Mike Tyson, Beloved Rascal, and Other Modern Hypocrisies

rapist kitsch

This first bit is going to be seen as trying to beef with a few particular people in the industry, but my intention is the opposite; what I’m describing is interesting precisely because it’s so common. My readers always demand examples, though, so here’s a good one.

On the Ringer’s Big Picture podcast, they recently did the 1977 edition of their popular “movie drafts,” where the three regulars on the show take turns selecting movies for particular categories in an effort to come up with the best slate of the three. 1977 presents a bit of a complication, though, given that it was the year of Annie Hall - one of the greatest American movies ever made, and also one written, directed, and starring Woody Allen, who is now a pariah. So, after selecting a few other movies first, when they get to Annie Hall the three hosts (Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan) go through an obligatory period of hemming and hawing about how Allen is bad. Only then do they grudgingly admit that the movie is very, very good. I don’t use the word “obligatory” lightly, and that’s why this isn’t about those three podcasters in particular; everyone who does this sort of thing for a living knows what the rules are with Allen. The question is, to whom do those rules not apply? For the record, I don’t have any particular beef with the hosts keeping Woody Allen at arm’s length. If they have moral objections to a filmmaker and want to express them when talking about his movie, that’s fine. The trouble is that this sort of moral work needs to be undertaken with the most basic requirement of morality, consistency, the understanding that moral rules must apply to everyone equally. And it’s not just the Ringer podcast network that has a problem with achieving that consistency but media writ large.

Allen is a pretty good rejoinder to the “there’s no such thing as being canceled” claim that gets thrown around a lot. Despite never being charged with a crime, the allegation against him has rendered him persona non grata in Hollywood, no longer invited to awards shows and events, losing his very lucrative multi-picture deal with Amazon Studios. The MeToo moment prompted renewed focus on allegations by Allen’s stepdaughter Dylan Farrow that Allen molested her as a child; in the years since, the filmmaker has gone from being a celebrated figure in Hollywood to someone past collaborators feel compelled to disavow. I never know how seriously to take people who insist that there’s no such thing as being canceled. The immediate question is why those self-same people spent the past 15 years trying very hard to cancel others. If there’s no such thing as canceling, why did you yell on Twitter about accountability, so often and for so long? What were you trying to accomplish? Another good example of effective cancellation is Kevin Spacey, who appears unlikely to ever act in a major movie or show again, though he has been convicted of nothing. And I say good! That seems like a just outcome to me. But… that’s what canceling is. You know that’s what it is. That’s how it works. It has worked, in Spacey’s case. Why pretend otherwise?

(Not for nothing but the whole discourse of canceling started when Twitter users who fancied themselves activists started saying “X is canceled.” Yell at them.)

At this point any discussion of canceling is just a trading of clichés, and nobody’s listening anymore. It’s a completely exhausted discourse and both sides have retrenched to the point that there’s nothing constructive about the debate. But all “canceled” ever meant was that, sometimes, public opprobrium is brought to bear to enforce negative consequences on someone perceived to be guilty of a sin the law can’t or won’t punish. That’s what happened to Allen. He was accused of something unthinkable, the evidence was deemed not sufficient to produce an indictment by the police, public opinion gathered to try and harm his career, and it was indisputably harmed. The entertainment industry has issued a distributed punishment on Allen such that he now gets productions financed by tiny European companies that have no ability to actually put his work in front of American audiences. Similarly, both civil and criminal legal cases against Spacey have failed, but he’s never appeared in a remotely mainstream movie or earned a big payday since. That’s canceling. And you’re perfectly free to say both were deserved. I’m certainly not here to tell you to feel sorry for Woody Allen or Kevin Spacey. I am saying that it’s profoundly weird to suggest that they’re not suffering negative professional and social consequences from the collective online shaming that you yourselves engaged in. I thought that was the whole point of the shaming!

More importantly, there’s Mike Tyson and all the other Mike Tysons.

Mike Tyson, Kid Dynamite, 1980s heavyweight boxing champion, has settled into a role as a beloved cultural figure. Once uniquely feared for his ferocious style (which has led to him being constantly overrated as a boxer in the all-time ranks¹), he’s come to be seen as a lovable, even cuddly presence. His fearsome reputation has strangely helped his new career as a wacky, “random” celebrity. At 57 years old, he’s fighting YouTube sensation Jake Paul later this year, in another sign that we’re living through the fall of Rome. He enjoyed a major career resurgence with his famous cameo in the raunchy 2009 comedy The Hangover. Since then, Tyson has appeared on talk shows, started a podcast, made comedic television commercials, and as you can see in the image at the top, starred in an animated television show for Adult Swim. Broadcast from 2014 to 2019, Mike Tyson Mysteries had that mid-period Adult Swim quality of attempting to substitute a wacky premise (ferocious-turned-adorable Mike Tyson solves crimes) for actually being funny. The show does serve, though, as a good symbol of how Tyson’s public image has become kitsch, his resurgence based on nostalgia for his boxing career and the fact that the entertainment industry loves both established names and unpredictable personalities.

Here he is with TV funnyman Jimmy Kimmel, yukking it up!

Tyson isn’t just a fun-loving celebrity. He’s also alleged to be serially predatory towards women. He’s been accused by his former wife Robin Givens of vicious domestic violence, and seems not particularly inclined to dispute those allegations. He was quoted in a 1989 biography saying, about hitting Givens, “She really offended me and I went BAM. She flew backwards, hitting every wall in the apartment… That was the best punch I've ever thrown in my entire life.” He said “I have socked her before” in regards to Givens on The Oprah Winfrey Show and readily admitted to Winfrey that it was an abusive relationship. They openly discussed his violent side in a deeply-uncomfortable Barbara Walters interview. He has repeatedly downplayed his alleged abuse of Givens by accusing her of faking a pregnancy and miscarriage in order to extort money from him, as if that would excuse his behavior even if true. In 1992 he was convicted of raping an 18-year-old college student and is still on the sex offender registry; the prosecution was successful in part because of evidence gathered at an emergency room the morning after the incident and because Tyson’s chauffeur corroborated her mental state that night. He served less than three years in prison. In 2023 he was accused of rape in a suit filed under the New York Adult Survivors Act, a suit in which the plaintiff alleges that she “told him no several times and asked him to stop, but he continued to attack me… He then pulled my pants off and violently raped me.” Apparently referencing the 1992 case, Tyson has appeared on video saying “I am not above violating a woman, but I did not violate that woman.”

I would suggest that this history would ordinarily be sufficient for cancelation; if you hate that term, then please supply your own. Certainly this all appears to be damning enough to result in the kind of social and professional consequences that have fallen on others accused of intimate partner violence or sexual assault. I might even hazard that, as horrific as the allegation against Woody Allen is, what Tyson has been very credibly accused of is worse in aggregate. Call me crazy. And yet on another Ringer podcast, Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan (both on the previous podcast episode I mentioned) evinced far less concern about goofing on Tyson than they did about grudgingly praising Allen’s best movie. They act like he’s a subject that we’ve all agreed to chuckle along about, and no doubt they’re right. Here’s the kind of attitude they have towards discussing Tyson.

Bill Simmons: Yeah. I didn't like fat Mike Tyson was kind of a bummer. He's in better shape now. I wish they should CGI his pot belly in this movie.

Chris Ryan: Get a little George Lucas going?

It’s the usual for that podcast - jokey and flippant. Which is of course fine in a vacuum, it’s a podcast, not a tribunal. But then that’s the point: The Big Picture is also not a tribunal, and yet the social mores of media ensure that the hosts treated Allen with extreme care where they had treated Tyson casually. The two of them would never have thought to be equally jokey and flippant about Allen, under any circumstance. Later they name the Tyson cameo as part of “what’s aged the worst” in The Hangover, but that’s explicitly because the surprise of it has been blown, in the context of the conversation. There’s never a moment where the hosts demonstrate any sense that Tyson needs to be publicly disavowed, in an hour and 20 minute podcast that was released in 2019, the height of the MeToo era. And in context with the later discussion of Woody Allen, I find that very weird! They don’t particularly say “hey, Mike Tyson, great human being,” but that’s not the standard, right? The Woody Allen standard is that you have to openly disavow someone in explicit terms to make it clear that you don’t condone him. That conspicuously did not happen in this podcast despite Tyson’s longstanding history of domestic violence and sexual assault accusations.

Again, though no one is going to believe this, I’m not hanging anything on the Ringer guys specifically here. I’m saying that their attitudes are the norm in the business. They’re playing by the rules that have been communally developed regarding these two accused men - Allen, and Spacey, and others are all understood to require immediate disavowal because of widespread peer condemnation in media. Everyone has been socialized into that behavior. But why not Tyson? Why not a bunch of other guys? Why has Michael Fassbender skated on disturbing allegations of domestic violence, when others have had their careers seriously threatened by similar accusations? Why did John Lasseter get to jump right back into Hollywood big shot status? Why is Dr. Dre a beloved hip hop icon given serious allegations of violence against women? Why is it that Bill Murray has absorbed a number of accusations and just bobbed along unconcerned? How does all of this work? As is so often the case, I’m struck by the combination of the extreme certitude in which contemporary public morals are voiced, by our self-appointed morality police, and the profound lack of basic consistency or logic underlying who ends up socially indicted and who doesn’t.

This isn’t really about Allen and Tyson, specifically, and it’s definitely not about podcasters at the Ringer, who are just playing according to the weird, ad hoc rules our industry has developed. It’s about the fact that in the 2010s media’s workforce communally decided that its professional purpose was to act as a social media kangaroo court, that to be a member in good standing of the journalist and commentator community required you to serially accuse and judge and hector and yell, all day long, primarily on Twitter. For awhile this looked like it had real cultural force, especially as individuals accused of various kinds of bad behavior began to be punished by institutions looking to avoid bad press. But like most moral movements it eventually ran up against the limits of its own internal contradictions and the inevitably of petty human failure, both of which could be seen on full display in the demise of Times Up.

The people yelling on social media never had political power to match their volume. Still, they did accrue sufficient cultural power that they could force some institutions to hand down consequences, though I find that this contention is unpopular. (My life has taught me that a sure sign of an unhealthy political organization or movement is when people within that organization or movement are uncomfortable being told that they are in fact gaining power.) The story of someone like James Damore - who, to be clear, strikes me as an obnoxious dipshit - is the story of someone who did not understand that he was operating according to a different paradigm’s rules than the one he was used to, as well as the story of how institutions like Google became opportunistically concerned with social justice as public sentiment changed. Which of course doesn’t mean that he wasn’t sexist. It’s just that the fact that he was fired reflected a rapidly-shifting public morality, one which would have been difficult to follow even had it usually been invoked sincerely (instead of for PR) and even if it was applied consistently (which it wasn’t). I certainly do believe that most of the people who tried to wring justice out of the world by yelling at it did so because they sincerely wanted to protect vulnerable people, along with their deep desire to fit in. But they conspicuously failed to create a set of coherent rules that they could or would enforce with even minimal consistency. And when that’s true the sincerity means little.

It goes without saying that the right’s moralizing is worse on the merits of the suggested morals, more deeply hypocritical, more destructive, and more gleefully indifferent to consistency. Donald Trump is the hero of the Christian right, and you don’t need me to lay out the nonsense inherent to that status. He and his flock are the purest expression of making “destroy my enemies” the whole of politics. If the question is why I don’t spend more time yelling at them, the simple answer is that they are beyond shaming, and certainly beyond reforming, certainly by me. Whereas if we are at an inflection point for American liberalism, if it really is true that the page is turning and we’re leaving a certain exhausted approach to left-leaning politics behind, then perhaps this is a good time to express a better approach to public moralizing. The trouble with the kind of proud distributed righteousness that was on constant display for the past decade-plus is that it prompts exactly the kind of petty hypocrisy and ethical inconsistency I’m lamenting here; if you spend all day complaining that everyone fails to meet your extravagant standards of behavior, you will inevitably look ridiculous when those standards bend opportunistically, or worse, when you yourself fail to live up to them. There are reasons that we’ve traditionally separated politics from pure moral judgment, and a big one is that nobody likes a church lady. We on the left-of-center could be better at public morality if we engaged in public moralizing much less often.

Then again, the turn against the shameless self-righteousness of the previous decades appears to be driven not by principled rejection of false piety but by the fact that it’s now perceived to be an expression of embarrassing Millennial sincerity. Public moralizing may not be retreating thanks to its profound recent failures or critical engagement with its assumptions. It may simply be off-trend.

Well, I can still complain. We’re living in a landscape where Mike Tyson has not only been credibly accused of domestic violence and rape but made statements that seem clearly to admit to them, has become a folk celebrity with a jolly reputation, and nobody cares. He’ll receive endless soft-focus media portrayals as the Jake Paul fight approaches, “look at this proud old lion” stuff. There will be, I hope, at least some effort to apply the old rules to him. Still, many who spent the 2010s hanging every apostate they could find will simply nod along. You can’t really call it a redemption story because people have largely avoided acknowledging that Tyson has done things which would require him to be redeemed. And I’d love to be able to ask some central authority of Yelling Social Justice why people discussing Annie Hall on a podcast feel that they have to fill painful minutes of airtime with awkward throat-clearing about Woody Allen, while Mike Tyson gets to rest comfortably in kitsch.

1. I have Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Joe Frazier, Lennox Lewis, Larry Holmes, Evander Holyfield, and maybe Tyson Fury ahead of Mike Tyson. The first three are self-explanatory. Lennox Lewis had a style some people found boring and a personality many found annoying, but he was an extraordinarily successful boxer who beat Tyson by KO. People sometimes suggest that he beat Tyson because Tyson was too old, seemingly not aware that Lewis is older than Tyson! Larry Holmes lost to Tyson when he was well past his prime and his resume was much more impressive during a stronger era for heavyweights. Holyfield dominated Tyson twice despite being four years older. Fury’s total career accomplishments are greater, although with the state of boxing the past ten years it’s hard to judge. Tyson was an electric fighter whose peak was as ferocious as anyone’s, but he happened to appear in a moment of unusual weakness for heavyweights and when he had the chance against great fighters like Lewis and Holyfield he was simply outclassed. The Buster Douglas fight was no fluke.