Just Never Get Married
by Alexandra Molotkow
In 2003, Winnipeg judge Lori Douglas, then a lawyer, found out that her husband, Jack King, also a lawyer, had posted private and very explicit pictures of her on a website. Much worse, he had shown some of them to a client, allegedly to entice him to sleep with her. Douglas and King have both denied her involvement, the matter was initially settled out of court, and Douglas went on to become a judge. But the matter resurfaced, and in 2011, a Canadian Judicial Council panel was convened to determine, among other things, whether the photos “undermined confidence in the justice system and her ability to act as a judge.” (She has since agreed to retire.)
King’s behavior was, in his own words, “bizarre, ridiculous, stupid, self-indulgent, grotesque” — just for starters. But if Douglas had nothing to do with it, and it appears she didn’t, she was a victim, and evidence of her private sex life has nothing to do with her job performance. I think most Hairpin readers would agree. But it doesn’t really matter what our values are; we’re part of a society, and society has its peeves and its momentum. Just by talking about Douglas (sorry, Lori), even sympathetically, you are serving as a cog in the machine.
The Ashley Madison hack, and the shame implied in being outed as a cheater, is a different thing, in the sense that most of us agree that cheating is a moral wrong (whether it’s one of those bad wrongs is another thing) while posing for sex pics within a trusting relationship is not. But in both cases you have public shame for private activities.
I think most of us with liberal minds put a lot of faith in our “sin” classification systems, as if they matter. Using racial slurs is a bad, everybody’s-business sin, while cheating on your spouse is a maybe-bad, nobody’s-business sin, and appearing naked in pictures is a not-actually-bad, nobody’s-business sin. All of this is well and good from a theoretical point of view, it’s important to know your own values, but that’s just not how it works. The suggestion of “a bad thing” is enough to damn someone, even if it’s not bad at all, once it’s slathered all over the Internet.
Another article of faith: the private/public distinction, as it relates to morality. Years ago you could be a horrible person but a good citizen and get off scot-free, but now everything comes to light eventually in the social panopticon. Not to be too heavy-handed, but: we are basically living in a religious dystopia! ha haaa. Which probably has some positive side effects — the easiest way to keep your ass clean is to just be decent in all your affairs — but it’s also full-stop terrifying.
When I first read about the Lori Douglas matter, I had some very naive hopes that shamings that egregious might change attitudes and maybe encourage more compassion for the outed, especially now that we’re all public. And that’s not not the case, but compassion only goes so far; the damning is done and it sticks, regardless of how right-thinking individuals feel about it. Sometimes, the public unites against the outing institution, or a “scandalized” person shows exceptional grace under pressure and the whole affair becomes proof of character. But most of the time it doesn’t go that way, perhaps because most people are public without having trained for it, and the whole thing is just a friendly reminder that we’re all part of a giant blobby mass against which any individual has very limited power.