The XX Factor

The Long, Glistening History of Presidential Candidate Erotica

The first chapter is titled “The Lonely Oyster.”

Amazon

Just in time for America’s traditional post-Christmas erotica binge, the Daily Beast has brought to our attention a heartwarming tale of a tired presidential candidate looking for a little relief. In between masturbating to the U.S. Constitution and imagining a woman’s vagina as “a colonial bonnet for a dick,” the senator from Texas enjoys sexual intrigue and a vision of our country under the rule of Queen Chelsea Clinton in A Cruzmas Carol: Ted Cruz Takes a Dickens of a Constitutional.

The author is pseudonymous writer Lacey Noonan, previously featured in DoubleX for her achievements in Rob Gronkowski erotica. In Cruzmas Carol, Noonan gives as much attention to the candidate’s real-life political obsessions (converting gays, delivering America from Obamacare) as it does to his “President Johnson.” As such, it fits squarely into the mode of what ex-Wonkette writer Josh Fruhlinger called the “retributive” genre of fan fiction, which takes pleasure in subjecting buttoned-up, moralizing politicians to perverse sexual shame in effigy.  

Fruhlinger launched the now-defunct Hail to the Slash blog—which housed pages upon pages of steamy political slash fiction—in an effort to get his commenters to stop fighting and start inventing bipartisan trysts, starting with William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. The archive eventually expanded to include centuries of American presidential history, all the way back to George Washington and Alexander Hamilton:

“Yes, General Washington.” Alexander moaned. “Now, now. None of that ‘General Washington.’ It is George for now.” George said as he slid one finger into Alexander’s tight entrance. Alexander let out a gasp of surprise. It felt so nice! However the feeling did not last when George slid in two more fingers. There was now a dull throb of pain.

In the modern era, Fruhlinger imagined a cross-generational rendezvous between Ron Paul and William Jennings Bryan:

Paul, fumbling with Bryan’s undergarments, said “I always forget how many clothes you wore back in these days.” So strange, as if Mr. Paul weren’t a native of “these days” himself, but just a visitor from somewhere else. But in the moment he didn’t dwell on it. There were other, better things on which to dwell: mouths, and hands, and skin covered with delightful hair.

Abraham Lincoln, a stalwart muse for vampire-hunting whimsies, has also given life to a series of erotica volumes from Catherine DeVore. Abraham Lincoln: Presidential Fuck Machine finds the Great Emancipator distracted by carnal urges: “As I stripped my nightclothes and prepared to dress, I noticed that my cock was fully erect and ready for duty, most likely due to some dream or humour that had overtaken me in the night. My birthmark itched, as it often did at such times.”

Arianna Huffington has suggested that presidential candidates be subjected to a litmus test inspired by Joe Biden, who claimed that he’d “rather be at home making love to my wife while the children are asleep” than running for president in 2006. A degree of sexual openness and a commitment to a healthy marriage would indicate a good leader, she argued.

But when presidents and candidates have written their own erotic content, some citizens and pundits have balked. Last year, the Library of Congress released letters Warren G. Harding wrote to his longtime mistress, Carrie Phillips. “Wouldn’t you like to get sopping wet out on Superior—not the lake—for the joy of fevered fondling and melting kisses?” he wrote. “Wouldn’t you like to make the suspected occupant of the next room jealous of the joys he could not know, as we did in morning communion at Richmond?” The former president was mocked in the media.

One of the best takeaways from the Harding correspondence was that he or Phillips had given his boner a code name: Jerry. “Jerry…told me to say that you are the best and darlingest in the world,” Harding mused in one letter. “If he could have but one wish, it would be to be held in your darling embrace and be thrilled by your pink lips that convey the surpassing rapture of human touch and the unspeakable joy of love’s surpassing embrace.”

Failed Democratic presidential candidate and potential independent presidential candidate Jim Webb took heat in 2006 when George Allen, then his competitor for a Virginia Senate seat, distributed a press release quoting 10 sexual excerpts from Webb’s novels about the Vietnam War. “He saw the invitation with every bouncing breast and curved hip,” Webb had written in Fields of Fire. “He was thirteen … She was fifteen … In a few moments she drew him to her and he murmured in his quiet voice, ‘I am still small.’ ‘You are large enough,’ she answered. And he found he was.” 

Allen and some conservative blogs accused Webb of demeaning women in the erotic scenes in his books. Webb said that he was just writing accurately about the terrors he witnessed as a soldier in Vietnam, where, he’s proudly noted, he killed a man. But some of his descriptions take vivid, undeniable pleasure in the visceral sensuality of the world he’s rendered. In Something to Die For, Webb wrote: “Fogarty … watch[ed] a naked young stripper do the splits over a banana. She stood back up, her face smiling proudly and her round breasts glistening from a spotlight in the dim bar, and left the banana on the bar, cut in four equal sections by the muscles of her vagina.”

Seeing the sexual side of a presidential candidate—whether via the politician himself or an impartial author of erotica—can have a humanizing effect on a cold, calculated public image. “Literature is literature,” Webb said in his own defense. “I’ve made my career as a novelist.” Lacey Noonan has, too, and the “little chiefs of staff” of political operatives everywhere can be grateful.