27W
Eall know that one awful
guy who likes wine and is
knowledgeable about it
but really enjoys the
being-knowledgeable part more than the
wine. His oenophilia is oriented toward
performancerather than consumption:
surveying the wine list, making a few
well-informed observations about
the offerings, enjoying the deference
offered him by the other, less confident
drinkers at the table, the little ritual of the
probationary pour and the cork. What he
is imbibing is not the 1982 Lynch-Bages
so much as the ceremony—and, most
important, what it says about him. The
grape juice is mostly beside the point.There’s a lot of that in the social-media
age, though if you were paying attention
you’d have noticed that there was a good
deal of it before then, too. New York City
is full of people who do not like plays but
who are very fond of having goneto the
theater. They may not actually get very
much out of sitting through two hours of
Geoffrey Rush at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music doing artistic penance for his
role in those dopey pirate movies with
Johnny Depp, but they very much enjoy
being the sort of person who goes to see
famous Hollywood actors in Gogol
plays, and talking about it, advertising
their status. They may or may not know
which wine to order, but they know that
Wickedis for (sniff!) tourists. One of the
by-products of this is the bizarre modern
need to photograph evidence of prestige
moments and share them over social
media. Go to any museum from New
York to Amsterdam and you’ll see peo-
ple taking pictures of... pictures. Art,
sports, travel, food—all have been
reduced to objects of consumption that
are almost entirely semiotic, treasures in
a quest for the signs and symbols of a
desirable life.Harvey
Weinstein’s
Sexual Semiotics
The alleged abuses reveal a man who
had to be looked atBY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSONOf sex, too. Hence the peculiar erotic
careers of Harvey Weinstein, Anthony
Weiner, Bill O’Reilly and his “falafel
thing,” Donald Trump and his “grab
’em by the p***y” antics, and a host of
others in the recent parade of creeps and
weirdos whose sexual shenanigans
have one thing in common: a curious
absence of sex.
The Eliot Spitzer case was an old-
fashioned sex scandal that you could get
your head around: He paid prostitutes
for sex. Without condoning Spitzer’s
actions, one can understand them on a
purely instrumental basis: Spitzer wants
to have sex with an attractive 22-year-
old woman who is not his wife, he has
lots of money, she is willing to exchange
sex for money and doesn’t care that he
likes keeping his socks on while getting
his rocks off. That’s a reasonable sex
scandal. It makes sense.
What in hell was Anthony Weiner
up to?
Weiner, once an up-and-coming
Democratic striver, is being sent to
prison as the result of a sex scandal in
which there was no actual sex. Weiner is
the textbook case of semiotic sexuality,“An ingenious, always
provocative analysis of
history’s most lethal war.”
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