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CHEATING SCANDALS HIT DIFFERENT RIGHT NOW

Cheating hasn’t changed. But post Me Too, our reactions have.

By Aja Romano@ajaromano Oct 4, 2022, 4:30pm EDT

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The Try Guys (from left, Eugene Lee Yang, Zach Kornfeld, and Keith Habersberger)
address cheating allegations against former co-worker Ned Fulmer in a YouTube
video released Monday. YouTube
Aja Romano is a culture reporter for Vox, focusing on criticism and the ethics
of culture. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily
Dot.

Cheating scandals have always been with us. When Zeus stepped out on Hera, the
Greeks turned his every affair into literal legend. When Eddie Fisher stepped
out on Debbie Reynolds with Elizabeth Taylor, we turned a messy real-life
breakup into a classic love triangle narrative, with an ugly virgin/whore
conflict at its center. When Beyonce shaded Jay-Z for cheating on her, we opined
that even a woman who seemed so close to perfection had to deal with a trifling
husband — while also letting our speculation over “Becky with the good hair” run
rampant.

When celebrities cheat, it’s an opportunity for gossip and tawdry
sensationalism, often fueled by longstanding gender stereotypes and tabloid
tropes that may be easily consumable entertainment but bear little resemblance
to reality. In other words, cheating scandals say more about the pop cultural
narratives we superimpose upon them than they do about the people involved in
them.

Yet a recent string of high-profile cheating scandals, all involving
high-profile straight men who cheated on their successful wives, suggests that
the public’s relationship to these tropes, and perhaps the celebrities
themselves, might be changing. Out: slut-shaming and victim-blaming. In:
interrogating toxic masculinity.

Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine drew massive backlash after an allegation surfaced
last month that he had cheated on his pregnant wife with an Instagram model half
his age. A few days after news of Levine’s cheating scandal broke, actress Nia
Long grabbed headlines when the Boston Celtics suspended her husband, head coach
Ime Udoka, for one year following an investigation into his alleged relationship
with a junior member of his staff. Once again, the public backlash conveyed
shock and outrage that such an ideal woman could find herself with a
philandering spouse.

The most personal public response yet arrived when the world learned last week
that Ned Fulmer, lately of popular YouTube group the Try Guys, had cheated on
his wife. Although they’re much lower-profile compared to the other celebrities
in this rundown, the Try Guys have cultivated a deeply loyal fan base by
building a brand based on their relatability and relative wholesomeness. Fulmer
in particular had branded himself in partnership with his wife, building their
professional work around their idyllic marriage. Consequently, the Try Guys
cheating scandal fully subsumed social media in collective shock, hurt, and
mourning. When the rest of the Try Guys (Keith Habersberger, Eugene Lee Yang,
and Zach Kornfeld) finally spoke out on Monday to confirm that the allegations
were true and that they’d parted ways with Fulmer, their fans quickly valorized
them.

On their face, each of these scandals seems pretty different. Yet each has
culled a level of public concern and moralism that feels like a shift from the
cheating scandals of the past, which were essentially tawdry cautionary tales
and little else. When we look at them more closely, we see a set of competing
narratives about power, gender, and relationships that don’t always align with
reality — but do tell us a lot about ourselves.

POWER DYNAMICS AND PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS MAKE CHEATING SCANDALS TRICKIER
THESE DAYS

On September 19, 23-year-old model Sumner Stroh came forward on TikTok to accuse
43-year-old Levine of having a year-long affair with her. After cheating on his
pregnant wife, Victoria’s Secret angel Behati Prinsloo, Levine allegedly DM’d
Stroh to ask if he could name the baby after Sumner. As creepy as that is,
Levine looked even smarmier once three other women also spoke out to accuse
Levine of sending flirty texts like “I may need to see the booty.” In an
Instagram post, Levine later denied having a physical relationship with anyone,
but admitted to utilizing “poor judgment” and “cross[ing] the line during a
regrettable period in my life.”

These accusations ranged widely in scope. One woman basically accused Levine of
disrupting her life by sending her a single flirtatious text and then ghosting
her in 2010, four years before he married Prinsloo. Another failed to produce
anything more shocking than texts revealing that Levine is an ass man. Still,
they all had the basic theme of Levine behaving inappropriately, usually with
much younger women — and they introduced a theme that ran throughout the
subsequent discourse around the other cheating scandals as well: the imbalanced
power dynamic of these relationships.

“At the time, I was young, I was naive, and, I mean, quite frankly, I feel
exploited,” Stroh stated in her TikTok about the alleged affair. “I was very
easily manipulated.” Other onlookers expanded on Stroh’s point, including
actress Emily Ratajkowski. “I don’t understand why we continue to blame women
for men’s mistakes, especially when you’re talking about 20-something-year-old
women dealing with men in positions of power who are twice their age,”
Ratajkowski stated in a pointed, since-deleted TikTok. “The power dynamic is so
skewed, it’s ridiculous. It’s predatory, it’s manipulative.”

Remaining aware of the power dynamics at play was also a priority for the staff
who dealt with the fallout of the other scandals. “We as an organization have a
responsibility to support [female staff members],” Celtics executive Brad
Stevens stated in the wake of Udoka’s suspension, noting that many of them had
been “dragged unfairly” into the social media gossip about the scandal. (Udoka
apologized in a statement “to our players, fans, the entire Celtics
organization, and my family for letting them down.”)

Meanwhile, the Try Guys were so sensitive to the optics around the Fulmer
scandal that they spent Monday’s clarification video discussing their efforts to
completely erase Fulmer himself, literally, from their videos and merchandise.
While the rumor mill is flowing with numerous anonymous allegations that the
other members of the Try Guys team witnessed Fulmer’s sexual misconduct in
person multiple times, the men confessed themselves deeply shocked and hurt by
the scandal, saying they had no idea. “We refused to sweep things under the
rug,” Yang stated. “That is not who we are and it’s not what we stand for.”

It’s not just the Guys who are focused on the optics. All of these scandals seem
to reflect a major shift in how the people involved and the general public think
about the parameters of a cheating scandal. For what may be the first time ever,
we’re seeing an emphasis on more than just “who did it” and “who’s the villain.”

Historically, the cheating narrative has always been inherently misogynistic,
reifying our tropes about the evil other woman, hammering away at the
virgin/whore dichotomy, questioning the behavior of the spurned party, and
rarely if ever focusing on the cheating partner. The “Jolenes” of the world were
given a witchy mystical ability to steal even the strongest man, while marriage,
even monogamy itself, tended to be framed as a confining prison for women,
forced to either pine for men who would never change or evolve beyond them into
independence. If a man stepped out of his wife and the public learned about it,
the prevailing cultural attitude held that she had failed to adequately perform
any of her many wifely duties as home manager, housekeeper, mother, caretaker,
and fully accommodating sexual partner.

This pattern arguably began to shift with Beyonce’s 2016 stunner Lemonade, which
largely centered around her feelings and reactions to husband Jay-Z’s cheating.
Instead of shifting those feelings onto the proverbial “other woman” (the
aforementioned “Becky,” who drew attention but wasn’t the focus), Bey
transformed the anger into a narrative of personal empowerment. She also
initially released the whole album on the streaming platform owned by Jay-Z, so
Lemonade ironically became a way of consolidating their power couple status. The
Lemonade narrative was perhaps the most successful narrative yet at forging a
new path between “fruitless pining” and “I don’t need a man.” And, crucially, it
didn’t have to destroy another woman to do it.

In 2017, the cheating narrative gained another element of complexity, this time
at the expense of Joss Whedon. Whedon’s longstanding image as an outspoken
feminist creator had been deteriorating for some time in his post-Avengers era,
but it took its biggest hit yet when his ex-wife Kai Cole alleged that his
feminism was just a front for years of cheating. Whedon, Cole alleged, preyed on
much younger women, usually women he worked with. These were relationships with
seriously imbalanced power dynamics, and Cole emphasized that Whedon used his
feminism as a way of masking his manipulative tactics and gaslighting women who
would question them, including Cole herself.

Cole’s narrative about her relationship with Whedon arrived right before the Me
Too movement and preceded what would soon become culture-wide conversations
about imbalanced workplace relationships. By confronting the idea that her
husband’s cheating was dually a form of emotional abuse and a form of predation,
Cole created an approach to talking about infidelity that broke away from the
“wicked adulterer” trope and aligned with more complex Me Too themes. Me Too
awoke us, culturally, to countless reductive and gendered stereotypes around the
ways we discuss everything from sexual harassment to monogamy. Inevitably, the
conversation around cheating began to focus on the man at the center of the
scandal.

This change arguably happened not only because of the Me Too movement, but also
because of our increasingly intimate parasocial relationships. We’re far removed
from the peak era of the Hollywood idol, when stormy celebrity relationships
could happen mostly far away from us. Now, they often play out on social media
among famous people who feel like our pals. We got our first real taste of this,
culturally speaking, when John Mulaney cheated on his wife of six years, artist
Anna Marie Tendler. Like Fulmer, Mulaney had become known for being a “wife guy”
— a dude whose personality presents itself, rightly or wrongly, as “I love my
wife!” Like Fulmer, Mulaney’s often ironically banal comic style had won him the
kind of audience whose parasocial relationships with him led them to feel deep
outrage and betrayal over the idea that he could have cheated on a woman he
spent years publicly adoring. But unfortunately, neither Mulaney’s nor Fulmer’s
“wife guy” brand could stand up to reality.

The parasocial aspect is arguably the last new piece of the cheating scandal’s
evolution, but it’s one of the thorniest. It also indicates how complicated some
of our conversations around cheating have become — maybe even to their
detriment.

THE CONVERSATION ABOUT CHEATING HAS CHANGED — BUT HAS IT CHANGED THAT MUCH?

The problem with our newly woke awareness of cheating is that the old cheating
narratives haven’t disappeared. They’re still with us, bound up in all the
typical stereotypes about broken relationships — only now they’re competing with
a barrage of endless social media takes that turn these individual scandals into
parts of much larger conversations about gender. All the while, the women who
come forward with these allegations still endure the brunt of the public’s
anger.

Current conversations still incorporate “the other woman is evil” trope, this
time abutting the “how could a man cheat on this perfect woman” outcry. The
public conversation still too frequently relegates women to flat caricatures of
themselves, even if the caricatures are supposedly positive.

Then there’s the overexposure of the people involved and the treatment of the
scandal itself as newsworthy beyond its actual merits. The fact that all of this
happens online and on social media makes the scandal feel like homework for many
people. “I’ve never heard of the Try Guys in my life,” a friend told me in the
wake of the Fulmer allegations. “Now they’re everywhere. Do I have to know who
these people are?”

The performance of public outrage can feel exhausting — and in some cases, like
Levine’s banal sexting, like a throwback to Victorian-era sexual politics.
Because of the ongoing advance of purity culture across the internet, it’s
become far too easy to conflate being scandalized and shocked that a guy cheated
on his pregnant wife with being scandalized and shocked that a guy likes sex at
all, or that two adults were — gasp! — flirting.

At the same time, because of our newfound awareness of the elements of coercion,
power, and manipulation that can accompany cheating, our outrage often conflates
“cheating” with far more serious sexual transgressions like much more aggressive
nonconsensual behavior and sexual misconduct.

Amid all of the gossip and discourse, the speculations about who the involved
parties are and wife guy jokes and “consensual workplace relationship” memes, we
have to ask: Ultimately, is any of this our business? Is any of it really
newsworthy? Is it all just an excuse to gawk at celebrities and put their lives
under a microscope of extreme moral scrutiny?

Behind every celebrity scandal are real people trying to cope with serious life
circumstances — and even if they seem trivial to us, the onslaught of public
opinion attaching to a public figure can make any situation 10 times worse.

That said, we know from long study that our relationships to celebrities have
more to do with what we project upon them than the celebrities themselves. The
cheating scandal too often turns women into scapegoats for the behavior of
cheating men, and too often allows the public to demonize them. Now, while the
cheating scandal has in some ways become more black and white than ever, it’s
also started to crystallize many of the ideas Me Too raised. We’re starting to
ask what drives people to cheat, and in what ways cheating can be used to
reinforce creepy power dynamics and emotionally abusive situations. Those
conversations are good for us, even if they lead to an overwhelming onslaught of
takes and social media fatigue.

It also seems clear that the public interest isn’t dying down soon. So, no, you
don’t need to know who the Try Guys are. Just know that this cheating episode,
like all of them, holds a mirror up to our own relationships and invites us to
peek inside — if we dare.

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