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Sadomasochism and the Political Beauty
Pageant
By Richard Leader
Political humor in the United States is synonymous
with sadomasochism. Truth be told, almost all of our humor subscribes
to one core belief: we can find happiness in the suffering of others.
This paradigm fuels everything from our radio shock-jocks to our
supposedly “family-friendly” fare: America’s
Funniest Home Videos has been adding public insult to injury
for going on two decades now. As a society, we enjoy seeing the
contrast between winners and losers. That difference, despite its
starkness, is something we view as funny. The higher the “tops”
and the lower the “bottoms” in a given scenario, the
more entertaining we as a people seem to find it. So it should come
as no surprise that internet galleries of political cartoons contain
pictures of donkeys and elephants raping one another for our amusement:
you get to pick the victim of your choice.
Image from Tripias.com
While such imagery is certainly on the extreme side, it is different
only in degree from the genre’s more genteel efforts. There,
the anthropomorphic mascots engage in more mundane forms of violence—forms
that have become so normalized that they no longer register in our
minds as violence. Sometimes, as if to prevent just that sort of
realization, the backdrop of professionalized boxing is used to
remind us that it is a civilized battle governed by rules and masculine
codes of honor. A further typology focuses precisely on the moment
of victory, with one animal looming over the battered body of its
rival.
In all cases, the same themes are expressed. The act of rape merely
takes the ideal of dominance to the most severe conclusion that
the system will permit. Death is not an option: to show one of the
animals (and its corresponding party) dead on the battlefield would
cause viewers to see the system as fragile, rather than inevitable.
Rape thus becomes the worst-case scenario of choice for artists
wishing to re-affirm our values of dominance and submission. Improper
as the depiction of sexualized violence might be for “polite
company,” such imagery is nevertheless quite honest about
our political beliefs.
The supposed beauty of the American two-party-system—and
sadomasochistic sex for that matter—is that while dominance
and submission are inherent aspects of society, and that system
itself is beyond reproach, at least power roles can sometimes be
exchanged. As such, it follows that our political humor is often
pornographic. Whether patently obscene or filled with sly innuendo
designed for mainstream venues, both methods serve to protect an
inviolate two-party system.
 Rather
than Democrats and Republicans, however, I speak of “men”
and “women.” These images seek to enshrine male power
across the political spectrum. Only on the most superficial levels
are those donkeys and elephants attacking each other: women are
the proverbial grass being trampled underneath. Rape is something
that is done to women. Their very nature—according to man,
his science, and his religion—is defined by their penetrability.
Men can be raped, a form of violence perpetrated exclusively by
other males, but in being so they become women of a sort, defined
by their vulnerability.
Despite the donkeys and elephants of the cartoons being rendered
“politely” without genitalia, we presume that they are
male. Men are the default agents in our society and our iconography
reinforces that masculine standard. The addition of a pink bow is
the preferred method of identifying a subordinate character (from
Minnie Mouse to Ms. Pac-Man); rape can accomplish the same transformation.
Although the gender of the cartoon animals might be in flux, the
identities of their authors and readers are not.
The grim misogyny of this humor escapes notice because women are
ostensibly absent from the conflicts the cartoons present: it is
the men of the two parties jockeying for position, just as it is
competing male interests and egos at stake. A male Democrat is equally
as likely to post a picture on his website of a donkey being raped
as an elephant. After Bush was victorious in the 2004 election,
a blogger named Arthur Guray placed such an image on his website
at Tripias.com, claiming that he sure felt “like the donkey.”
Rape is much more easily a metaphor for men: they are able to freely
take liberties with the meaning of the word, not fearing it in their
own lives. Women, despite a physical reality for both political
parties, are not seen the primary audience for the cartoons or the
victorious feelings of entitlement they are intended to evoke. Win
or lose, it is a man’s game to relish—and female donkeys
and elephants do not make for convincing rapists.
When images of women are included in political humor, they exist
as scorekeeping tokens in the clashes between men. Those clashes,
despite their ferocity, are ultimately apolitical in the conventional
sense of feuding donkeys and elephants. While imagery of Hillary
Clinton is invariably malicious, it is rarely seen as sexist given
that her presence in such discourse is seen as rational: she “asked
for it” by gaining power, even though no man would be attacked
in precisely the same ways. As the men of the Left have refused
to acknowledge that sexist depictions of Clinton are in fact sexist—and
not just part of the political game, brutal in any case, for anyone—caricatures
of Clinton have become a covenant between the men of both American
parties.
That same covenant exists even without a “rational”
justification for the roasting of a woman as a public figure. When
Maxim magazine printed a fabricated image of George Bush’s
daughters in a state of undress as an “April fool,”
one would be hard-pressed to decode any political meaning that has
anything to do with donkeys or elephants. James Heindery, then Maxim’s
executive editor, tried positioning his prank as a political one,
claiming that the women’s presence on their father’s
campaign trail made them “fair game” as satire. And
yet that game, the eternal competition between the two parties,
was actually suspended for a brief time by the image: after all,
the only two Republicans harmed by the stunt were Jenna
and Barbara Bush. Men on both sides of the aisle happily lined up
to buy copies of the magazine.
 One
of the more revealing humor pieces involves a series of portraits
divided into two sections: the likenesses of 18 women, nine to a
side, are arranged into pyramids under the headings of Democrat
and Republican. The joke is simple: Republican women are more attractive.
Yet it is apparent that the contest is not between women, but men,
and Republicans win the battle of “our women” versus
“their women.” In fact, one version of the image, rather
than taking the time to even name the parties, actually states “ours”
and “theirs” in plain terms. In the momentary world
of the joke, it is the Democratic men who lose to their male peers.
In the real world, however, it is all women who lose. The political
beauty pageant that the humor piece assembles, much like any number
of pageants that involve actual stages and swimwear, does few favors
for the women crowned victorious. The real winners, after all, are
men.
 The
women chosen as the property of Republican men are a motley group.
Actors Bo Derek and Janine Turner top their pyramid, followed by
Laura Bush, columnists like Peggy Noonan, and a variety of pundits,
including Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter. The women under Democratic
ownership are even more varied: Barbara Streisand and Helen Thomas
form an unlikely pair at the top of their pyramid. Hillary Clinton,
Teresa Kerry, and Madeleine Albright are positioned in the middle,
with Janet Reno, Andrea Dworkin, Nancy Pelosi, and Susan Estrich
serving as the base. While the portraits of the pageant winners
are all headshots taken from publicity materials, the losers are
mostly depicted in stills from civic appearances or debates, emphatically
speaking under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights. The comparison
attempts to tell but one truth: women are attractive only if they
keep their mouths shut.
Although the women placed in the Republican box might be victorious,
it is a hollow one. It is readily apparent to anyone, even without
a firm grasp on American politics, that they are a far less accomplished
group than their competition. Their trophy status both undercuts
the things that they have achieved while allowing men—of all
political stripes—to resent them at the same time for their
success, defined by their celebrity, meager as it might be in some
cases.
Nevertheless, the women in the Democratic section are also hated
by all men. Susan Estrich now works for FOX News and liberal men
enjoy nothing more than attacking her in the most rapacious ways
for “selling out.” She might now have a wider audience
for her own views, ostensibly unchanged, an argument that many of
those finger-pointing men certainly use—especially when they
take money from big-businesses such as the sex industry to finance
their own blogging careers. That argument is a harder sale for a
woman to make. Few liberals have any love for Janet Reno or Madeleine
Albright, and Hillary Clinton regularly generates levels of disgust
that few mortals have heretofore achieved. While a good number of
men on the Far Left justify their seething hatred of her by her
waffling on the war in Iraq, their contempt for her is inversely
proportional to their love for her husband, who is—despite
his own hawkishness—endlessly celebrated by the same crowd
for his exploits as a “pimp.”
That, of course, brings us to Andrea Dworkin. She was a woman that
most liberal men, in their ignorance, saw as a conservative or even
fundamentalist who was opposed to “free speech.” And
yet here she is, presented as if she were someone—or rather,
some thing—that Democrats should be embarrassed of
being connected to, rather than the other way around. Not only was
Dworkin never the shame of the Democrats, neither was she their
flunky: she once wrote an open letter, “Dear Bill and Hillary,”
condemning the actions of both. She did the unpopular thing in those
times and rejected both sides. Instead, she aligned herself with
Monica Lewinsky, a woman whose own physicality, like Dworkin’s,
is routinely mocked by liberal men, even a decade after her political
relevance.
In her 1983 Rightwing Women, Dworkin accused Democratic
men of purposely failing to protect abortion rights out of their
own selfishness, those men being bitter that feminists had abandoned
the so-called sexual revolution. She wrote, “When feminist
women have lost legal abortion altogether, leftist men expect them
back—begging for help, properly chastened, ready to make a
deal, ready to spread their legs again. On the Left, women will
have abortion on male terms, as part of sexual liberation, or women
will not have abortion except at risk of death.”
The beauty pageant image found a quick home on many Republican
websites, blogs, and internet forums, where it was triumphantly
displayed. It can also be found on the homepage of Neal Boortz,
a midlevel radio personality and libertarian. Although Boortz lacks
direct ties to either party, and might not be on board with the
Moral Majority, he makes it fairly clear who he sees as beneath
him: “People who vote Democrat have generally abandoned their
adult responsibilities to manage their own lives and to live without
having to plunder the pockets of others.”
Libertarians see themselves as the quintessential “tops”
in a sadomasochistic system, their inherent superiority rendering
them impervious to the system’s dangers and imperfections.
While Boortz might not have a personal stake in the battle between
Republican and Democratic men over which side has the hotter chicks,
he is game for it as long as someone is losing. Those losers
exist for his personal entertainment. His website has a section
entitled “Neal’s favorite links” and a hyperlink
to a voyeuristic picture of a woman’s chest (it is unclear
if the woman knew she was being photographed) is actually listed
before his link to the U.S. Constitution.
The pageant also has a place on non-aligned websites such as About.com’s
“political humor” section, hosted by Daniel Kurtzman.
He also includes a copy of the Maxim “Bush Twins”
image in his inventory of jokes. As the service is intended to reach
men of both political parties, vicious attacks against both are
permitted for the site, as a whole, to maintain parity. Men, as
a gender, err on the side of viciousness. In American politics,
this holds especially true for heterosexual white men as there is
no losing: ultimately, both parties satisfy our needs, if not our
desires. “Parity,” for About.com, means riding the coattails
of that viciousness into more visitors and advertising dollars for
itself.
In internet forum arguments over the “results” of the
pageant, both sides were aware of its arbitrary construction: conventionally
attractive women can be summoned from anywhere to fulfill a male
requirement; these days, they can even be generated by computer
software. Instead, men took the pageant as license to post further
images. Those intended to mock Condoleezza Rice were especially
popular, self-described liberal men finding her a safe target for
the expression of their own sexism and racism. Other men claimed
that the Democratic Party has strong ties to the pornographic industry,
something thought to be to its credit, hinting that there are certainly
attractive enough women to be found there.
This sort of behavior is not limited to the troglodytes of various
underground forums, tucked away in the dark recesses of the internet.
Sometimes it makes the front page: JerseyGOP.com has a “Republican
BABE of the Week” feature. Starting with Bo Derek in 2002,
about eighty other women have been profiled since that time. One
babe is singled out, however. They decided to renege on the award
they gave to Ashley Judd. Rather than eliminating any presence of
her on the website, her name embarrassingly remains with a strikethrough,
presumably in retaliation for her feminist affiliations. She was
part of Ms. Magazine’s “This is what a feminist looks
like” campaign, one that some feminists found problematic
in that it potentially created a beauty contest of its own in its
attempt to combat unflattering stereotypes.
While JerseyGOP.com no longer links to the page they created in
Judd’s honor, it still exists and can be found through search
engines. Her reward for being a loyal Republican—or so they
thought—was a gallery filled with images of her in various
states of undress. Part of Judd’s Republican allure, in their
eyes, had been a quote declaring that she does not “go anywhere
without the Bible,” a message they saw no irony in displaying
when constructing a virtual centerfold for her. This is how they
treat the women they like. Strikethrough notwithstanding, they treat
the women they hate exactly the same way. Just as Neal Boortz did
with his website, the JerseyGOP.com gallery of Ashley Judd images
also contains a hyperlink to the text of the U.S. Constitution.
If women are the choice ingredient in the political food fights
of white men, the men who supply those women in bulk enjoy an especially
lucrative position. A calendar entitled “Babes Against Bush”
was unveiled shortly before the 2004 U.S. election. It was a product
of one David Livingstone, a freelance writer who evidently specializes
more in generating publicity for himself than writing. Livingstone
conscripted his young girlfriend into posing for it, along with
a variety of hired professionals.
The stunt scored the couple interviews on various cable news networks,
metropolitan newspapers, and even a plug by Peter Rothburg at The
Nation, who said it was a must-buy for the “political
gift giver.” In a feature at Salon.com, Livingstone claims
that his bid for attention is backed by feminism: he intones, as
the Babes’ “spokesman,” that a group “primarily
consisting of women” (emphasis original) speaking
up about an issue sets “hordes of button-down establishment
pundits” on edge. Only the words were his and the bodies were
theirs.
This required a Republican counterattack and thus a much more modest
Babes for Bush group was formed, along with its own publicity materials.
While both organizations have long since abandoned their websites,
“speaking up” only being useful when one is in the limelight
and raking in money, the way that women’s bodies were lined
up and marshaled into action by men speaks volumes. Representatives
of both the mainstream media and even progressive publications such
as The Nation declined to acknowledge that such treatments
were sexist.
 Although
men on the Left sometimes invoke the specter of sexism when pointing
fingers at their male rivals on the Right (just as American conservatives
enjoy doing the same at their rivals in the Middle East), it is
clear that sexism, as such, only exists outside of the political
game. So long as the fight is between Elephants and Donkeys, and
not humans in all of their diversity, sexism momentarily ceases
to exist—as women themselves momentarily cease to exist. In
the world of the food fight, where people are only extensions of
longstanding political parties, differences are ignored in favor
of the white male standard that the animal mascots represent.
An image of a donkey being beaten, raped, or even lynched cannot
be seen as sexist or racist as such violence is not a politicized
part of the white male experience. By “cannot,” I more
fully mean that white men will not allow or permit such imagery
to be seen as sexist or racist. As the gendered status of the animal
mascots is ever mutable, representing everyone and yet no one, the
transition from one state to the next is governed by those in power.
The humorous possibilities of rape can be safely explored because
the animals are decidedly not women (a group that then
loses any standing to object) and are much closer in form to being
white men: that is, people who view themselves as having the mental
fortitude to accept such renderings of rape as merely flavorful
commentary. Yet, it is precisely because women and minority men
are, in fact, included under the aegis of the political mascots
that white males do not attack the images as being “misandrist”
or “reverse-racist.”
Just as Condoleezza Rice has become a safe target for abuse by
people who would not normally characterize themselves as sexists
or racists, the ambiguous gender of the party mascots allows many
to enjoy rape humor that they might object to under other circumstances.
Some progressive websites offer an image, sometimes in support of
the Green Party, where each animal is shown gleefully raping its
counterpart. The headline reads, “Same F**king Difference.”
While some might say the cartoon only illustrates a pun (it is
interesting that the text required self-censoring and yet the image
did not), it is quite clear that the animals being penetrated are
not nearly as happy as those on top, each with a carefully crafted
smile. Heterosexual men experience so much anxiety about the respective
pleasures of intercourse that they need an entire medium, pornography,
to convince them that women enjoy it to the point of writhing and
screaming, pain and pleasure being synonymous for females. The image
of the two parties raping one another betrays that anxiety.
 Cartoons
of the Democrat and Republican mascots raping one another are hardly
commonplace. Even so, it is apparent that resistance to them for
the sake of decorum is ever weakening. In his report on the 2004
Republican convention for Belief.net, Steve Waldman writes of finding
a button that asked viewers to “Keep Bush on Top.” An
elephant was shown raping a donkey. This, he found next to another
button proclaiming “Christians for Bush.” Further merchandise
revisited the political beauty pageant, with “Beauty and the
Beast” emblazoned next to images of Laura Bush and Hillary
Clinton.
While the rape imagery is still a fringe element in political discourse,
the thoughts and feelings that inspire it are not. We are a culture
that revels in the celebration of dominance. We justify it to ourselves
in different ways. For some, this means down-home religion and its
strict rules of stewardship over God’s creation, with hierarchies
inscribed in eternity. For others, it means ivory tower post-modernism
and an endless obsession with the possibilities of performing gender,
the realities of life being an inside joke known only to their cabal.
All these solutions are palliative. Whether one believes that the
meek shall inherit the earth or that submission itself is a form
of power (provided one understands the rules of the game), both
are uneasy with revealing the truth about their fealty to a system
of dominance. Honesty comes with great difficulty. After all, only
a complete and utter sociopath could look upon another person and
demand their subordination. The average sociopath—the average
person—has a much easier time with cartoon animals.
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