The Problem With the “Hypocrisy” Justification
By Attempting to defend the now-retracted Gawker story, Maria Bustillos tweets:
@irin @max_read It's very easy to condemn this story. But are you saying it's better to protect hypocrisy of public figures?
— Maria Bustillos (@mariabustillos) July 17, 2015
As applied to this specific case, the two massive holes in the argument are immediately evident. First, it uses a far too expansive definition of “public figure.” (As Greenwald says, any definition capacious enough to include an executive accountant for a privately held company would surely include Bustillos, who I’m guessing doesn’t believe every aspect of her private life to be fair game for high-traffic websites.) And second, if there’s any “hypocrisy” angle the story doesn’t even make any attempt to establish it.
Still, the Geithner non-story is an easy case. What interests me are are the broader, more widely shared premises underlying the argument, which as I said the last time there was a similar controversy remain problematic.
One thing we should notice is that “hypocrisy” arguments are as plastic as originalism — you can manipulate levels of abstraction to justify almost any story really motivated by a prurient interest under a “hypocrisy” pretext. Bustillos later tries to do this: don’t all c-suite executives implicitly pretend to a certain bourgeois respectability? But the problem is that pretty much everyone who isn’t a nihilist or sociopath is a hypocrite. People who are able to adhere with perfect consistency to the principles they aspire to are rare indeed. If a “hypocrisy” is defined in broad enough terms there’s no privacy.
Perhaps the bigger problem with the argument is that it assumes that “hypocrisy” per se is a major issue, when it fact it’s a relatively trivial one. I don’t disagree that an inconsistency between personal behavior and values that a powerful public figure is trying to impose on others, hypocrisy is potentially newsworthy. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that its the bad values, not the hypocrisy, that are the major problem. The legal disabilities Larry Craig sought to impose on gays and lesbians would be just as indefensible if he was a 0 on the Kinsey Scale. On the other hand, if the values one is acting inconsistently with are good values, the hypocrisy doesn’t invalidate the values.
On the story at hand, there is one important underlying issue: the fact that someone like Geithner is enormously unlikely to face any legal sanctions, while sex workers always labor under the fear of legal sanction. Criminalizing sex work is really, really terrible public policy. But stories like this with an explicit or implicit hypocrisy angle not only fail to make this point — they rely on the stigma against sex work for a substantial measure of their alleged newsworthiness. Focusing on hypocrisy is more likely to impede clear thinking than to promote it.