In 1968, JG Ballard published a short story called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” in his book The Atrocity Exhibition. Reagan, at the time, was a famous Hollywood actor who had recently been elected governor of California. Ballard was the British author of a series of science fiction novels, whose work was becoming increasingly—is there a better word?—depraved. Not long after The Atrocity Exhibition he published the novel Crash, about people who are sexually aroused by car accidents, which was made into a decent 1996 movie by David Cronenberg (not to be confused with the excruciating 2004 Paul Haggis movie of the same name).
“Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” interestingly, is a kind of preliminary sketch for Crash, because, in Ballard’s imagination, it’s impossible erotically to separate Reagan from “rear-end auto collisions”:
INCIDENCE OF ORGASMS IN FANTASIES OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH RONALD REAGAN. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with “Reagan” proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects…Axillary, buccal, navel, aural, and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that the caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12% of cases, the simulated anus of post-costolomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98% of penetrations. Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of “Reagan” in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto collisions with one and three year model changes, (c) with rear exhaust assemblies…
Despite the title, this isn’t a story narrated in the first person. It has no first person, no individual voice, except that of the detached social scientist observing the experiment. It’s the public, the focus group, who wants to fuck Ronald Reagan, or be fucked by him. Like most of Ballard’s fiction—not so much the car-accident stuff but his dystopian climate change novels and especially his urban nightmare High-Rise—this story is astonishingly prescient.
Unfortunately, being a short story, it never made much of an impact on American politics. (As I tell my students, you could include the nuclear codes for the US arsenal, the original key to BitCoin, the true identity of JFK’s assassin, and the name of Madonna’s plastic surgeon in a short story, and no one would ever notice; that’s why they’re so perversely fun to write.) When Reagan ran for president in the late 1970s, anonymous protestors circulated copies of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” at the RNC, but no one noticed. It wasn’t until about 20 years later that American politics entered its hardcore era, so to speak, when the Starr Report moved the Overton window from NC-17 to XXX. The blue dress. The cigar. Nicholson Baker’s phone-sex novel Vox. In The New Yorker, Lorrie Moore wrote that American politics had an “autoimmune condition,” which was a great line, but not quite right: not an autoimmune but an autoerotic condition.
All that was before Sarah Palin entered national politics, during John McCain’s ill-fated 2008 campaign against Obama, and almost simultaneously made porn history: Lisa Ann, playing “Serra Paylin,” became one of the most popular adult actors of all time, most famously in the Larry Flynt-produced classic Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, released on election day.
Do politicians masturbate to images of themselves? You have to assume many of them do. After the 2016 election, as a thought experiment, I tried to imagine a work of fiction that Trump—a famous non-reader, obvs—would actually read, and the only thing I could think of was porn about himself: that is, about shiny buildings, shiny airplanes, shiny helicopters, piles of Big Macs, guys with pinky rings having sex in long limousines with fake-breasted Eastern European models. In a way that very few people ever achieve for very long, Trump has managed to live a life that’s simultaneously fantasy and (for him) tangible and real. It’s his uncanny valley. It’s why he’s so singular and so beloved. He doesn’t need to be a porn star: he is porn.
But we all knew that. None of that is new. The new porn in politics in 2024 is the obsession Israeli soldiers have with finding and cosplaying with women’s underwear in Gaza. There are thousands of photos that attest to this. As Belén Fernández puts it, writing for Al Jazeera:
There is plenty to say about this sort of exercise in militarised semi-pornography as a calculated assault on the dignity of women in an overwhelmingly conservative society. Ultimately, the taunting display of Palestinian lingerie amounts to an almost pathetically cliched violation of the intimate space of Gazan women. But to be playing around with the panties of people you are killing takes depravity to another level. Call it Orientalist fetishization with a genocidal twist.
Granted, it’s not just the females of Gaza who are eligible for such “demeaning” treatment; Gazan males can be intimately humiliated, too. In December, dozens of Palestinian men and boys sheltering at two Gaza schools were detained by the Israeli army, stripped to their underwear, and made to kneel on the ground.
The degradation of Palestinian women is all the more obscenely hypocritical, however, in light of the Israeli military’s condemnation of Hamas for its “discrimination” against women in the territory it controls. A section on the military’s English-language website devoted to “The Status of Women in Gaza” laments that “basic rights are often systematically denied” to females, who are faced with “decreased educational opportunities” as well as “limited employment opportunities” – a situation that is clearly best rectified by Israel’s bombing of most such opportunities to smithereens.
What Fernández doesn’t say, or doesn’t stress, is who these images are intended for: they’re produced to be shared on Israeli social media and disseminated worldwide by Israel’s supporters, who take great delight in them. The genocide in Gaza is probably the most widely filmed, memed, mocked, and joked-about event in Israeli history, and other than the tiny, embattled minority of antiwar activists, few have objected to the pornification of the quote-unquote “war.”
Societies built on racial domination, those with violently enforced racial power structures, have a strange relationship with shame. Whites in the American South, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were obsessed with preserving the gentility, dignity, and elaborate social rituals of antebellum Southern society; they also celebrated lynchings as festive occasions, posing for souvenir photographs alongside the horrifically dismembered, often naked, bodies of Black men and women. There was a widespread trade in postcards of lynchings and “souvenirs” of lynchings, including the severed genitals of Black men preserved in jars. These fetish-objects of subjugated peoples have incredible symbolic importance in American culture, with a long and complicated afterlife.
Is it fair to call these popular images and documents and fetish-objects of communal atrocities “pornography,” though? The people who circulated and delighted in them wouldn’t have used that word. Adorno, writing about how psychoanalytic theory can be used to understand the rise of European fascism, insisted that “since the libidinal bond between members of masses is obviously not of an uninhibited sexual nature, the problem arises as to which psychological mechanisms transform primary sexual energy into feelings which hold masses together.” But the relationship between pornography, sex, and politics is wildly different in 2024 than it was in 1934. MAGA supporters aren’t turning rallies into orgies, but, as anyone who’s ever seen plastic testicles dangling from the back of a pickup truck knows, they are extremely uninhibited and extremely sexual. I don’t just mean Mark Robinson, the wannabe “Black Nazi”; I mean speeches like this one by Tucker Carlson, which may be remembered as a paradigmatic moment of the 2024 race. Drawing on ubiquitous porn imagery, Carlson describes Trump as the angry father coming home to say to America, “You’ve been a bad girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking. And no, it’s not going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you more. And you earned this.”
As many people will remember, the American thinker who argued most vociferously that porn has a major role in public life was Andrea Dworkin, who in the 1970s and ‘80s campaigned against the growing acceptance of X-rated movies, Playboy and Penthouse, strip clubs and peep shows, arguing that pornographic depictions of women are not just propaganda for misogyny and rape, but a social reinforcement and legitimation of a rape culture that already exists. "Feminists are often asked whether pornography causes rape,” she wrote. “The fact is that rape and prostitution caused and continue to cause pornography. Politically, culturally, socially, sexually, and economically, rape and prostitution generated pornography; and pornography depends for its continued existence on the rape and prostitution of women.” Dworkin insisted that pornography should be banned a second time (since it was only legalized the first time in the 1960s) because it was an attack on women’s civil rights, not because it was prurient and obscene, but this distinction largely disappeared when she joined forces with the religious right’s anti-pornography campaign in the 1980s.
After that, Dworkin was widely viewed as a traitor to feminism and marginalized by her former allies on the left; her writings were largely forgotten. It wasn’t until the last decade that younger feminists, some of whom hadn’t even been born during Dworkin’s heyday, rediscovered her work and praised it as an antidote to the failures of what Moira Donegan calls “a more individualistic and conciliatory approach to women’s rights.” To my mind, the most important aspect of Dworkin’s work is its insistence that the fusion, or interpolation, of private fantasy and public reality is a political fact, a fact we have to accept and weave into any larger political analysis. It matters, for example, that white Americans have a tendency to fetishize Native American human remains, especially skulls, using them in private clubs, in much the same way that remnants of lynchings were used (maybe still are used) as fetishes in the South. There’s a ridiculous and childlike quality to the inner workings and rituals of powerful secret societies historically restricted to white American men—Skull and Bones, Michigauma, the Bohemian Grove, the University of Alabama’s “Machine”—that only starts to make sense when you see them as a deeper kind of cultural gratification, a scene that melds together ridiculous fantasy worlds with the exertion of political, social, economic power.
If you think of pornography as extreme play in the realm of infantile fantasy, which can happen in public as much as in private, you can see why Dworkin was so limited, even confused, in her description of the relationship between pornography and propaganda: she was fixated on X-rated material, when the most potent pornography is PG. The most influential piece of American sexual propaganda in the mid-1980s wasn’t Debbie Does Dallas. It was Top Gun, which is often described these days not just as homoerotic but blatantly homosexual. Dave Holmes, writing in 2022 in Esquire:
[In the] beach volleyball scene, a shirtless Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and Rick Rossovich (plus a wisely shirtful Anthony Edwards) face off in a high-stakes pickup game to the sound of Kenny Loggins’ “Playing With The Boys.” My brother, ten years older, married with four kids now, took me to see Top Gun in the summer of 1986. We left the theater exhilarated. “Man,” he said, “they oughta have a recruitment table outside the theater.” “They really should,” I said, knowing down deep we were talking about very different recruitment tables. If you were a certain kind of teenage boy in 1986, the beach volleyball scene in Top Gun spoke directly to you. And what it said was: “You’re gay now. Good luck.”
Top Gun was recruitment into gayness and recruitment of straight boys and men into the ostensibly heterosexual, but also extremely homoerotic, US military, which in the eighties was busy compensating for American national humiliation in Vietnam by extending its phallic empire (F-16s, aircraft carriers, M-16s in the hands of the Afghan mujahideen who would later go on to form the nexus of al-Qaeda) around the globe. There’s something so particularly American about the combination of innocent earnestness, sexiness, and deadliness in Top Gun—something about simultaneously arousing your libido and soothing your anxious inner child. You could say it's the same quality shared by Hallmark movies, chocolate chip cookies, mac and cheese, superheroes, and the most superhero-like of all sports, American football, a pageant of impossibly beefy men in spandex. It’s this quality that Trump knows how to tap into, where the most brutal is also the most banal.
Sometime before his death in 2020, David Graeber gave a brief talk summarizing the essential problem of liberal centrists in the Democratic Party. “In France,” he said, “they sometimes talk about the extreme center, and I think that’s a fitting phrase. The moderates are the most immoderate people possible. They’re uncompromising because they don’t have a lot of positive arguments. They’re not really for anything. Obama worked because he was the kind of guy who looked like he would have a vision—he acted like a visionary, he had the intonation, the way of standing, he looked into the distance like a guy who believed in something. And it shows you just how much visionary politics has been killed, when it didn’t occur to people to ask exactly what his vision was. His vision was not to have a vision.”
When the diagnostic reports on 2024 roll in—it’s the day after the election, so they’ll start any minute now—they will likely say that the polls once again undercounted Trump’s support, that the country under Biden actually experienced a dramatic rightward shift, because the election wasn’t nearly as close as most pundits predicted. It may be that nothing short of a fundamental change to the party’s DNA would have saved the Democrats. At the moment I’m too heartsick to speculate. But I don’t think anyone will deny a significant factor was that anti-genocide independents, progressive Democrats and Arab Americans defected to third parties, voted for Trump, or chose not to vote at all. Harris never gave a single indication that she intended to change US policy toward Israel; she went out of her way to alienate the substantial portion of her base outraged over the Gaza genocide, not even allowing a single Palestinian to speak at the DNC.
Or, to put it another way: good vibes don’t work against porn. Or, weird but true, in juxtaposition with porn. The liberal Biden/Harris administration, which was elected to champion human rights and the rule of law, refuses to admit it has yoked itself to a settler army perpetuating acts of pornographic fascism, atrocities comparable to the worst acts ever carried out on American soil. Harris supporters insisted that joy actually was a platform, and that a cross-racial coalition of women enraged by the defeat of Roe would emerge to save the day. It didn’t work. The reasons are large and complex, but one of them, surely, was the number of left/liberal women (and others) who responded with memes like this:
There’s no way to get around the simple fact that in all senses—private, public, fascist, genocidal, misogynist, sadomasochistic—pornography won on November 5th, 2024. It has won throughout 2024, in Jerusalem, Moscow, Italy—everywhere right-wing imagemakers are in power. It’s about to become the dominant style in American politics in a way Andrea Dworkin in her darkest moments might have predicted. Given his obsession with penises, Trump is likely to keep talking about them at every occasion. If he doesn’t personally film a porn scene in the Oval Office, his aides probably will. If not his aides, the young online influencers he cultivated throughout his campaign definitely will.
I have no idea how Democrats on the national level will respond to this moment—the most stark repudiation of their principles, in my reading, since Bill Clinton formulated the so-called Third Way during his 1991-92 campaign. But I know what those of us on the left will do. Arielle Angel sums it up beautifully in a Jewish Currents article from last summer, “Florida is Everywhere,” describing how the Desantis government has eroded civil liberties, eviscerated public universities, driven up the cost of living, and turned the state into a haven for criminal billionaries and ex-dictators, while the state Democratic party stands by wringing its hands:
If there is any hope in this bleak picture, it is to be found in those people who are already facing the onslaught, who are making homemade hormone therapy and providing mobile services to the unhoused; the organizers going back to basics—reaching out one-on-one to every member of the union to ensure it can withstand attacks, building difficult and unlikely coalitions on narrower issues in hopes of expanding from there. We must regroup, to the fullest extent we are able. Florida is everywhere—and, as is clear from the water lapping at our ankles, we are all out of time.
“Back to basics” sounds like the only possible proposition to me. How about you?
Photo credit: @marahfidahya