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Sean Parker Is a Honeymoonster: A Guide to Post-Wedding Bridezillas

Yesterday, Facebook mogul Sean Parker published a 9500-word essay on TechCrunch debunking criticism of his $10M wedding in Big Sur. Contrary to media reports that portrayed him as a forest-destroying egomaniac, Parker writes, his wedding was “beautiful,” “tasteful,” “enchanted,” and “epic.” He invokes fairy tales, God, and J.R.R. Tolkien. He uses the phrase “unparalleled beauty.” He also uses the phrase “imbuing the moment with a feeling of supernatural bliss.”

This is honeymoonster behavior.

The honeymoonster is social media’s sequel to the bridezilla. Though its origin is difficult to trace, bridezilla appears to have entered the lexicon in the mid-nineties to describe a woman behaving monstrously during the planning and execution of her wedding. The earliest print reference appears to be a 1995 Boston Globe article about bridal greed: “She also cautions brides-to-be about turning into Bridezilla, the name wedding consultants bestow on brides who are particularly difficult and obnoxious.” Bridezillas reach their peak on wedding day, but like mayflies expiring at dusk after a day of noisy mating rituals, they expire when the night ends. After that, the conventional wisdom goes, they’re just cranky wives.

But modern weddings have a second life online. They are photographed, Instagrammed, and posted on Facebook for admiration, discussion, nostalgia, and gawking. Wedding website templates at The Knot and My Wedding offer mechanisms for distributing pictures after the party. And so a new genre of wedding-adjacent divas have emerged. Let’s call them honeymoonsters—newlyweds who want to manage their weddings after they’re over.

Bridezillas control what you do at a wedding; honeymoonsters control how you document it. (They may ban electronics entirely.) Bridezillas enforce wedding hashtags; honeymoonsters force deletion of tagged material they don’t like. Bridezillas terrorize wedding planners; honeymoonsters terrorize the videographers, photographers, and scrapbookers. Honeymoonsters go to great lengths to trash the dress. They pose for morning-after boudoir photos.

Sean Parker helped engineer the invention of social media, so he is both cause and effect of honeymoonster culture. He is the mother of all honeymoonsters.

Image management is more complicated for a public figure than it is for the rest of us, but according to Parker, the dilemma exists on a continuum of relative digital celebrity. “One of the most salient themes of our ceremony and also of our vows was the notion of ‘sanctuary,'” Parker writes. “Such a place is increasingly difficult to find in our technologically supercharged and hyper-connected world.” For those “cursed with celebrity or notoriety,” the effect is “only exaggerated.” (For the sake of expediency, let’s not dwell on the tortured self-portrait embedded in those statements, tantalizing as it may be.) “We chose a setting for our wedding that was a literal expression of our search for sanctuary: a place that was safe, private, and intimate,” he writes. “We didn’t court attention – quite the opposite, we asked guests to check their cell phones and cameras at the door.” Nevertheless, he planned a multi-million wedding that involved fake ruins and a settlement with the California Coastal Commission, and his essay contains photos and descriptions of the ceremony, all available for public consumption. His angst isn’t only about attention. It’s also about control. Sanctuaries, after all, are only safe when they are controlled to keep out predators and the profane.

Parker faced an abnormal level of wedding backlash, but the pursuit of control drives non-celebrity honeymoonsters, too. Check out the rationale from this “Cellphone/Camera Ban” discussion at The Knot:

Is anybody banning cellphones and/or cameras at their ceremony so that the guests can actually enjoy the moment without having to duck around other guests’ electronics in the way of view and so that when you look out to see the happy smiles and tears of joy on their faces you can actually see their faces instead of the electronics? I plan to hire a photographer and videographer for the ceremony and possibly set up an Instagram hashtag for the reception so that guests can share their photos from that.

The bride wants to edit how her guests “enjoy the moment” (preferably with visible tears of joy) as well as how they will look in the professional photographs she commissions (no cellphone facial obstruction). She’s not against attention; reception Instagramming is fair game, as long as the images are properly tagged. She wants to influence when and how people pay attention to her, both in the moment and when they look back.

Wanting to remember your wedding a certain way is not inherently monstrous. Nor is the post-facto pursuit of privacy. Both are reasonable desires and can be indulged healthily. But when your post-wedding triage approaches the length of the Epic of Gilgamesh, consider taking a break. The wedding is over. It served its purpose. You are now married. You probably even had fun! “Our wedding day was a beautiful dream come true,” Parker writes. “After all the stress of the preceding 19 days, the wedding itself went off without a hitch. Afterwards we were excited to run away on our honeymoon and forget about everything.” But he could not. Some toxic combination of
wedding stress, digital feedback loops, and social anxiety had driven him to madness. He had become a honeymoonster.

Special thanks to Josh Gondelman for critical lexical contributions to this article.

Read more posts by Maureen O’Connor

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,weddings!
,bridezillas
,honeymoonsters
,honeymoons
,social media
,control freaks
,love and war

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Company That Vetted Snowden Accused of Chronic Slacking, Lying to the Government

In response to the NSA scandal, the government has argued that surveillance is necessary for our safety, and we just need to trust that they’re violating Americans’ privacy as little as possible. It’s a lot harder to make that leap of faith following the revelation that those handling sensitive data might not be checked all that thoroughly. Federal investigators claim they have evidence that USIS, the largest private provider of government background checks, frequently failed to properly complete its investigations of those seeking security clearance, then lied to government to cover their tracks. After all, it’s not like one of their subjects was likely to steal a trove of classified information, post it online, and spark an international manhunt, right?

USIS performed Edward Snowden’s security background check, and officials say that while there were unspecified problems during the process he was eventually cleared to work as a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor at the NSA’s Hawaii office. While recent developments shed more light on the issue, the concerns aren’t new. The Office of Personnel Management, which oversees most of the government’s security background checks, launched a contracting-fraud investigation of USIS in 2011 (just a few months after Snowden was given security clearance). Though the OPM inspector general’s office won’t comment on the case, last week Sen. Claire McCaskill said USIS is the subject of a criminal probe due to a “systematic failure” to conduct background checks.

The company was required to conduct reviews of all of the background checks it performed to make sure nothing had been overlooked. However, from 2008 to 2011 USIS allegedly skipped the second review in as many as half of its cases, then told the government it had performed both checks. Now a federal watchdog tells the Washington Post that he plans to recommend that the government stop using USIS, unless the company can prove that it’s changed its ways.

Making good on that threat would be difficult, as USIS handles about 45 percent of all background checks for OPM, and the system is already plagued by huge backlogs. So even if the allegations are true, the task of determining who should be handling our most sensitive data might remain with a company that lied about cutting corners, but promises not to do it again.

Read more posts by Margaret Hartmann

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spy games
,edward snowden
,usis
,privacy

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Republican Harvard Economist Writes Terrible Defense of the One Percent

Gregory Mankiw plays a small but important role in the political ecology: an accomplished Harvard professor who validates Republican economic policies. It’s almost impossible to find empirical support for debt-financed tax cuts, but when George W. Bush proposed them, Mankiw and his Harvard pedigree were there to reassure that they
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Serena Williams Apologizes Again, Still Suggests Reporter Might Be to Blame

After Rolling Stone quoted Serena Williams saying the Steubenville victim was partially at fault for her rape, the tennis star issued a weak non-apology, vaguely suggesting that she was misquoted. At a Sunday afternoon press conference on the eve of Wimbledon, Williams issued a clearer apology for her rape comments, and expressed remorse for possibly insulting rival Maria Sharapova, though she went on to complain that the reporter was unfairly “eavesdropping” on her conversation.

In the more gossipy of the two controversies to emerge from the article, Williams said on the phone, “She begins every interview with ‘I’m so happy. I’m so lucky’ – it’s so boring … She’s still not going to be invited to the cool parties. And, hey, if she wants to be with the guy with a black heart, go for it.” Writer Stephen Rodrick makes an “educated guess” that she’s talking about Sharapova, who’s dating her ex Grigor Dimitrov. Apparently Sharapova made the same assumption, because she said on Saturday, “If she wants to talk about something personal, maybe she should talk about her relationship, and her boyfriend that was married, and is getting a divorce and has kids.”

Williams never admitted that she was talking about Sharapova, but said she sought out her competitor on Thursday and tried to make amends. “I said: ‘Look, I want to personally apologize to you if you are offended by being brought into my situation. I want to take this moment to just pour myself, be open, say I’m very sorry for this whole situation’.” She went on to note that she’s “used to dealing with professional reporters.” Williams continued:

“I’m used to dealing with these people not writing or commenting on a private conversation that I may have or kind of listening in or eavesdropping and then reporting on it. You guys have completely spoiled me. With that being said, I’ve been in the business for a little over 200 years, so I should definitely, definitely know better.”

As for the Steubenville victim, Williams said she’s talked with the girl and her mother. “We came to a wonderful understanding, and we’re constantly in contact,” said Williams. She added, “I apologize for everything that was said in that article,” but didn’t delve into precisely how her thoughts on rape have changed. “I feel like, you know, you say things without having all the information,” she explained. “It’s really important before you make certain comments to have a full list, have all the information, all the facts.”

Read more posts by Margaret Hartmann

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,serena williams
,steubenville
,maria sharapova

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Is Rand Paul’s Love of Ayn Rand a ‘Conspiracy’?

My item on Rand Paul the other day, predictably, went over quite badly in the libertarian community. The Insomniac Libertarian, in an item wonderfully headlined “Obama Quisling Jonathan Chait Smears Rand Paul,” complains that my Paul piece “never discloses that [my] wife is an Obama campaign operative.” A brief annotated response:

1. I question the relevance of the charge, since Rand Paul is not running against Obama.

2. In point of fact, my wife is not an Obama campaign operative and has never worked for Obama’s campaign, or his administration, or volunteered for his campaign, or any campaign, and does not work in politics at all.

3. I question the headline labeling me an “Obama quisling,” a construction that implies that I have betrayed Obama, which seems to be the opposite of the Insomniac Libertarian’s meaning.

4. For reasons implied by points one through three, I urge the Insomniac Libertarian to familiarize himself with some of the science linking sleep deprivation to impaired brain function.

A more substantive, though still puzzling, retort comes from the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, a frequent bête noire of mine on subjects relating to Ayn Rand and Ron or Rand Paul. Friedersdorf raises two objections to my piece, which traced Rand Paul’s odd admission that he is “not a firm believer in democracy” to his advocacy of Randian thought. Friedersdorf first charges that the intellectual connection between Paul and Rand is sheer paranoia:

Chait takes the quote and turns it into a conspiracy … As I read this, I couldn’t help but think of Chait as a left-leaning analog to the character in Bob Dylan’s “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Those Objectivists were coming around/They were in the air / They were on the Ground/ They wouldn’t give me no peace. For two thousand years, critics of unmediated democracy have warned about the masses abusing individuals and minorities. The American system was built from the very beginning to check democratic excesses.

But if Rand Paul distrusts democracy he must’ve gotten it from Ayn Rand. 

A conspiracy? Am I imagining that Rand Paul has been deeply influenced by Ayn Rand? Paul himself has discussed the deep influence her work had on his own thinking. In college he wrote a series of letters and columns either quoting Rand or knocking off her theories. He used a congressional hearing to describe one of her novels at tedious length. How is this a conspiracy?

Friedersdorf proceeds to argue that Rand is not really very militant anyway:

It’s also interesting that Chait regards Rand’s formulation as “militant.” Let’s look at it again. “I do not believe that a majority can vote a man’s life, or property, or freedom away from him.” Does Chait believe that a democratic majority should be able to vote a man’s life or freedom away? …

In the political press, it happens again and again: libertarian leaning folks are portrayed as if they’re radical, extremist ideologues, even when they’re expressing ideas that are widely held by Americans across the political spectrum.

Well, here we come to a deeper disagreement about Ayn Rand. My view of her work is pretty well summarized in a review-essay I wrote in 2009, tying together two new biographies of Rand with some of the Randian strains that were gaining new currency in the GOP. My agenda here is not remotely hidden, but maybe I need to put more cards on the table. I’ve described her worldview as inverted Marxism — a conception of politics as a fundamental struggle between a producer class and a parasite class.

What I really mean is, I find Rand evil. Friedersdorf’s view is certainly far more nuanced and considerably more positive than mine. He’s a nice, intelligent person and a good writer, but we’re not going to agree on this.

Friedersdorf waves away Rand’s (and Rand Paul’s) distrust of democracy as the same fears everybody has about democracy. Well, no. Lots of us consider democracy imperfect or vulnerable, but most of us are very firm believers in democracy. Rand viewed the average person with undisguised contempt, and her theories pointed clearly in the direction of cruelty in the pursuit of its fanatical analysis. A seminal scene in Atlas Shrugged described the ideological errors of a series of characters leading up to their violent deaths, epitomizing the fanatical class warfare hatred it’s embodied and which inspired Whitaker Chambers to observe, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To the gas chambers — go!’”

Randism has never been tried as the governing philosophy of a country, so it remains conjecture that her theories would inevitably lead to repression if put into practice at a national level. But we do have a record of the extreme repression with which she ran her own cult, which at its height was a kind of totalitarian ministate. You can read her biographies, or at least my review, to get a sense of the mind-blowing repression, abuse, and corruption with which she terrorized her followers.

But the upshot is that I strongly dispute Friedersdorf’s premise that Rand’s theories are a variant of democracy, any more than Marx’s are. In fact, I find the existence of powerful elected officials who praise her theories every bit as disturbing to contemplate as elected officials who praise Marxism. Even if you take care to note some doctrinal differences with Rand, in my view we are talking about a demented, hateful cult leader and intellectual fraud. People who think she had a lot of really good ideas should not be anywhere near power.

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,politics
,rand paul
,ayn rand
,chaitfeuds
,conor friedersdorf

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Gay-Rights Activist Latest Target of City’s Anti-LGBT Violence

Eugene Lovendusky, founder of the group Queer Rising, spent much of the past month protesting New York City’s recent uptick in gay-bashings, but over the weekend, he became the victim of yet another bias attack. The 28-year-old Queens resident says he was leaving a club near Times Square with his boyfriend and a friend early on Saturday morning when a group of teenagers started yelling “faggot” at them. “By instinct, I turned around and said, ‘You can’t say that to me,'” Lovendusky tells DNAinfo. He says that’s when one of the teens punched him in the jaw, knocking his glasses off his face.

Lovendusky called 911, and a short time later, police arrested 19-year-old Manuel Riquelme, who was found at a pizzeria with friends on 40th and Ninth Avenue. Riquelme has been charged with felony assault as a hate crime and misdemeanor aggravated harassment. “It’s further proof that anyone no matter how strong or vocal you are in the community can be a victim,” Lovendusky told the Post. “If anything this will only strengthen my resolve.”

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,hate crimes
,gay bashing
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Meet the New NRA President, Jim Porter, Who Calls the Civil War the ‘War of Northern Aggression’

On the eve of the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting, in which up to 70,000 people with guns gather in Houston, Texas, under the slogan “Stand and Fight,” the gun group has announced a new president who is more extreme than the old president. Jim Porter, whose father was also an NRA president, will begin his two-year term on Monday, after the party. For some insight into how dealing with the gun lobby in the near future will be, please refer to this 2012 speech from Porter, in which he calls Barack Obama a “fake president.”

“The NRA was started, 1871, right here in New York state. It was started by some Yankee generals who didn’t like the way my southern boys had the ability to shoot in what we call the ‘War of Northern Aggression,'” he told the New York Rifle & Pistol Association in a little history lesson. “Now, y’all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the War of Northern Aggression down south.”

Porter went on to explain that “one of our most greatest charges that we can have today, is to train the civilian in the use of the standard military firearm, so that when they have to fight for their country they’re ready to do it. Also, when they’re ready to fight tyranny, they’re ready to do it. Also, when they’re ready to fight tyranny, they have the wherewithal and the weapons to do it.”

The nutty Wayne LaPierre will remain the group’s main mouthpiece, but this man sounds like he knows how to turn up the crazy, too.

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,jim porter
,national rifle association
,gun control

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Who’s Advertising Directly to Obama on ESPN?

There’s a little blind item in Politico’s story about interest groups advertising on ESPN specifically to reach our sports-fan president: A media strategist tells writer Anna Palmer that an unnamed client had advertised on the network during a climate change debate in his first term “for exactly that reason.” Since watching sports on TiVo sucks, the tactic makes sense, but hopefully if you’re the president you can at least arrange for a mute button.

Read more posts by Adam Martin

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,barack obama
,advertisingpocalypse

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Wolf Blitzer Is Apparently Famous Enough to Get ‘Swatted’

“Swatting,” a fad like planking and fridging (but far more dangerous and expensive), might finally be over now that it’s trickled down to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. The prank, currently reaching “epidemic” proportions, is designed to send the SWAT team to the homes of famous people, like Ryan Seacrest, Chris Brown, and Justin Timberlake, with anonymous calls or messages to police alleging violence in progress. At Blitzer’s home in Bethesda, Maryland, over the weekend, authorities were told someone had been shot and set up a perimeter only to find out it was fake, and that the man of the house wasn’t even home. “Wolf is fine,” said a network spokesperson. “That’s what matters most.” The prankster is not in custody, no matter what CNN says.

Read more posts by Joe Coscarelli

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,media
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,swatting

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Cuomo Ends Hypothetical 2016 Presidential Bid

Andrew Cuomo may be the first person to drop out of the 2016 presidential race, though technically no one is running yet. Cuomo has said he isn’t even thinking about 2016 on numerous occasions, though that hasn’t put a stop to the speculation, particularly from his dad. Now a source says he’s resigned himself to the fact that he’s losing the race that currently only exists in political junkies’ minds. “The governor has told people in recent weeks that there’s not a chance for him to run if Hillary gets in the race because she’ll easily wrap up the Democratic nomination,’’ a Cuomo administration insider tells the Post. “He knows that and he accepts that, and so he won’t even be thinking at all in those terms — unless Hillary decides not to run, which seems unlikely.”

Fortunately, people can start pinning their hopes for the (extremely distant) future on another New York politician. Politico has a lengthy article on New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who is “quietly building a résumé that would allow her to be taken seriously should she ever decide to run for president.” Gillibrand, who holds Clinton’s former seat, won’t be running in 2016 either — or anytime soon. Politico notes that Gillibrand has both Clinton and Cuomo standing in her way, and she’s relatively unknown nationally. However, “Remove those issues, and she would be seen as a first-tier presidential candidate by most metrics — especially at a time when both parties are eager to find strong female prospects for the White House.” It’s beginning to look like Gillibrand could be a major player in 2024, presuming no other issues arise in the next decade or so.

Read more posts by Margaret Hartmann

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,politics
,it’s never too early to talk about 2016
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