Performing in Online Porn Shouldn’t Derail a Political Campaign

By now you’ve heard about Susanna Gibson, the nurse practitioner running for the Virginia statehouse who, news outlets revealed, had an account on Chaturbate. I never heard of it either. Honest. It’s a website where individuals and couples masturbate, have sex, and who knows what else. When I logged on to see what this was, I tuned into one couple in their underwear sitting on a couch, not touching themselves or each other, looking as passionate as two delayed passengers in the Amtrak waiting area. Other couples were more, um, kinetic.

Gibson, a Democrat, isn’t denying that she had an account on the site where she and her husband engaged in sex. She’s defiantly said she’s staying in the race, and her attorney vows to use Virginia’s revenge porn law to go after whoever leaked it.

The mother of two is right to stand her ground. Look, it’s up to voters to decide if sexhibition with your spouse is disqualifying. It wouldn’t sway my vote, assuming there was nothing illegal going on. Lots of Americans record themselves having sex. That a married and consenting couple does so not only on camera but online is not that big a stretch.

The showoffs on Chaturbate can get paid by admirers who leave tips. According to reporters who have seen some Gibson videos, the candidate and her spouse encouraged her audience to donate because it’s for “a good cause.” (They’re no longer on Chaturbate, but they’re popping up elsewhere.) What she and her husband, an attorney in the Richmond area, considered a good cause isn’t entirely apparent since the videos were made before this year’s race for a seat in Virginia’s closely divided House of Delegates. Whether the cause was their kids’ tuition or something more prurient, I do not know, but, to me, that’s her business.

There’s some dispute about whether Gibson and her husband asked the audience to pay to watch specific sex acts, which, apparently, is against the oh-so-proper Chaturbate rules. I’m not bothered by this alleged transgression, but I understand why it and the whole braggadocio of displaying your wares might be so off-putting to some voters that they take a pass on her. Fine. It’s a free country.

For me, the problem is when party donors or leaders take a candidate or incumbent to the gallows for some alleged sex indiscretion before there’s been due consideration. So far, the donors and Virginia Democrats haven’t freaked out, which I regard as a sign of maturity. Some Democrats have offered a terse no comment or refused to say if they’re still backing her, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Jeff E. Schapiro. But it’s early.

It’s not entirely analogous, but anybody who was angered, as I was, when Al Franken was forced to resign from the U.S. Senate during the white-hot heat of the otherwise much-welcome and overdue #MeToo movement should also pause here. In 2017, Franken’s Democratic Senate colleagues waited about a nanosecond before demanding his head. This followed charges that he was engaged in unconsenting sexual tawdriness with a woman on a USO tour before becoming a senator. (He made a breast-grabbing gesture while she was sleeping.) Later, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer raised questions about the validity of the charges and unearthed a Roger Stone connection to them. Many Democrats have expressed regret about the ouster. Hat’s off to those Dems who kept powder dry, like Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Joe Manchin. But most were so hyped to oust Franken that they made their first statements on Twitter. Hoping to pick up a Senate seat in a special election in Alabama in 2017, Democrats didn’t want to be seen as tolerating sexual harassment from the Minnesotan, especially when the Republican nominee in that race, Roy Moore, was accused of having a decades-long and grotesque propensity for hitting on teenage girls.

While Senate Democrats forced Franken out, they stuck by their New Jersey colleague, Robert Menendez, who, at the time, was in federal court facing charges that he unlawfully aided a campaign supporter. That proved the right call, especially since the jury was hung and even the Trump Justice Department decided not to pursue the case, although Menendez is still being scrutinized by federal prosecutors.

I bring up Franken, but we could also discuss other cases where a sentence-first-judge-later ethos rules the day. Four years ago, I wrote in the intriguing but, alas, now-defunct GEN magazine from Medium about Representative Katie Hill having been pushed out of her newly elevated U.S. House seat by Speaker Nancy Pelosi after it emerged that the freshman Democrat was in a three-person relationship with her husband and a young woman who was an ex-staffer. As with Gibson, malice was behind the leak. (GOP operatives pointed reporters to the Gibson imbroglio.)

I wrote at the time that Hill was on track to be reelected before she’d been victimized by revenge porn and that “no one can be happy with her behavior.” Besides the affair with the campaign staffer, leaked text messages, if they are to be believed, suggested heavy drinking and partying. And an Iron Cross tattoo in one of the prurient photos didn’t help matters. But Hill never had the chance to go through the House’s’ imperfect ethics process, and the 700,000 citizens of her Southern California district never got to weigh in.

So far, Gibson is hanging in there, which is good. Her GOP opponent, David Owen, perhaps sensing a more forgiving mood, expressed concern for her and her family but didn’t go all Scarlet Letter on the 40-year-old.

Of course, there are times when a sexual imbroglio is disqualifying. An anti-legal abortion member of Congress who leans on the staffer he’s having an affair with to get an abortion does not have a great career ahead of him in Republican politics. (It is the true story of Representative Tim Murphy, a Pennsylvania Republican, who was forced to resign.) Donald Trump’s encounter with Stormy Daniels is not disqualifying. Paying her off by laundering campaign funds would be. Is Bill Clinton having an affair with an intern? Very bad but not remotely impeachable. (Whether he lied about it in a civil case funded by his political enemies is still debated, but even if he did, that is not a reason to overturn an election. Losing and having your snowflake ego bruised is the only good reason to overturn an election.)

But these are decisions I shouldn’t make, and you shouldn’t make. The pol’s constituents should make them, hopefully with maturity and patience. I hope Gibson, who says she was motivated to run for office because of the Dobbs decision eliminating the half-century-old constitutional right to an abortion, stays in. In Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia, her cause remains vital.

Part of the problem is that we cannot decide if politicians, whom Americans hate in the abstract, should be considered employees we tolerate as a necessary evil or role models whose ethics we consider relevant to their job. Making some dough on Chaturbate would not be an issue if Gibson were a plumber or an accountant. But because she’s a politician, her (semi) private life is open to scrutiny and subject to evolving mercurial sexual standards. No one cares if their cardiologist is masturbating online. (We just want them to wash their hands really well before surgery.)

Twenty-three years ago, the director, Rod Lurie, made a film, The Contender, in which the presidential nominee to replace a deceased vice president is a woman who, it turns out, had sex with two men at a drunken college encounter. Pearl clutching follows, as well as a mystery about the dead veep. Today, a college sexual encounter is a yawner, as it should be.

There is a better way to handle these political sex controversies. I’m thinking of Representative Barney Frank.

In the 1980s, the Massachusetts Democrat survived an ethics inquiry about his relationship with a male prostitute. As I noted a few years ago in GEN:

Barney Frank, the former Massachusetts congressman who co-authored the eponymous 2009 banking reform law, came close to losing his seat in 1989 when it emerged that he’d lived with and had solicited sex from a male prostitute. The “bisexual hooker,” as the press dubbed Stephen Gobie at the time, had promised to become a good citizen, and Frank gave him money and hired him for errands and such out of his pocket to help him. But Gobie was still turning tricks, and Frank kicked him out. It leaked when Gobie, looking to cash in on a book or movie deal, gave his story to the conservative Washington Times. Frank looked like a goner. He had been in the closet, but now had a prostitute problem. The Democrats, hoping to come back from their third presidential defeat, could have offed Frank, safe in the knowledge that the party would likely keep the seat. The Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, a moderate Texan, could have pushed the Massachusetts liberal out immediately, Al Franken-style.

Instead of being ousted, Frank was reprimanded by the House after a long ethics probe. The decision of what to do with him was left to the citizens of his eastern Massachusetts district. They kept him around for another 20 years. I’m glad the torch-and-pitchfork mob isn’t coming for Susanna Gibson. Let the voters decide.

The post Performing in Online Porn Shouldn’t Derail a Political Campaign appeared first on Washington Monthly.