And then they came for Jeffrey and Chris (and honestly, that was fine)
On Zoom Dicks and Hollywood Chrises
Guys, I’m not gonna lie to you and tell you that what shall henceforth be known as Zoom Dick day was not one of the most enjoyable days I’ve had on the Internet in a while. It already seems like it was three lifetimes ago, but the story had everything: twists, turns, revelations. The jokes were excellent. The sympathetic defenses were ever-more artfully unhinged.
On Monday, Vice first reported that Jeffrey Toobin, a New Yorker writer and legal analyst who is a fixture on CNN, had been suspended following an incident in which he had “exposed” himself on a Zoom call. On Slack channels and text group threads, co-workers and friends (all women, naive little lambs that we are) speculated about whether this could’ve been an accident. I thought about the times I’ve toddled from the living room into the bedroom (these are the two rooms in my possession) with my open laptop after getting off a call to change from night pajamas to day pajamas. Did Jeffrey Toobin also have day pajamas? Was he, maybe in an ill-advised but understandable move, in boxers and this was a case of an unfortunate frame combined with some sort of unintentional slippage? Maybe, we thought, it was only by the grace of God that we all hadn’t flashed a nipple, although in my office, there are plenty of women who won’t turn their cameras on even if their hair is wet.
Then, of course, we got the delicious details. It turned out Jeffrey Toobin hadn’t just shown his penis to his colleagues, he had been actively jerking off, according to two people on the call who spoke to Vice. Better yet, this had been in some sort of weird election night “simulation” with some of the New Yorker’s biggest stars taking different parts—Jane Mayer was apparently playing Republicans, Masha Gessen was playing Donald Trump, Jelani Cobb was playing Democrats and the exercise was so erotically charged that Toobin couldn’t wait until democracy cosplay was over to rub one out. The thought of Jane Mayer maybe being the anonymous source gabbing with Vice fills me with pleasure (!). Here is possibly my favorite tweet:
We should’ve just left it there, but the takes! Oh, the takes! A lot of people said something to the effect of, everyone masturbates!! This is true but seems to miss a key point about WHERE and IN WHAT CONTEXT the vast majority of people choose to masturbate. Someone said something about people being mean on the Internet and...mass incarceration? CNN’s Brian Stelter mourned the loss of a great legal mind like Toobin just days before a pivotal election. The New York Daily News let a dude write an op-ed about how this really had to do with our shame around masturbation and I can’t stop laughing.
It would be better not to extract any greater meaning from Zoom Dick but I’m also trying to imagine a woman sticking her hand in her pants during a Zoom call (or what sounds like it was maybe a brief break in a Zoom call) or better yet, firing up her Magic Wand as her coworkers pretend to politely ignore the buzzing, as they apparently ignored Toobin going to town on himself. It’s preposterous. Not impossible—we are starting to hear of powerful women, in the mold of the “girl bosses,” being at worst, gross and exploitative, and at best, recklessly insensitive to their colleagues and employees—the former CEO of Thinx, who apparently believed it was appropriate to comment on the size and shapes of her employees’ breasts, comes to mind. But mostly this kind of entitled audacity is still the province of very wealthy white men who believe they can’t lose. I wonder what it must be like to be sitting atop a plush perch at both CNN and the New Yorker, with lucrative contracts, massive platforms and editorial freedom, and be so instinctively convinced of your own invincibility, to have so little fear about your livelihood, that such carelessness is even possible. That, I really can’t imagine.
The Zoom Dick news cycle has dovetailed nicely with the Hollywood Chris cycle, an equally absurd turn of events which started with a tweet asking people to discard their least favorite Hollywood Chris (that’s Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pine, Chris Pratt, and Chris Evans) and ended with Chris Pratt’s fellow A-listers rushing to his defense to protect him from the Internet hordes overwhelming deciding that he was—the horror!—the worst Chris. The consensus is based on a vague suspicion that Pratt might be conservative-ish although, really, he has the air of a man with less of a coherent political ideology, and more of an inclination to say half-baked things about cancel culture and finding common ground.
Mark Ruffalo said we should not cast aspersions! Robert Downey Jr. told us to delete our accounts. Josh Gad, James Gunn and Zoe Saldana chimed in to attest to his superior character, his ~positive~ vibes and his Christianity. Eventually, Chris’s wife got involved too to decry “meanness and bullying,” so you know Chris himself was HURT.
Apparently being a Guardian of the Galaxy, marrying a Schwarzenneger and having oodles of money doesn’t actually give you thicker skin, or for that fact, any perspective at all. All Chris and his buddies had to do was ride out a 24-hour meme. Look at the superior Chris as an example: Chris Evans accidentally showed all of his Instagram followers a dick pic on his camera roll and instead of going full WOE-IS-ME, WHO WILL THINK OF THE CHRISES, made a self-deprecating joke along with a reminder to vote. Model celebrity behavior during a non-scandal.
Not to get all “Kim, there’s people that are dying” on you, but damn, Kim, there’s people that are dying, and the rest of us are just trying our best to get through the interminable, unyielding day. We are trying to have a little fun at the expense of people who the chips usually fall in favor of. Maybe we could save our seriousness and earnestness for problems that are realer than Chris and Jeff having a bad couple of days. I suspect they are going to be just fine.