Spare a Thought
The inexorable rise of pitybragging.
Please spare a thought for Danny Cipriani. For the unacquainted, Danny used to throw a ball around a rugby field.
For his unrivalled talent on the pitch came a constant supply of supermodels off the pitch. Danny once dated Kelly Brook, Katie Price, Lindsay Lohan, and just about every other tabloid fixture of the 2010s.
Danny’s written a memoir. From what I can gather, it’s one of those cloying tributes to narcissistic personality disorder. The title asks a question à la mode those cod-philosophical Facebook posts your melancholic aunt presses into being after a few snifters of gin.
‘Who Am I?’ asks Danny’s book, knowing full well who he is. To feign humility, the title does that Millennial thing: asks a question to which it knows the answer.
I have a cactus-like indifference to celebrity, to Danny Cipriani, to anyone over whom the kaffeeklatsch gushes. Danny was a gifted athlete who drained his Superman abilities in pursuit of celebrity. Little is more tragic than wasted talent.
The Romans thought celebrities were mentally deranged, and to be avoided. To this day, we’re yet to discover the secret behind their vastly superior self-healing concrete. The Romans had a point.
Anyway, Danny’s sex life, as documented in his book, would blush the cheeks of a Roman senator.
Danny has bedded scores of beautiful women. This happens when one is Hollywood handsome, rugged, cocky, and a known shagger. At the height of his bedhopping campaign, Danny featured permanently in the tabloid press, each week a new beauty attached to his arm.
In short, Danny could indulge himself senselessly and did so with the atomic energy of a nymphomaniac in the waiting room at Dignitas.
Reader, that’s it. That’s the story. A young man blessed with opportunities to shag beautiful women indulged those opportunities to shag beautiful women.
In cerebral times, that sentence would end this review. Indeed, that sentence would be the entire review.
But this age of New Authenticity obliges us to take everything and everyone for their best intentions. That’s despite thousands of years of human nature suggesting the folly of this prevailing attitude.
“I’m not the sort of bloke who swaggers into a pub or changing room and starts boasting about his latest conquest,” says Danny, who has published a book about his sexual conquests.
So, the premise of Danny’s book is not ‘I’m the world’s greatest shagger,’ but ‘Here’s what I learned about the human condition from my sacrifice in doing exactly what I wanted to do all the time, anyway.’
This tome of laddish bedhoppery is not a lurid lascivious lore but a profound meditation on the human condition and all that befalls a fallen people. With the right dose of modern faux-sincerity, tales of selfishness become tales of selflessness.
“I’m sleeping with everyone, from porn stars to actresses to girls I meet at the coffee shop.” “Threesomes became the norm,” he grouses. “But I just feel dejected when it’s over.”
Danny Cipriani wants you to know he is one of the world’s foremost, Hall-of-Fame lotharios. Danny slept with three beautiful women a day.
But the age of the sincere is also the age of the scold. Danny cannot brag about his sexual exploits. He must cloak his pride and vanity behind modesty and humility.
“It may sound like every man’s dream, but the art of life is finding the right balance,” he says.
“And in that respect, sex is no different than food or drink. While it’s fine to like food and drink, if you like them too much, they can make you unhappy and destroy your life. Sex for me has become a form of self-harm.”
Mercifully, I didn’t purchase or read this book. Helpfully, the newspapers here in Broken Britain have serialised the work.
Besides, books of this genre are interchangeable. The self-help genre spawned the ‘mirror memoir’. In short, Reality TV has impregnated Self-Help and they’ve spawned a delinquent, bastard child. We’ve gone beyond the instructive to the performative. Everyone’s a self-help book now.
You can boil self-help books down to one sentence: Think about what you can control and forget what you cannot. Mirror memoirs go like this: I am the most important overdeveloped monkey on the planet. For 300 pages, I’ll hide my radioactive vanity behind self-help platitudes. I am the director, the hero, and every other name on the credit reel of this story about me.
This book could have been a tweet.
Without having read Who Am I? I can tell you what it boils down to, Danny Cipriani slept with thousands of women. He wasted his talent. And not because he is a thoughtless man with a penis—but for you. Danny seduced those supermodels for the betterment of humanity, not for the notches on his bedpost. His campaign of obsessive bed-hopping was not animalistic indulgence, but philosophical endurance. Concubeo ergo sum: I fuck, therefore I am.
We’ve devised clever ploys to circumvent the strictures of our phony-sincere culture.
Our age has spawned the phenomenon of pitybragging. For a definition, pitybragging is drawing attention to something of which one is proud, through the false prism of victimhood.
Danny is proud of bedding scores of beautiful women. He cannot say this. Danny must feign victimhood to elicit the attention and admiration he so craves. Pitybragging conceals ignoble motivations behind noble intentions.
In this age of narcissism, we hide indulgence and vanity behind sacrifice and humility. Our Hefner-like acts of selfishness masquerade as Gandhi-like acts of selflessness.
Like Vishnu, the pitybrag takes many forms. Peruse the New York Post and you’ll find ‘A restaurant shamed my big boobs — and made me cover up with a lost & found scarf’ or victims of ‘Hot Phobia.’ Invariably, victims of these afflictions are aspiring or established influencers.
The allure of pitybragging lies in the doubled reward. Danny gets implicit admiration for his sexual prowess. And enjoys explicit pity and appreciation for his supposed sacrifice.
In this age, where few say what they think or think what they say, vanity poses as modesty, indulgence as sacrifice, and pride dances in the garbs of humility.
Reader, I’m no prude. Indeed, I am pro-revelation of the flesh. But I wasn’t born yesterday.
Danny suggests his exploits were a search for self-discovery, a sacrifice from which mankind can gather new insight into the human condition.
In reality, Danny shagged countless maidens and models because Danny could shag countless models and maidens.
Given the chance, 98 percent of young men would do the same thing.
Of course, they couldn’t possibly say that. That would be inauthentic.
Perhaps I’m just a cynic.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanities....or to bowlderize George Best's quote and there was an ego less man...."I spent half my money on birds, booze and cars, the rest I wasted"....enjoyable column, thank you.
Danny who? Had to actually google. Think his heyday may have been when I was (mercifully) overseas. Brilliant read: I believe you say what you mean - and it is as refreshing as a Pimms on the terrace. Thank you.