The Men Defending Graham Platner In All The Wrong Ways

Graham Platner is at the center of another scandal, this time after reports he sent sexual messages to multiple  women during his relationship with his now-wife Amy Gertner. The information was initially disclosed to campaign officials by Gertner herself as Platner’s Senate bid got off the ground. Both at that time and in a video released on Saturday, Gertner stressed that she and Platner had addressed the cheating through counseling and have moved on. But this has not kept the issue from reigniting the debate about Platner’s fitness that has dogged him for much of his run. 

This essay is not about Platner’s fitness, at least not directly. Instead it’s about the conversation around it. In the wake of the cheating story, a certain set of commentators have mocked the idea that cheating and character matter at all. Some have gone so far as to revel in the chance for Democrats to put forward a candidate who flouts perceived liberal prudishness. It’s a display of sexism and hollowness that warrants attention. So, I want to discuss this and the deeply misogynistic way some of Platner defenders have tried to dismiss the scandal and address what this says about the state of our politics. 

After the story broke, podcaster and YouTuber Kyle Kulinksi posted that, “Platner could’ve sexted my mom and I’d still vote for him.” More than one reply noted that this sounded a lot like the logic deployed to defend Trump and other sexual miscreants in his administration over the years. What I saw was another instance of a time-honored tradition of men causally, often jokily, offering up the women in their lives as sexual objects for their public heroes. Consider this super-cut of Knicks fans being asked if they would “let Jalen Brunson sleep with [their] girl” for a championship. The segment is clearly intended to be funny. Even as a dedicated Knicks fan myself, I can say that the humor of this was lost on me. It’s just a series of young men proclaiming that they would let the star of their favorite basketball team have his way with the various women they are close to—not that Jalen Brunson has ever expressed any interest in this. 

This is what I thought of when I saw Kulinski’s post. I suppose a generous interpretation would be that Kulinski wants a Democrat to beat Susan Collins as badly as Knicks fans want an NBA championship. But it strikes me that there’s something parasocial at play here, a form of idolizing that men engage in with famous men wherein they afford them more dignity than the flesh-and-blood women who love and support them. In fact, offering the women in their lives as hypothetical sex objects for famous men is a way of showing how big a fan they really are. 

Elsewhere, journalist Ken Klippenstein posted “Platner confirmed player, voters hate those.” Klippenstein followed this with a Substack entry on Monday entitled “Graham Platner Loses Washington’s Vote,” with the subhead “And yet the era of smoothgroin politicians is coming to an end.” Klippenstein’s case, as the “smoothgroin” epithet suggests, is that the image-conscious career politicians in the Democratic Party, the ones who would never cheat on their spouses, are dickless losers. To quote the piece:

People are done with the clean-cut types who've harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be. Think of the telegenic types like Gavin Newsom who never have a strand of hair out of place or much of anything to say (certainly not against the establishment). Think of Cory Booker, who at age 56 announced his first marriage, complete with a made-for-media rollout—clearly on the ridiculous assumption that people still give a shit about their presidential candidate having a typical family.

Think of Pete Buttigieg, a politician so allergic to public displays of affection with his spouse that his own communications director publicly called him "the Tin Man.”

This is a puerile and chauvinistic sentiment. It’s the sort of high school cafeteria misogyny you’d get from an 80s sex comedy. It’s derogatory to women, to the people offended by Platner’s long list of misconduct, and to politicians Klippenstein simply sees as weak and unmanly. In another obvious nod to Buttigieg, he mocks Democrats for, in his mind, wishing that Maine would only “nominate an asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant.”

But Klippenstein isn’t satisfied with his tawdry defense of Platner nor his faintly homophobic discussion of Buttigieg’s modesty. In the post, he includes side-by-side pictures of Susan Collins and Janet Mills captioned with a joke he copied over from his social media: “Susan Collins and Janet Mills would never be embroiled in a sexting scandal (too much integrity?)” One has to assume Klippenstein finds these women too ugly to have ever received a sexual advance. Hilarious isn’t it? And Klippenstein’s specific contempt for Mills radiates through the piece. He opens the piece by stating that she got “her clock cleaned by Platner so badly she’s probably still shitting pieces of her dentures out.” 

Klippenstein protests that he isn’t actually a fan of Platner. I’ll take him at his word on that. So it’s difficult not to conclude that what’s animating him, aside from sheer misogyny and ego, is a kind of anti-fandom against liberals akin the pro-Platner fervor Kulinski has expressed. Klippenstein hates Mills, Buttigieg, Schumer, and other mainstream Democrats. And he loves any opportunity to demean them, especially if it gives him a chance to bro out. 

In a similar vein, David Sirota wrote an essay at Jacobin dismissing the idea that private behavior should ever matter more than a candidate’s policy positions. But, again, it feels mostly like a proxy for Sirota’s own animosities. And, again, it comes off as casually misogynistic in its indifference to Platner’s infidelity or his past online comments about women. Here’s Sirota:

If you are part of this political-media elite, you are probably desperately promoting the idea that politicians’ “character” is defined by their manners, civility, family life, and anything else that has no material impact on voters. You cannot allow politicians’ “character” to be defined by something new: their willingness to fight against you, your fellow elites, and the oligarchs who many voters believe are ruining their lives and destroying the world.

Here, shaming elites is its own libidinal exercise. And Platner is just the man to offer Sirota, Klippenstein, and others like them the release they crave. 

In contrast, Jerusalem Demsas has argued that Democrats should not take Platner’s cheating scandal lightly. Voters, Demsas insists, do still care about these things. She cites a bevy of public opinion data showing Americans remain far cooler on cheating than, say, our French cousins. And, as Demsas puts it, the failure of Platner and his defenders to recognize the basic moral landscape of the country is an issue, not least because we are not talking about a single affair:

More concerning is that Platner’s infidelity doesn’t appear to be a one-time indiscretion, but rather the result of a 15-year-old worldview that’s dismissive of the concept of having high moral standards.

Demsas has a point, although recent years do suggest the American public is fickle at best when it comes to punishing candidates for being unfaithful. Still, infidelity is a perfectly legitimate reason for someone to choose not to support a candidate. In my view, it is not necessarily disqualifying in and of itself, especially if the couple has resolved their issues privately and decided to stay together. 

Nevertheless, there are eyebrow-raising aspects to Platner’s story. After all, he was using Kik, a messaging app notorious for its loose oversight and its popularity with sexual predators. In fact, that profile was active until this week! In his profile photo, he is in just a towel, his arm positioned to cover the totenkopf tattoo on his chest. It does need to be stressed, however, that there is zero evidence Platner engaged in any illegal activity on the app. 

Platner has apologized, and to a large extent the matter of his sexts ought to be between him and his wife. But his apologies aren’t really of interest to me here. As I said, the purpose of this essay isn’t to litigate Platner himself. He is obviously far from the first candidate to have scandals around his language and conduct toward women. And he won’t be the last. What matters to me is that those of us purporting to stand for gender equality reject the kind of cruel, juvenile misogyny on display from Kulinski, Klippenstein, and others. 

Featured image is To Rise and To Fall, by Francisco de Goya