I’m not going to write about literature today. Instead, I’m going to write about Tiger Woods, who was pictured on the cover of the New York Post yesterday outside of, if the press is to be believed, a rehabilitation center for sexual addiction (I refuse to link to the photo, as way of setting the tone for this post). I hate that Woods would do something like this, and moreover I hate the amount of victimization that has seeped into our culture. Everyone, it seems, is a victim of something these days. Now, I don’t mean to denigrate people who suffer from legitimate issues related to addiction or abuse or trauma. My critique of Woods is meant to be a defense of them, because if everyone is victim, then no one is.
It seems to me that Woods is employing the my-teacher-doesn’t-like-me defense. I’m sure you’ve all heard someone explain the bad grade they received from a professor with something along the lines of “the teacher just didn’t like me.” In other words, they were given poor marks not because of their failure to prepare for assignments or their inability to grasp the material but because of an unfounded bias against them. The implication being that they would’ve received stellar marks if only they hadn’t been the victim of circumstances that were beyond their control.
Woods is employing a similar excuse. By positioning himself as a victim and framing his mistakes as nothing more than the results of a situation he could not control, Woods is seeking to avoid responsibility for his actions. See, he didn’t want to cheat on his wife over and over again with several different women, but he had no choice in the matter; he’s not a bad person, he’s simply a victim of extenuating circumstances. This fallacy is negated immediately based on the dominance of Woods in his profession; true addicts don’t become the best in the world at anything, unless their addicted to something dopey like “winning” or “excellence”. Woods is not only deflecting the need to take responsibility but cheapening the public conception of sex addiction. Perhaps I’m just insensitive, but a rich and famous man having assignations with easy and available women doesn’t seem like the behavior of an addict. Or perhaps my expectations for a sex addict are just too high after encountering the desperate perversity in Portnoy’s Complaint (you didn’t think I could get a literary reference into this kind of post, but I found a way).
I will not use this space to hand out advice to Woods like so many other commentators seem more than willing to do. I have little interest in this “scandal” and know nothing of it besides the basic facts. I’m much more interested in news such as the recent death of the only man who was confirmed to have survived both atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And really, I don’t care one or the other how Woods decides to proceed from this point forward, whether he wants to stay with his wife or he wants to get sleeve tattoos, move to Vegas, and party twenty-four hours a day. My only concern is that a philanderous billionaire is trying to pass himself off as a victim and that it will probably work.
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