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A Serious Question About Anthony Weiner
Okay. Now that we’ve all finished being grossed out, laughing ourselves hoarse, and making Weiner jokes, I’ve got a serious question.
What the hell is wrong with Anthony Weiner?
Clearly, he has a mental illness. It’s obviously an affliction that involves a compulsion to humiliate himself and those close to him. It combines aspects of sadism, masochism, exhibitionism, and addiction. Is this typical of any known disorder? Is it something the DSM-5 has specifically identified? For anyone here in the mental health field — have you ever seen anything like this before?
Usually I relate to politicians by seeing them as akin to ordinary people I know, only more powerful, ambitious, and narcissistic. Hillary’s like the scolding grade school teacher who enjoys her power over six-year-olds far too much for comfort. We all know guys like Bill — probably every woman has a girlfriend who, unfortunately for her, married a smooth-talking, philandering jerk just like him. We all know drunks, drug addicts, people who somehow screw up every job they get, and other self-destructive folk.
But Weiner’s got something really weird going on. He has to be the most humiliated guy in the history of public life, doesn’t he? He clearly longs to be humiliated and to humiliate his family. He deliberately creates situations where he and his family will be grossly humiliated in front of the largest possible audience. To do what he did after participating in a documentary about his humiliation, after years of therapy discussed oh-so-very publicly, during the height of a presidential campaign when obviously the press will be tracking his every breath — well, I just don’t know anyone who has even a minor case of what he’s got, whatever it is.
Do you?
Published in General
He doesn’t seem to enjoy the humiliation – I don’t know that he seeks it out. It seems more likely to me that even the extreme humiliation is not enough to dissuade him from this compulsive behavior where he reassures himself of his importance or masculinity or something.
If we’re armchair psychoanalyzing (and really, when aren’t we here?), I would say some flavor of narcissism mixed with some deep seated feeling of rejection or inadequacy.
If every time you push the red button a rat-pellet comes down the chute, and the rat keeps pushing the button, even when he gets an electric shock for doing it 10 percent of the time, I think it’s safe to say the rat likes the pellets — a lot.
Weiner knew perfectly well that the odds were good he’d be caught, and he knew just what would happen if he got caught. It seems to me fair to say, at least, that he doesn’t mind humiliation all that much — or he minds it a lot less than he minds abstaining from sending pictures of his crotch to anyone on the Internet who claims to be a woman.
Usually people go to great lengths to avoid repeating hideously embarrassing mistakes.
Yep, that’s the long and short of it.
I don’t think he likes the humiliation aspect. But he likes the exhibition aspect. He needs reassurance of his manliness and virility. It’s likely he isn’t getting it from Huma. She has her nose buried up Hillary’s [CoC]. So Weiner seeks out anyone who will tell him he is a stud. The thrill, the risk, the…ahem…danger excites him, or at least doesn’t dissuade him from his behavior. I bet he thinks he can skate after the standard apology tour. He probably learned from Bill that you can totally get away with this kind of thing.
I am disturbed that your comment possessed 0% satire.
Bill was smarter at hiding it.
More interesting, to me at least, is who are these people who were voting for him and donating to his campaigns even knowing what he was. And what’s wrong with THEM?
The creep took a picture while his child was sleeping right by his side. He’s a sick, sick man. I’m sure there’s a better word to describe him, but I can’t think of one.
Or is he so frustrated with Huma’s worship of Hillary that he thinks he is trying to get back Huma’s attention?
Hater!
Well, Bill is a little more than that, Claire. He’s a predator—though, come to think of it, I’ve had friends who at least dated men like that, too.
There are people here at Ricochet who could probably produce some diagnostics, but I believe this is a recognizable disorder, and perhaps one that is particularly common (though not, of course, ubiquitous) among politicians.
This isn’t because politics is inherently dirty, and dirty=dirty=dirty, it’s because the demands of seeking and holding political office are such that normal people self-select out of the running. The born-politicians possess extreme extroversion, physical and emotional stamina, an insatiable hunger for attention and approval and the capacity to endure the risk, deprivation and uncertainty of a campaign that lasts many, many months… the born-politicians thrive on this, crave and need it. Combine all those attributes with a strong sexual appetite, and hey presto! You have Anthony Wiener. Or Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, campaigning itself tends to undermine the otherwise stabilizing and boundary-reinforcing effect that a normal job and home life could have, and provides ample opportunities for misbehavior. Women, that is; idealistic, vulnerable, power-hungry, greedy or just stupid.
If the politician in question manages to find and marry a woman with compatible
character defectsattributes and if she gets what she wants out of the arrangement (a baby or two, access to power) the chances are pretty good that she’ll at least overlook and may even enable him, at least for a time (Huma) and even for a lifetime. (Hillary).There’s a good Darwinian explanation for all of the above, too, BTW. It’s basically this: from the perspective of either Weiner’s or Bill Clinton’s genes, the whole point of attaining power is to increase access to reproductive opportunity.
Yuck.
Claire, the rat likes the pellets, not the shock.
Bill also had a much straighter trajectory.
To power – To power…
Huma also can’t ride Weiner’s … coattails … into the White House.
He really, really, really likes those pellets.
Really likes ’em.
I’m sorry, it’s impossible to be serious about Anthony Weiner.
Weiner is the kind of American Jew who would marry a woman who edited her family’s anti-American, anti-semitic Muslim Brotherhood magazine.
Was he? Or was he most active in a pre-Internet era when exposure was more difficult?
Bill and Tony (we can call AW that if we are calling WJC “Bill”) also seem to have different interests. Clinton was after sex itself. Wiener was advertising. I have seen little evidence Wiener was doing other than sending pictures, texting, etc. There is no blue dress. Since Wiener’s activities by their nature are more public, he was a lot more likely for those activities to be noticed. Most of Clinton’s activities are still he-said, she-said (except where Clinton got caught in legal cases). There were no smoking pictures or texts.
Seawriter
Ah. Interesting. Does this make Weiner more or less of an idiot? (He’s less of a predator, at least…)
Though Bill was still pretty freakin’ reckless. Lewinsky claimed that all she had to do to, essentially, get Bill into an incredibly compromised position was to flash the back of her thong underpants. Did Al Qaeda know about this vulnerability? How easy it could have been to assassinate this guy…all you’d need is a martyr with a whale tail and a come-hither glance…
Ai yi yi.
Claire, I’m with rebark on this one, the humiliation isn’t the goal. In an over-simplifying, reductionist way, the price he pays (or expects to pay) isn’t steep enough…or hasn’t yet cost him enough. But that is a bit simple.
Of course diagnosing a public figure I haven’t examined is against my ethics code, but for patients I have seen like this, it’s a mixed of a compulsion (think OCD like), mixed with some inability to see or care how much they harm others, mixed with a lethal amount of charm.
I could right a wordy piece about how the family systems and messages, the lack of emotional object constancy, and the series of reinforcers and punishers for various behaviors have occurred to produce people like this. But no matter, he leaves a trail of damage in his wake. And at moment he is caught, he cares, but in the moment, with temptation at hand, he gives in.
Medication, therapy, and rules are needed.
Even the pervs at the bus stop zip up eventually. Send those shots over the internet, and that power is denied you forever.
Maybe after a while he likes both. Sort of a reverse Clockwork Orange effect.
And can I just say…when people ask me about how hard it is to work with dying patients and their families, or kids with severe disability, I think about patients I’ve had that feel into the “Weiner realm” and I give thanks for the kind of work I found.
Would also love to hear @bryangstephens weigh in, as he sees lots more clients than I do.
Happily, I have no idea what you are talking about.
There are likely three questions embedded there:
My guess as to 2 is that about 6 years ago he hooked up with a doctor who started writing him prescriptions for HGH and testosterone and/or anabolic steroids. All of a sudden this 40+ year old dweeb found himself with the body of a 20-something athlete and he wanted to show it off.
Claire, what would you do one day if you woke up and when you looked in the mirror you saw Taylor Swift looking back at you? Would you go out and flaunt it or stay at home with the cats?
1 and 3 probably require a psychologist or psychiatrist to answer.
Anthony Weiner makes me smile actually because it reminds me of one of my favorite media moments.
I was walking through a cafeteria at work and there was the press conference for Anthony Weiner to explain or apologize for his first sexting scandal and I had to stop and watch: there behind the microphone was Andrew Breitbart, fielding questions.
I had no idea what he was doing up there but it is the second time I’ve been stopped short by the TV news.
I’m convinced Weiner would have gotten away with his behavior and would be a Democratic star by now if it weren’t for Andrew on that stage at that moment. He transformed Weiner into a figure of fun, a small man unable even to be the most compelling person in his own sex scandal.
Just for fun:
Gotta say, America does this stuff best. (Think Haggard. Think Minneapolis airport toilets. Think any John Waters film.)
I love it!!
Maybe when a woman is motivated to marry a man for reasons other than the reasons he wished had been her motivation, he sort of wants to destroy her chance of having from their marriage whatever it was that was her real incentive for marrying him ?
I think you do Claire a disservice here.
An ever present feature of addictive behavior is the belief that this time the result will be different. Process (behavioral) addictions (in contrast to ingestive ones, where a substance is introduced into the body to change mood) – say, like gambling – have a thrill component which is seriously mood altering. Winning is highly reinforcing, even if it happens only occasionally. As well, there is positive mood alteration or thrill whenever one simply gets away with doing it again without being caught – similar to surviving some death-defying feat. I suspect that is behind Weiner’s compulsions.
I think that’s what I tried to say. He’s not addicted to the humiliation, he’s addicted to something humiliating.
I had to look up Taylor Swift. I still don’t get it: Is she supposed to be unusually sexy?