it’s totally fine to take a picture of Woods or Paris Hilton leaving some apartment building at 3am. After all, if some schnook walking by randomly might have seen it, why not take a picture and plaster it on some scandal rag? They have to right to have us look the other way while they go about acts that are , at their core, societally subversive.

I think we should turn away from this gleeful condemnation of public figure caught with their pants down. Who cares if Monica and Bill had sex, of whatever sort? Or if the governor of South Carolina fooled around with some woman in Venezuela, or wherever the hell it was? Or if Peewee Herman was yanking his crank at a dirty movie? Or Hugh Grant received oral pleasure from Divine Brown in the fornt seat of his car? But no: they have to feel the full weight of our collective displeasure. After all, why should they be able to do what we can’t?

Step back a bit from the lurid aspects of secret sex, and consider other sorts of personal secrecy that we may think more reasonable, even if we are averse to adultery. We are likely to believe that people living under a repressive government or in a society that can retaliate against personal freedom are justified in keeping various activities free.

Someone who is plotting against the Republican Guard in Iran, we migth think, is justified in keeping that secret. Which we think of as different than some Unabomber type crank in the Idaho wilderness. A young woman in love in Saudi Arabia who decides to meet and make out with her boyfriend is justified in keep that secret, we might think, since the state there would cane her for that, and her society would ostracize her for the rest of her life. But if a married woman steps out with a boyfriend for an evening’s romp in a crosstown motel, she’s a slut, and everyone’s entitled to know.

And in a sexually repressed society like ours, the press acts as our official stone throwers. It makes no difference that we are supposed to be without blame ourselves before we throw those stones. Our targets have broken the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not keep secrets.