LOS ANGELES – On the Twitter account for pornstar-turned-politician Ela Darling, just above where her official @ElaDarling handle is displayed, are the words “Stoned Adulterer.”
It’s a cute handle, sure, and certainly won’t shock Darling’s legion of devoted fans or voters who share the implied enthusiasm for imbibing mind-altering chemicals. Still, I didn’t think I was going too far out on a limb when my initial reaction was “this handle might not be the most politically savvy nickname ever adopted by a candidate seeking to be a Democratic Assembly Delegate.”
Then again, if someone had asked me a couple years ago whether a man who went on a popular radio program and openly spoke of being sexually attracted to his own daughter and boasted into a live microphone about his ability to “grab women by the pussy” due to his celebrity could ascend to the U.S. presidency, I would have said no — but only after I’d finished laughing at the ridiculousness of the idea.
And yet, here we are — and there he is, in the Oval Office, for better or for worse, most likely for at least four years.
As it turned out, in such a political context the idea of a porn star who publicly self-identifies as a stoned adulterer winning a spot as an assembly delegate wasn’t so far-fetched after all. While she didn’t win the seat in District 39, Darling did collect enough votes to be the second runner-up.
Coming close to winning a spot as a delegate is a far cry from winning a major public office, obviously, but for those of us who have been watching the porn industry and public acceptance thereof over the course of several decades, it’s still a pretty stunning development.
There was a time when any association with porn was an absolute death-blow to a political career, even if the connection between the candidate and the porn industry was extremely tenuous. Have we reached a point where instead of representing a naïve or unserious attempt, a Twitter handle, vocation and overall image of the sort Darling sports might be an asset, not a liability, to a candidate?
One of the many paradoxes of the age of social media is the seemingly contradictory desire on the part of consumers and voters for transparency and authenticity on the one hand, coupled with a widespread embrace of the obviously fraudulent and downright deceptive on the other.
In countless “man in the street”-style interviews with his most passionate supporters, Donald Trump’s biggest fans often cite the fact he speaks his mind as one of the things they like best about him. Whenever Trump says something that clearly crosses the line separating the merely colorful from the truly unhinged, however, we hear from these same people that we ought not to take him so literally. Or, to paraphrase one of the most sycophantic subordinates in the grand history of sycophantic subordinates, people should judge Trump based on what’s in his heart rather than the things that issue from his mouth — or the things that issue from his fingers, presumably, given the man’s penchant for leading by tweet.
What I don’t know about Darling, having never met her and not being familiar with her persona, is whether she’s sufficiently mendacious, duplicitous and void of shame to make the most of whatever controversy might spring from someone with a background in porn trying to make the leap to electoral politics in a context bigger than an assembly delegate election.
Trump didn’t win the election simply by being a controversial figure. His ability to play the media like a fiddle and manipulate the national conversation was the difference between victory and another early exit from the Republican primaries like the one he made in 2012.
If attacked as unqualified or unseemly due to a past in porn, whether the assault came from the media or a political opponent, how would Darling (or any other performer running for office) respond?
Unfortunately, a well-reasoned, rational appeal asking people to set aside their preconceived misgivings about adult performers likely would not be effective, because the voting public doesn’t seem too interested in that sort of thing anymore, if in fact it ever was.
Turning on the press and verbally lashing them for their fundamentally wrongheaded bias, an approach that continues to work nicely for Trump, might not be as effective coming from a porn performer. Among other things, even voters who are avid porn-watchers often seem quite comfortable with enjoying the streamed performances of porn stars while still regarding them with the same sort of disdain that has been around since the term “porn star” became a “thing.”
Regardless, the fact a porn star’s potential viability as a political candidate is even a question for discussion says something about how much public perception of porn has changed, how much American politics has changed and how much the nature of public discourse about both porn and politics has changed.
Are those changes good or bad? Who knows. Either way, maybe someday we’ll all learn the answer by way of President Camacho leaving the realm of fiction.
