The nationwide laugh fest over the video of the kiss-cam couple ducking for cover at a Coldplay concert outside Boston — was that bad or good?
The video of the canoodling couple needed only minutes to go viral, especially after internet sleuths identified the pair as Andy Byron, then chief executive of the East Coast tech firm Astronomer, and Astronomer’s then-Human Resources head Kristin Cabot, who is not Byron’s wife. The parody memes began immediately, and they were, frankly, hilarious. My two personal favorites were AI reenactments featuring, respectively, Lego minifigures and cats. (Yes, AI is good for something.)
As might be expected, second thoughts and backlash quickly followed in the media. Readers and viewers were reminded of the substantial personal toll whenever infidelity gets a public airing, especially when it’s aided by social media. In this instance, both participants resigned, and Byron has a wife and children who stand to be humiliated by the ridicule surrounding the incident. (Cabot’s current marital status seems unclear, although there are reports that she was married to another CEO as of February.)
At the left-leaning Guardian, contributor Miski Omar complained, “Public shaming is now a participatory sport.” She asked, “Was the doxing, the intense, invasive publishing of private details a proportionate response?” The right-leaning UnHerd was even more outraged. Columnist Matthew Gasda wrote, “While turning someone into a meme might seem fun, it’s severely undignified, and discards the customs and safeguards of a liberal society in order to participate in a sadistic pile-on.”
I respectfully disagree. George Orwell wrote an essay in 1941 about the cheap, mildly smutty humorous postcards that the British working class of the time just loved. Most of the jokes were sex jokes, and they traded in broad, crude human caricatures: the adulterous husband on the seduction trail, the scolding wife with her fireplace poker, the voluptuous young thing who catches the husband’s attention for a moment he’ll later regret, a “sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in law,” as Orwell wrote.
But as Orwell pointed out, the popularity of the lowbrow postcards reflected not a decadent society but “a society that is still basically Christian” — that is, a society that still takes marriage, and marriage vows, seriously. It is only among the genuinely decadent — the cultural and intellectual elite — that you find elaborate rationalizations for fooling around behind your spouse’s back: It’s “polyamory,” or it’s “having too much love to confine it to one person.” The rest of us can see infidelity for what it is — an all-too-relatable failing. And that’s a healthy thing.
We also know how quickly extramarital commitments can disintegrate when one party’s self-interest is at stake. In the Coldplay video, Byron’s unchivalrous jump away from Cabot (as she holds her face in her hands), once he realizes the camera is on him, leaves her standing by herself. (I don’t think Byron’s wife is suffering any opprobrium from this — quite the contrary. All the tweets I’ve seen express hope that she takes him to the cleaners if there is a divorce.)
The reason we laugh at incidents like the Coldplay fiasco isn’t that we think we’re morally superior to the shamed pair. We know, deep in our hearts, that even those of us who are devoted to our spouses might be just a little bit tempted by the attractive new hire, or the good-looking exec who also owns a couple of multimillion-dollar houses. Our laughter is the laughter of recognition at the flawed and fallible human nature we share with everyone else on the planet. As Orwell wrote, people are capable of unselfish heroism when the occasion calls, but there is always “the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, [and who] can never be suppressed altogether.”
It didn’t help, of course, that Cabot’s job description happened to be that of the HR lady whom everyone loves to hate, the one who cracks down on other employees’ office romances (maybe not at Astronomer but elsewhere), and gets workers into trouble for complimenting the appearance of their colleagues. And how much privacy could Byron and Cabot have reasonably expected when they appeared together at a public concert, sitting in conspicuous seats?
Kiss cams have been a feature of stadium events since the early 1980s, together with warning signs about videotaping, and they have occasionally caught out couples in relationships they didn’t want others to know about — which ought to have served as a warning to exercise appropriate discretion. Naturally we shouldn’t put children or other vulnerable people under the glare of a public spotlight, but as for the rest of us adults: If you don’t want to be on a kiss cam, don’t go to venues where there are kiss cams.
So I say: No apologies for the jokes. They show that we as a society still have a robust respect for the institution of marriage and spousal loyalty. Besides, the memes have been awfully funny.
Charlotte Allen is an arts and culture columnist for Quillette and film critic for Salmagundi.
