Question: what do Ted Cruz and Pornhub have in common?
The somewhat surprising answer is that they’ve both featured an adult film star in their videos.
Sure, the Cruz campaign didn’t put self-proclaimed “conservative Christian” Amy Lindsay in a campaign ad on purpose (though wouldn’t have you considered them just a tiny bit less devastatingly uncool if they had?), and they went to great lengths to reassure Cruz’s fundamentalist core supporters that it was an accident. They even pulled the video just to be safe, though how one can ever be truly “safe” around the kinds of people who are seriously voting for a guy who might just be the Zodiac Killer is anyone’s guess.
It’s bizarre to consider that Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign a) exists and b) is hiring softcore porn stars to be in his ads.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, however; America has a long and rich history of political commentary through pornographic parody.
Presidential porn parodies have become something of a staple of contemporary political campaigns. There was the infamous “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?” in 2008, which helped catapult actress Lisa Ann to national stardom, and this year, Hustler created a porn parody of one of the Republican debates, because why not?
In a way, it’s a snapshot of this country’s id. Americans are both obsessed with and puritanically frightened of sex—it shows in the ways we relate to sex and sex work, particularly porn, which remains stubbornly popular in all its iterations, even in those most fundamentalist, conservative Christian states.
It’s like a thought exercise in free speech carried to its most extreme logical conclusion: in a country whose citizens hold freedom of speech sacrosanct and also really, really enjoy porn, why not exercise your right to political agency and, say, watch a porn actor playing Lyndon B. Johnson fucking a Black woman in the name of civil rights at the same time?
That’s perhaps one of the most oddly offensive things I’ve ever had to type; it’s just one part of an 80-minute-long video called “Here Cums the President”, in which various past Presidents engage in anachronistic sex acts.
(You can also watch President Nixon fucking an incredibly racist stereotype of a Chinese woman in the name of racial harmony, if you’d like, though I can’t personally recommend it.)
The real-life LBJ did actually call his penis “Jumbo” and enjoy waving it around at people, so I suppose it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine, if you’re so inclined, that he was the kind of dude who thought his dick could personally advance the Civil Rights movement. That doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable or fraught to watch a Black porn actress make the customary noises while LBJ talks about the “penis-in-chief”.
Americans idolize their presidents; perhaps it’s unsurprising that so-called “presidential porn” is so popular. It’s a perfect storm of American obsessions: sex, pornography, the cult of personality around presidents, offensiveness-as-free-speech. With names like “President Obama’s Stimulus Package”, it’s like these videos dare you to be offended (as I was while I watched a very bad Tricky Dick impersonator–get it?–ejaculating all over an ethnic stereotype’s ass).
If you find them tacky, crude or in poor taste, if you take issue with the fact that someone obviously thought up the titles first and the plot later, if you question the politics of porn glorifying or degrading elected officials through the suggestion of sexual deviancy, you become the uncool one, the one who doesn’t get the joke.
Presidential porn, like a lot of niche porn, exists partly as a way of proving social cachet, kind of like a red, white and blue-themed 2 Girls 1 Cup: something you show your friends in the computer lab at lunch time, watching to see which people are most able to appear unaffected by the gory spectacle.
The presidential porn-watcher, we can safely assume, is the kind of person who takes a great deal of pride in their inability to be offended by shock sites, someone who giggles knowingly with other similarly enlightened peers about those who lack the bravery to watch interracial porn of a bad President Obama impersonator introducing his “stimulus package” to a petite white woman.
Political figures are considered public; their satirical representation an acceptable expression of freedom of speech, so presidential porn parodies don’t even have to file off the serial numbers in the same way that other porn parodies might have to if they want to escape unwelcome legal attention and Fair Use suits.
President Clinton’s famous line, “I did not have sexual relations with this woman,” is not protected by copyright, making it ripe for endless parody, both of the line itself (technically true in the District of Columbia, which defines sexual relations as penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse) and of the persona of the man who uttered it. In Here Cums the President, this fertile ground is naturally revisited, with an ersatz Clinton (identifiable mostly by the hit-and-miss attempt at Clinton’s iconic drawl) assuring the woman sucking his dick that they weren’t technically having sex.
Thus, political commentary–of a sort–is technically achieved, and the viewer can feel smugly satisfied by both their edginess and the fact that they are in on the joke. Ha, get it? Clinton was a horny old bastard who manipulated women into having sex with him! Nixon was a fucking racist! LBJ talked about his dick a lot, and also the producers vaguely remember learning about the Civil Rights Act in middle school Civics class!
It’s not particularly deep commentary, nor is it especially insightful, but isn’t that also the American way – that kind of lowest-common-denominator peanut gallery catcalling masquerading as satire, the same thing that supposedly makes The Big Bang Theory funny? We love to feel as though we’re smarter than others, more enlightened, more in touch with the American ideals of liberty and free speech, without actually doing that much to achieve those goals.
In the same way that cishet white male stand-up comedians get away with making the same three jokes about masturbation and bad breakups in the name of “political incorrectness”, we don’t have to do much more than get a naked person to utter a reference to a historical fact in the voice of a dead president while fucking another naked person to feel like we’ve somehow said something, somehow contributed to the political discourse in that uniquely millennial way where the ideal of free speech is more important than the content of the speech itself.
I don’t recommend Here Cums the President (or any of the titles I’ve mentioned in this article)–hell, I couldn’t muster up the courage to watch them myself, but instead got my partner to watch and relate to me the worst bits, with occasional fleeting looks at the screen to verify that, yes, Richard Nixon was reliving a sick Memoirs of a Geisha fantasy of Asian fetishism and it was exactly as bad as it sounded.
I guess I’m not in on the joke: not being American, and being someone who consumes porn for the purpose of sexual gratification rather than feeling edgy or enlightened, I’m not really the target audience. But while I couldn’t get into presidential porn, I don’t think it’s entirely without merit as a form of social commentary.
I would love to see more feminist and indie porn creators tackling this subject matter with real finesse, insight and wit, because while I think LBJ waving Jumbo in a Black woman’s face is in incredibly poor taste, I can almost appreciate the intention behind it, the idea that the presidency doesn’t protect public figures from comment or criticism.
In the right hands, that’s the beginning of a compelling parable about the cult of personality surrounding presidents and how it’s been manipulated and taken advantage of by the series of men who’ve been the elected figureheads of American democracy.