At the end of Kara Swisher’s inaugural episode of her new podcast On with Kara Swisher, she offers some unsolicited advice to, well, a lot of people: Stop making fun of/making memes about Adam Levine’s terrible sexts.
“We talk about privacy a lot — you know, the press does, [about] the tech industry violating privacy. This is this guy’s private texts, is this really ours to, you know, to schadenfreude over?” says Swisher, a veteran tech journalist who famously does not shy away from tough questions herself (the rest of her show was an interview with Chris Cuomo). She goes on to remark that the messages seem like they were part of consensual relationships or maybe flirtations Levine had, and that he’s said he’s sorry. “Every single person has a text they find unfortunate — and so whatever, it’s not our business what his marriage is like.”
After acknowledging that human beings have gossiped since beginning of time, she concludes: “When we’re all participating in it, it’s not our prettiest side. It makes us feel like we are all in high school and we’re the jerkiest people ever…I think you look worse than Adam Levine does.”
As eternal as gossip is, the past several days on a certain slice of the internet have really been a field day in online gossip about near-strangers. Swisher’s podcast was released before the Try Guys—a group that makes comedic YouTube videos—parted ways with one particular try guy, apparently because he had an affair in his marriage. Perhaps it is simply that my own personal Twitter feed is dominated by people who at some point worked for Buzzfeed, where the Try Guys got their start. But the level of glee that was on display yesterday after news of the infidelity and subsequent “parting of ways” broke felt off the charts, and certainly too extreme for whatever level of fame this guy has. I was one of many people who hadn’t even known who they were—as New Yorker writer Rachel Syme noted, the whole thing made her feel like she’d “had a cultural lobotomy.” To learn about someone’s fame at the same time you are learning about their misdeeds adds to the feeling of collective ickiness.
Some reached for an excuse for giving this random guy a taste of the tabloid treatment once reserved for bonified celebrities: it’s not just that he cheated, it’s also that he made part of his brand about how much he loves his wife (like Levine, apparently, he’s a “wife guy”). He made money off of this, you see, and so now that it is public we all get to laugh collectively at his expense. But whatever “public figure” status the try guy did have as a successful content creator has now been usurped by this news. It made me think: at least high schools were contained. This cafeteria is something the whole world can see.
It’s particularly interesting to watch this happen right now, as we sit in the crossroads of two separate but related phenomena: the upcoming five year anniversary of MeToo and the ongoing to attempt to relitigate and atone for and maybe even try to correct for the many sins the media habitually committed against women in the 90s and early 2000s. Somehow, in the midst of all of this, we have decided it is OK to do to men what we are realizing was borderline abusive to women. And sure, perhaps these men “misbehaved,” though not in ways that really require public litigation. We don’t actually have information about how the wives feel, whether they are not surprised or if they are in shock, and what they need to move forward. Romantic relationships are complicated, and perhaps most notably, they evolve. As author Sandra Newman put it on Twitter, the tendency to search for “proof of hypocrisy when a loving relationship fails” is an inherently childish tendency that insists the world is divided into neat sections of right and wrong, black and white.
Into all of this mess comes one last story: the impending unauthorized biography of Anthony Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018. The book doesn’t come out until Oct. 11, but the Times has already run a dishy piece revealing the mess that surrounds its publication, the procurement of the information in it, and the sordid details of the “last painful days of Anthony Bourdain,” as its headline advertises. The piece itself is such a brutal read that I personally cannot imagine purchasing the book, though the author behind it, Charles Leerhsen, certainly seems to have gotten the goods (as much as there ever can be “goods” that “explain” a suicide). The story runs through the tumultuous relationship Bourdain had in the last two years of his life with the Italian actor Asia Argento, including final text messages exchanges and a photo of the hotel where Bourdain died. Leerhsen and his wife stayed in the exact room where Bourdain killed himself when they visited (a mind-bendingly ghoulish choice).
The piece includes all of the famous facts about Argento before delving further into the fucked-up relationship she had with the culinary star. In case you are not familiar: she accused Harvey Weinstein of assault, then she was accused herself of an inappropriate relationship with a fellow actor who starred in a movie when he was a child; she is reported to have slept with him when she was 37 and he was just 17. The details of her relationship with Bourdain are not particularly revelatory of anything beyond the clear fact that there was something toxic happening between them—they were two people who were clearly each struggling as they tried to connect with themselves and each other. It is painful to read, because we all know how it ends for Bourdain. The piece loosely links his suicide to his tumult with Argento. After I read it, I found myself trying to figure out what we gain from laying the blame of this broken dynamic at the feet of the one who is still with us.
Anthony Bourdain was an international celebrity. Adam Levine is a famous musician. The try guy whose name I refuse to learn was successful enough to have some fame too, or at the very least, he intertwined his life with his livelihood (as, increasingly, many of us do). But I can’t help but worry that there is something deeply inhumane in how we are dissecting their misdeeds, because I do not understand what we are trying to learn or see. Entering another person’s private world, even as a journalist, should be accompanied by a certain amount of empathy, of personal humility, of understanding of the complexities that happen in human minds and relationships. Getting little blips of data about people’s “bad” behavior, and amplifying it over and over and over, to laugh at it, or even just consume it? That’s not news, or even gossip. It’s surveillance.
