MADISON, Wis. – The longer this presidential campaign season goes, the more obvious the problem becomes to me: As an industry, the adult entertainment business simply isn’t doing enough to sexually objectify, denigrate and ridicule the candidates who possess Y chromosomes.
When it comes to the lovely ladies of American politics, it’s pretty clear we’ve got them covered — generally in semen, but covered nonetheless. Where the menfolk are concerned, though, we’ve been asleep at the switch.
“Google the names Donald Trump, Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders and the word ‘porn,’ and the results are benign lists of links to articles and images that do little to degrade perceptions of the candidates’ competence or morality,” complained feminist author Soraya Chemaly — and she’s more or less correct, Wood Rocket’s Donald Tramp The XXX Parody notwithstanding.
Clearly, what the world needs now (aside from love, sweet love, obviously) is more pornography featuring Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz lookalikes. These hitherto porn-coddled men can’t be depicted only in non-sex roles, either. They must be engaged in hideously depraved acts of sexual debauchery, whether they’re performing those acts with women, other men or select inanimate objects commonly associated with politics, like American flags, neon-lit lecterns or Karl Rove.
One reason we need to do this is to counteract the stultifying effect titillating imagery has on men. Such imagery apparently makes them want to vote for either a cranky, aging quasi-socialist or an obnoxious, compulsively-lying, buffoonish billionaire with stubby little fingers, instead of supporting the bastion of decency, honesty and incorruptibility that is Hillary Clinton.
“Just seeing a woman in a bikini deactivates men’s medial prefrontal cortex, where thinking about people and their intentions, feelings and actions happens,” Chemaly wrote, citing a six-year-old podcast interview with a researcher who never quite asserted the same thing in describing her actual (preliminary) research. “After exposure to images of sexually objectified people, viewers are more likely to associate them with animals, and sensitivity to subjects’ feelings or expressions of pain are measurably reduced.”
Granted, I’m not sure which part of my brain would shut down if I were to be presented with a picture of Bernie Sanders wearing a bikini, but if it’s the same part that for some reason insists on storing every last note and syllable of the commercial jingle for Wayfair.com, then I’m all for it being shut down as soon as possible.
I’ll bet the guys who made those Sarah Palin porn parodies had no idea they’re the reason Barrack Obama won the race in 2008 or the cause of everybody thinking she’s dumber than a pile of Alaskan moose droppings.
Being the porn-addled sexists they are, those political porn parody producers probably think voters’ perception of Palin has something to do with all the idiotic shit that spews forth every time she opens her mouth. Of course, that assumes men in her audience are listening in the first place, as opposed to mindlessly staring at her tits or drifting off into another common masculine mental space — like the one that makes us spend $3,400 on a high-tech meat smoker, the controls of which we’ll never figure out because we’re still thinking about Palin’s tits.
So, as we produce our Sanders and Cruz porn titles, clearly we need to be thinking about much more than just who to cast in the lead, what niches to cover therein and what to call our creations. When you make porn lampooning a political figure, it’s not just porn — it’s potentially vote-swaying rhetoric.
“Using graphic sexualization to comment on a woman candidate’s worthiness for office isn’t pornography, it’s political strategy,” Chemaly explained. “Thus, when The Onion runs a piece about Hillary Clinton, in which she is manipulated to appear fully frontally nude…it erases the enduring effects of historic discrimination, legitimizes biases against women as leaders and misrepresents and distorts the purpose of satire.”
God damn Onion! Don’t you people know anything about satire? You really should have asked a feminist author about satire’s purpose before attempting it. Those people are Hillary-ous.
Image: Bernie Sanders by Miller Center; Ted Cruz by Gage Skidmore. What’s not to sexually objectify?
