Sub-Erotic Politics: Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and the Corn Dog Blowjobs

When I was 14 I thought that my schoolmates might somehow be watching me when I masturbated. I was sure one particularly unlikable boy called Ryan, who once coordinated two of his cheerleader friends to tell me I was so ugly my parents should have smothered me at birth, was able to see my auto-ecstatic handiwork. These thoughts were never enough to zip up my trousers (or pull up the floppy, elastic-waisted shorts more specifically), but they added a distracting tension to an act that still confused me. In the best case, childhood is a kaleidoscope of physical and mental pleasures, with morsels of candy miraculously produced by grandparents, the pleasures of running full speed down a hill, and the discovery that almost anything can be laughed at hysterically when the right company is present. This seems like a rich enough bounty to have won for having survived the traumas of birth and one’s teething years.

But then sex comes and overwhelms all of these small treasures, a sneezing tidal wave of slow motion levitation that reshapes the landscape of adolescence into a sultry place, filled with the coruscations of an alien sun and the sad murk of its accompanying questions. Was it really me who deserved these pleasures? Had I unknowingly stolen them from some private nook I was never meant to discover? Does that assfuck Ryan know how wonderful I can make myself feel, even after his orchestrated chorus of humiliation?

Surviving the transition from titillated child to mystified teenager is far from the most difficult one faces in life, but it is one of the first significant changes that we must all confront. It shows you something in a person’s understitching to see how they carry on whilst a mechanism for self-engineering tidal waves impatiently slumbers in one’s pants folds. It’s often claimed that politicians’ sex lives are of no importance to public discourse. Candidates and congressman defend themselves on matters of religious association, ideological conviction, spinning a loom of cottony stuffing, meant to fill out the insides of their prettily fabric’d casings. They can mystify their first meetings with John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, but they cannot extend this sense of wonderment to their more bodily interests.

During the build-up Iowa Straw Poll vote, this parade of tedium (where nothing worth asking was asked and nothing worth knowing was offered as answer) a few surprisingly pleasant images emerged. Both Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann were caught appearing to anoint with oral felicitude the thick columns of Iowan corn dogs. In the stream of ventilator exhaust generated by these two (“one-term president,” “Texas miracle,” “submission….means respect”) a reminder that these instruments of rhetorical cement have a purpose not yet consummated by their public alms to small government.

In recent years sex has undone the reputations of witless politicians so the insinuation that a sun-wrinkled alpha male in cowboy drag might, in another life (or another room) use his mouth on a phallus is surprisingly sweet. I have no idea what he is talking about when enumerating why the federal government has no place in education, but I think I can see a little more of him when the curtain is pulled back and the socio-sexual mammal is seen pulling the strings and levers of the political dummy. Bachmannn, too, is sweetly transformed from a robot-eyed steamroller into a tenuous but willing servant. It might not be submission exactly, nor particularly respectful, but it certainly seems loving.

I’ve wished for years that anyone who runs for office would have to release a sex tape of themselves as a prerequisite. Not because sex tapes are scarce commodities but because it seems an effective filtration mechanism, separating the clean-eared approval seekers who learn to repeat a script from the people who can stand a little public embarrassment for the sake of serving their communities. It would also have the benefit of saving lots of downstream embarrassment when some sexual details inadvertently escape over Twitter or through an easily impressed intern.

In the dumbest cases, a politician’s sexual interests reveal them as hypocrites. Phillip Hinkle, a Representative from Indiana, is the latest anti-gay legislator to have been found keeping naked company with other men, joining the self-loathing ranks of Mark Foley, Larry Craig, and Ted Haggard. In the more tortured cases, inflated ego-centrists like Bill Clinton use White House staff to slander a woman as a crazed “stalker” for having allowed him to lick her sexual fluids from a cigar. Likewise, Anthony Weiner made his federally funded staff available to his internet playmates, encouraging them to lie about his needily coercive libido.

Sex is the stupidest thing a person can be embarrassed of, if only because its benefits are universal. There is always the possibility of over-interpreting its importance, “the crankish quest for sexual symbols,” Nabokov wrote, “and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.” And yet the fear of simply addressing one’s lower susceptibilities gives portentous material for the symbol-readers among us. The fear of discovering in each other the one thing that we all have in common is the first step toward building a society where petty exploiters like Bill Clinton can be turned into victims, where submission is a virtue, and where it’s not gay if it wasn’t in your district.

Shame for what we cannot help being pervades everything, even the loyal constituents of our sexless masters. Consider the recent case of a Long Island lifeguard who sued the state of New York because they declined his request to stop wearing Speedos while on duty. “At a certain point you have to stand up and say this isn’t right,” the 61 year-old Roy Lester told the NY Daily News. After 40 years of adhering to the skimpy dress code, the bewrinkled man decided his thighs were no longer appropriate for public display, as if the diminishing of a persons outer desirability should have any bearing on how he adorns himself.

Sex is important only in so far as it inspires fear of consternation, necessitating the creation of a phantom persona that can seem to hover above the groining howls of the plebeians. Yet, even the food a person eats can give them away, revealing not a mortifyingly diminished creature in the lurch of sex but a pale specter whose identity seems to have been invented out of soap and plastic, shameful keepers of those below, whose leaking organs desire only to endure, to begin again and again. Even a corn dog can show how much of a difference remains between them and us, the sexed and the shameful, our keepers and ourselves.

*Images via IowaPolitics.com and markn3tel

**“Michele Bachmann Enjoys Leading Iowa Pack, Foot-Long Corn Dog” (via Gothamist)

“Phillip: Hinkle: Craigslist Encounter A ‘Shakedown’: Report” (via The Huffington Post)

“Lifeguard, 61, sues state for firing him after he refused to wear Speedo” (via NY Daily News)

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