However he has behaved, Tiger Woods’s personal life just isn’t our business. Brendan O’Neill on the relentless erosion of the line between public and private
Am I the only person who feels repelled by the naked glee with which Tiger Woods has been and is still being beaten to a pulp — no, not by his golf club-wielding wife, but by the world’s media? Ever since Woods crashed into a fire hydrant and a tree outside his home two weeks ago, his private life has been splashed across the front page of every tabloid from Tennessee to Timbuktu. It’s not over for poor Tiger. Earlier this week another clutch of girlfriends — or victims as they’re now portrayed — decided to spill the beans, including a porn star called Holly. His wife is said to have moved out, his mother-in-law is in hospital, after being taken from his Florida home in an ambulance.
But the ‘kiss and tell’ element isn’t the worst of it. Alongside the predictable tabloid sweep for ‘facts’, for the ‘real story’ of sexual indiscretions, there has also been a witch-hunting of Tiger Woods by a motley crew of broadsheet commentators, experts and therapists. They’ve leapt, vampire-like, for Tiger’s jugular, desperately excited by the thought of forcing this famously private individual to embrace the contemporary cult of emotional sluttishness and, in the words of one columnist, to submit himself to ‘the public confessional which fallen celebrities now have to go through’, even though it ‘will be torture’.
Woods, we’re told, must renounce his privacy-protecting ways (which he adhered to with ‘legendary zeal’, frowned one columnist) and ‘ring Oprah and get on her sofa pronto’. What we are witnessing is the Great Tiger Hunt — the hounding of a man who dared to say: ‘There is an important and deep principle at stake: the right to some simple human measure of privacy.’ The world’s media is attempting a forced conversion, a terrifyingly thorough attempt to strongarm a privacy ‘zealot’ into ditching his outdated beliefs and instead to embrace the majority religion of Letting It All Hang Out — Preferably On Oprah.
There are signs that some people are beginning to feel the loss of privacy has gone too far. Coincidentally this week, the influential Center for Democracy and Technology in the US has launched a ‘Take Back Your Privacy’ campaign, encouraging web users to take a stand against corporations that collect our personal data, and the Queen of England has launched what we might call a ‘Take Back One’s Privacy’ campaign, in which she has warned paps to stay away from Balmoral. Yet the gleeful cultural slaying of Tiger, the wealthiest and one of the most influential sportsmen on earth, suggests these two institutions may be fighting a losing battle: the Tiger saga confirms that the idea of private life has been denigrated almost beyond repair.
Over the past ten to 15 years, privacy has become a dirty word. Anyone who insists on keeping his life under wraps is instantly assumed to be hiding something. There was a time when we said ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’, which wasn’t just a naff saying about how English people love to decorate their houses with crazy paving and mock-Tudor accessories, but rather sprang from the great MP and jurist Edward Coke’s fight in 1604 for the ordinary bloke’s right to a private life. ‘The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose,’ said Coke, arguing that the state should keep its hooter out of our affairs.
Now, what is the cri de coeur of our snooping, super-Oprahised era? ‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.’ Governments say that to justify filming our every jaunt and jog on CCTV cameras; hacks say it to justify their expectation that everyone should unquestioningly open up to media interrogation; and therapists say it because apparently ‘bottling up your feelings’ will turn you into a serial killer or something. And increasingly, we sacrifice our privacy voluntarily. For centuries, the Coke outlook held good, as we conducted our private affairs behind occasionally twitching net curtains — today we post the most personal info and photos of all sorts of drunken shenanigans on Facebook, while thousands queue up to be on Big Brother or some other celeb-creating show in which they will be expected to do everything in front of TV cameras.
As a consequence of this relentless erosion of the line between public and private, we are now shocked when someone says, Greta Garbo-style, ‘leave me alone’. No sooner had the smoke stopped rising from the engine of Tiger Woods’s SUV than commentators were telling us that this man should have absolutely zero privacy. He has ‘no right to privacy’, insisted a bizarrely angry writer for the Independent, as if Woods had crashed into his sycamore. The justification for Woods’s lack of a right to privacy is that he has appeared in ads. And at press conferences. And ‘if you’re going to be in my living room’, said one columnist, then ‘I get to ask about what went on in your driveway’.
This shows how utterly corroded the centuries-old distinction between public man and his private endeavours has become. Are we seriously saying that anybody who does things in public — ads, photo-shoots, golf — should have no purely unspoken, unrevealed existence? I am currently ‘in your living room’ (or perhaps your study or your toilet) courtesy of this magazine — does that mean you get to know if I have ever been beaten up with a golf club? (Funnily enough, I have. On Northwick Park golf course in 1989 by a gang of teenage toughs who’d had too much lemonade. Is that enough revelation? Will you leave me alone now?)
Part of the glee in the toppling of Tiger springs from the fact that he posed as a ‘perfect family man’ and we now know (or we think we know) that he is something different. No one, it seems, is allowed to have a public façade any more, but why not? ‘Having put Woods on a pedestal, we now want to bring him down,’ says one writer. But surely the fault is ours, for elevating Tiger in the first place? The problem is not that he is a ‘false god’, but that we treated him as god-like. A fan club called the Church of Tiger Woods has now changed its name to the Damnation of Tiger Woods, which is not only a perfect metaphor for the religious-style persecution of Tiger — it also shows that it was our stupidity, rather than Woods’s duplicity, that made this super-talented golfer into a ‘god’.
And now, this zealous believer in privacy is being forced to genuflect before the altar of prostituted emotions and therapeutic psychobabble. He must seek ‘redemption’, we are told, by following ‘the three As’ (‘admit, apologise, advance’); he must partake in a ‘public mea culpa’, advises one writer, and confess to everyone that ‘I am disgusted with myself’. Only then, said a talking head on Sky News, can there be a ‘period of forgiveness by the public’. How did we become so arrogant that we believe Tiger must seek our forgiveness, as if we are on a par (no pun intended) with his own wife and kids?
The Tiger story is more than a typical tabloid feeding frenzy — it represents an important intellectual shift, where the idea of privacy, already battered and bruised, is being finally buried. We should all be concerned about this Tiger hunt, because we throw away privacy at our peril. The private space, in which we develop intense relationships, reveal our weaker or darker traits to loved ones, work out how we feel and who we are, is essential to a civilised society.
We seem to have confused Tiger with one of those media whores who people Celebrityland these days. Our sense of ownership of famous people also springs from the fact that there are celebs — some of whom we even created, Frankenstein-like, through reality TV phone-ins — who have a tacit contract with the public in which they provide us with at least one titillating story a month and we get excited/morally outraged by it: think Jordan, Jodie, Peaches, etczzzz. Yet there is a vast difference between these slebs and talent, someone like Tiger who happens to be famous because he is a brilliant sportsman. And if we are serious about nurturing talent, and about being treated with respect ourselves, then we have got to learn to back off. Tiger owes us nothing but good golf.
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