The Tape

Eric Dane, the guy everyone found attractive on Grey’s Anatomy, ended up in a private sex video with his wife Rebecca Gayheart and some actress, and America absolutely lost it. The video showed them having sex, using drugs, the standard stuff. The country treated it like the apocalypse.

The timing was perfect for a scandal. Everyone was primed for the next celebrity to fail the purity test. Paris Hilton, R. Kelly, various Disney stars—the machine was hungry. Dane’s leaked tape fed it.

What gets me is the sheer absurdity of it. Americans freak out over a nipple on network television but have no problem with people getting shot in the head. A married couple has sex with another adult and it’s somehow the biggest cultural emergency. The drugs bothered people more than the sex, which tells you everything you need to know.

The real trap of a scandal like that is how the leak itself becomes the scandal. If that video stayed private, nobody would’ve known. But leak it and suddenly everyone’s talking about it, everyone’s thinking about it, everyone’s pretending to be shocked. The moral performance is exhausting. People moralize for a week and then move on to the next thing.

I don’t know what the scandal actually proved. That celebrities are people? That famous people are vulnerable to blackmail and leaks? That America has deeply neurotic ideas about sex? All of those things were already obvious. The tape just made them unavoidable for a moment.

By now nobody thinks about the video anymore. Dane moved on, the country found something else to be scandalized about, and America stayed exactly as weird about sex as it was before. Nothing changed. The only real lesson is that leaked tapes blow up because people are hypocritical, not because the content is actually shocking.