[The Pro Circuit] On NOT Nailin’ Palin
Now that it’s all over but the screaming, I can finally consider the question that seems to have long been on everybody’s mind: “Sarah Palin?” I don’t mean “Sarah Palin?” as in “Huh?” No, no, I mean “Sarah Palin?” as in “Boom-chikka-chikka-weeyow wow!! Yow?”
I remember the moment I first read Sarah Palin’s name in connection with the Republican Vice Presidential nomination. It was online, at something like six in the morning — procrastinating, something all sane fiction writers are doing at six in the morning. An airplane was reportedly heading from Alaska to McCain’s location (Illinois or Michigan or something), amping up speculation that Alaska Governor — say it with me, now, Sarah Palin — was about to be McCain’s nominee for veep. The very first comment on the article was: “McCain-MILF ‘08!” The objectification of Sarah Palin had begun. Or, rather, the objectification of Sarah Palin as VP candidate had begun, since, let’s face it, she was a beauty queen — she’d been objectified before.
The quickness of the high-fiving bewildered me. Sure, there was emphatic woof-woofing from the lunatic fringe of the political sector; George Gurley wrote in the New York Observer that he wanted “to lick that face and drool on it like a dog.” There was soon a This Is Not Sarah Palin sex doll. And did anybody really expect Larry Flynt not to jump on board? The Palin-themed Hustler film, Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? stars MILFtacular Lisa Ann, at 36 a mere eight years younger than Governor Palin. Perhaps more importantly, Who’s Nailin’ Paylin was followed up — before the election!! — with its own philosopho-political response, Obama’s Nailin’ Paylin. Producer Cesar Capone found a way to get adult industry headlines without having to spend a dime on production; he offered the Gov $3 million to star in a porn flick, an offer — gasp!! — Palin could most certainly refuse, or more accurately ignore. Then there was another Palin movie, Palin: Erection. This is somewhat impressive in being, like, ultra-on-the-sopt, but not shocking in the porn industry, where it’s typical to slap a flick together to capitalize on the lamest possible social trends, with the rapidity of production being directly proportional to the trend’s lameness. The trend of jerking off to Sarah Palin was, apparently, pretty lame.
Anyway, the Palin parody is to be expected from Flynt, who hates political conservatives and ridicules them every chance he gets, and the rest of porn of course could be expected to fall in line, since the industry would, metaphorically speaking, fuck a microwaved watermelon for $5. And a Sarah Palin sex doll? Whatever.
But much to my bewilderment, my fellow erotica writers quickly jumped on the bandwagon, considering Sarah Palin as valid fodder for their erotic daydreams. I don’t really mean Susie Bright, who considered the matter of Sarah Palin’s sex life from a political standpoint, as she’d done previously (she actually once wrote a piece about fucking Dan Quayle). But in this case, I’m thinking more about Rachel Kramer Bussel, who launched sarahpalinerotica.com before the election, and Carol Queen, who hosted a political smut night at The Center for Sex and Culture, clearly aimed at Sarah Palin’s smoldering sexuality. Both Rachel and Carol are good friends of mine, and in their view it was all in good fun. I was invited to contribute to Rachel’s project, and turned it down on philosophical grounds; I agreed to read at Carol’s reading, with the proviso that I would not under any circumstances read about Sarah Palin (I later had to cancel due to appendicitis — coincidence? I think not — the CIA is all over me with their appendix-control rays).
During election season, I objected to all this Palin objectifying with a vitriol that utterly bewildered my friends. “What’s the big deal?” I was asked. When engaged in such conversations, I would find myself responding much like Linda Blair in the Exorcist — I cleaned a lot of pea soup off of my walls, I tell ya what.
I objected, and still object, to Sarah Palin jerkoff slash and Sarah Palin porn because I believed then, and believe now, that the march to objectify Sarah Palin is NOT about her being a Republican. It’s not even about her being a hideous hypocritical bitch who promotes abstinence-only sex education while crowbarring her knocked-up daughter into a completely inappropriate marriage to prove that marriage is a sacred union between two unwilling teenagers. It’s about her being a woman. I believed, and still believe, that objectifying Sarah Palin by making porn about her or writing erotica about her, or even making off-color comments about how hot she is — I believe that is sexist. People seem to think that’s strange of me. Some consider me a blowhard, because according to a number of my friends the fact that I write porn renders my opinion in this case null and void.
But that’s not the biggest reason I objected to Palinporn, and it’s not the reason I’m coming clean now. I was most upset by the Palinporn trend for one simple reason: Quayle.
Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush’s runningmate in 1988, was a bit of a buffoon, with little political experience. Some braniac political pundits wrote at the time was that Bush nominated Quayle because from that point on the election was all about Quayle and what a doofus he was. That allowed H.W. to stay out of the fray, and guess what? He won. It took a recession and Ross Perot to get him out of office four years later. The distraction from George H.W. Bush’s being unfit for command worked like a charm, and that’s what Palin smelled like: a distraction.
We live, now, in an era where Americans pick a candidate for the most frivolous of reasons. The last thing I wanted to see in the days leading up to the election was the bump McCain received in the polls turn in to a stratospheric climb because people thought Sarah Palin was sexy. I kept my opinions about her sexiness or unsexiness, for the most part, to myself when in public. It did not seem relevant to the conversation. Palin’s sexuality, like the rest of her, seemed like a distraction from the (to me) obvious fact that John McCain was the wrong, wrong, wrong candidate for President. Palin winked and otherwise right-thinking liberals swooned. They hated her, but the loved to hate her. It was weird.
Now that the election is over, the distractions continue: Palin has inserted herself into the media, or the media has invited her in. Republican Newt Gingrich is having a shit-fit over her. And if Palin runs for President in 2012, I’m sure there will be more Palinporn to come.
Please, God . . . make the bad, bad lady go away. Make her go back to Alaska and face federal racketeering charges, and make Larry Flynt never make a porno about her again. Please?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Thursday, 20 November 2008 at 7:09 am Eddie wrote:
The $3 million dollar offer to Governor Palin caused an interesting reaction within me. Porn has become more acceptable and mainstream in many circles and because of that the stigma surrounding being a porn actor has diminished.
But if we don’t have that stigma, how can we ensure that people considering porn or having offers to be in porn understand the exploitative nature of the industry? With the stigma there was an understandable cost, without it what do we have? I feel we need something to help women avoid the kind of production companies that sling cash to get starlets out of their panties.
Don’t misunderstand me, I think the stigma was incredibly sexist and narrowminded. But it was the only social construct we really had.
on Friday, 21 November 2008 at 12:18 am Kristina Lloyd wrote:
Well said. I’m with you.
Palin’s politics are vile but that doesn’t justify all the gleeful pornification of her. Misogyny is not satire. And no right-minded person would dream of using racism as a political weapon, so how come sexism is OK? I recently posted a link to a fab article in the UK press on this: People who are ostensibly feminist …
If the notion that these gender-based attacks on Palin simply play into Republican hands makes people question what they are doing, I’d be much happier.