Pings of infidelity: Sexting is the new cheating

A high-profile aide of the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, has announced separation from her husband, Anthony Weiner, a former US congressman and a compulsive “sexter”. Weiner had left a trail of sextual escapades, including cybersex with a female porn starlet, since he was “outed” in 2011 when a “lewd” photo of him briefly appeared on his Twitter timeline. But the recently exposed screenshot of him sexting, with his four-year-old son Jordan in the frame, has left America, and indeed the world, in a state of moral confusion.

It’s not exactly the physical act of having sex outside marriage – the good, old extramarital affair – that has crashed and burned the Abedin-Weiner marriage. It was his constant sending out of sexually-themed, often explicit images of his crotch and serial messaging to a string of women (one of them turned out to be a man from the rival Republican camp, just sext-baiting Weiner) and getting spectacularly caught a lot of time that drove the wedge between not just Weiner and Abedin, but also Weiner and the United States of America.

Weiner, in the great American consciousness, is the “new cheater”, the one who doesn’t often indulge in physical intercourse outside marriage, or a committed relationship, but pokes a hole into its traditionally-upheld sanctity by inflicting a thousand tiny cuts, one salacious message at a time.

Abedin is not the only one who has been hurt by her partner’s technologically-aided, internet/smartphone-driven “fun on the side”. Sexting is so rampant that a shopping list of Hollywood celebrities have walked this hall of notoriety, including talented actresses like Scarlett Johansson, Tea Leoni, Sandra Bullock, Blake Lively as well as American icons like Tiger Woods, actors like Tony Parker, and musicians like Kanye West.

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Exactly why was America so unforgiving to Anthony Weiner, whose impassioned speech on medical benefits for 9/11 injured in 2010 threw him into national spotlight, but seemed to have finally softened towards Bill Clinton, whose White House peccadillos are the stuff of fairy-tale for particularly raunchy adults?

While there are full-fledged websites such as Ashley Madison that offer “discreet” services and flaunt the tagline – “Life is short. Have an affair.” – sexting is a more Do-It-Yourself by-product of the instant messaging culture. Egged on by promises of encryption, the dalliances have shifted to the online world, making our smartphones the new gonadal splendours and our actual bodies and sex organs only incidental, an ornamental attaché.

It’s not obvious why a serial adulterer like John F Kennedy has such a profound hold on American collective conscious, the goodhearted playboy president who died young, but not Bill Clinton who rehashed that tired old template, unsuccessfully. While it’s an extreme stretch to compare Anthony Weiner with either of the two presidential luminaries, we must question why merely sexting and not quite having sex has shamed Weiner so before public eyes.

High-profile resignations, such as former CIA Director David Petraeus’, involved significant amount of physical intimacy, which is definitely missing in the case of Anthony Weiner. Unlike say a Donald Trump, real estate mogul and the Republican nominee, whose debonair past collects around his flappy mop like a comical-sexual halo, Weiner’s online transgressions get far sterner censure from the public at large.

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Not only is sexting the new cheating, many Americans, and indeed many around the world, find sexting worse than cheating. The premise: anything you hide from your partner amounts to cheating, and the physical aspect is only one of the infinitesimally myriad ways you could do that.

According to analyses on Huffington Post and Elite Daily, graphic sexual acts described in words and sent as a message to a non-partner would amount to cheating, even though there’s no actual physical contact. More often than not, this transference of the sexual gratification to messaging, instead of getting involved in a messy situation like an old-fashioned physical relationship, is considered to be suitable for the smartphone age.

A 2011 article in Gizmodo said: “It’s not sexual texting, or sexually themed texting – it’s sex texting. Texting as a simulacrum of doin’ it. Remember cybersex?” What Sam Biddle, the author of the piece, meant was that sexting is just sex via texting, like its earlier avatars – phone sex, cybersex, and it’s nothing less and nothing more than a real physical relationship which has been hitherto the yardstick for conventional modes of cheating.

However, there’s a difference, which merits mention. The sexual affluenza, democratised by dating apps like Tinder, has literally Uberised sex. The shared economy of sex is a peculiar capitalist twist to the communist sexual collective in which sex served a utilitarian function, in the service of the great communist state with perfect, sexually capable and sexually conversant citizens. The sexual labour was distributed all across, of course under strict and watchful eyes of the Big Brother state, unlike in the present situation where it is presented as sexual pleasure and is itemised as an individualised unit of sexuality under personal control, but shared with one or many via the dating apps or messaging services like WhatsApp and SnapChat.

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This (partially) disembodied sex is the epitome of the technological age. Men and women flaunt their smartphones the way they show off their gymnasium-hardened abs and underwired brassiere-supported breasts. If Tinder is the Netherfield Ball, to use a Jane Austen analogy, sexting is the new couple dancing; if Tinder is the new bar-cum-bistro, sexting is the new sex in the restroom.

Exactly why then Anthony Weiner has been subject to such ridicule when almost nine per cent of the adult cell phone users in the US have sent out sexts, while about 20 per cent have received them. These include explicit images exchanged over email or instant messaging services, and also racy texts that may or may not include a graphic image.

Moreover, America, an unusually prudish nation which nevertheless invented capitalist sexuality of incessant instant consumption, is tackling a “sextual panic”  at present, policing its teenagers and schoolkids over their sexting habits. Exactly as Ashley Madison offers up a platform for cheating, literally filling in a blank in the service industry by simply renaming what it has to give, America is crying out loud over what young persons send and receive on their smartphones, transferring the sexual efflorescence on to WhatsApp and Facebook.

Moreover, exactly as the paparazzi drone cameras zoom into the mere hint of the unwittingly exposed belly fat on the beach by a celebrity, body shaming and sextual shaming are becoming ubiquitous, with tabloids that feed off the illicit intimate and the graphic, “outing” as many for their “indiscretions”.

More and more, public figures and ordinary citizens, wrapped in this cocoon of “encrypted sex” are punctuating their narcissism, addiction, callousness or plain curiosity with the constant “pings” of infidelity. But it is our messy visceral response to it, confused and in disarray, that will ultimately determine what this age of hypercommunication and white noise, really stands for.