Unsolicited Nudes

Tonight I'm thinking about Stormy Daniels. No, not in the way that Pornhub wants me to think about Stormy Daniels, because that's ruined forever by association. And I don't really even mean her as a person, which sounds a bit dismissive and misogynistic because of course she is a person deserving of consideration, but look, there are like 9 billion people in the world. I can't stop and give full, dignified consideration to all of them. I'm still mentally working through all the randos I chanced across in the course of my day, right here in the place where I live. I'm not saying Stormy Daniels isn't on my list, I'm just saying maybe tonight isn't her night to be understood as a human in all her fullness.

And I'm not even thinking of her in relation to Trump, because a) gross and b) as last week, I'm not in a very Trump-ready mood. I'm feeling a bit better thanks to some live-music therapy and some actual talking-to-a-licensed-human therapy, but I still just can't be arsed. No, the Stormy Daniels story has two of my least favorite conversation topics baked right into it: present-day American politics and legal proceedings. Unfortunately those two things are now both fused together like faulty and noisome vertebrae that will never work correctly or independently ever again. And like fused vertebrae, they work together to produce a nagging and debilitating pain that saps our mobility, our independence, the potency in the unblemished clarity of our waking thoughts and our physical will.

No, I'm actually thinking of Stormy Daniels as a mile-marker, a tree ring, one of those height-measuring hashes they put on convenience store doorways in case they get held up and the cops need you to estimate the robber's height later. She's a thing by which other things can be measured. And of course she's not alone in this, but I'm finding her to be particularly instructive. No, not in the way that Pornhub wants me to find her instructive, because that's ruined forever by association. Really, we've covered this already.

What makes me think about Stormy Daniels is that I'm also thinking about Monica Lewinsky. Because she's around doing stuff. She's been motoring around for the last two decades not shying away from the thing that everyone knows her for,* actually steering into the skid by becoming a tireless advocate and public-awareness-raiser for the bullied and publicly shamed, despite trauma-levels of mass humiliation. This has been a thankless stream of action, the only possible way to fight against an absolute tsunami of scorn and derision designed specifically to drown her, preferably on television. Still somehow she floats, but half a lifetime of swim and gasping against the same undertow has taken a wearying toll.

And now think of the way we're already thinking about Stormy Daniels. The worst you could say about Monica Lewinsky was that she was naive and shortsighted, appropriate for her age and experience at the time, targeted and taken advantage of by a person in a seat of immense (the immense-est really) power more than twice her age who not only should have but 100% certainly knew better. She was a civilian drawn into something uncivil, a response of total public rejection and vilification stupendously out of proportion in response to a moment of impetuousness well in line with the behavior of a person in their early twenties.

Stormy Daniels is a person who has sex on camera in exchange for money. If anyone is going to be ostracized and slut-shamed, you would think it would be her. I'm sure there are those who are out there trying, but honestly, the response couldn't be more different from Monica, at least as far as I can tell. What Stormy Daniels is making me consider: is she being treated differently because we've evolved as a society to the point where a woman no longer bears 100% of the blame for a man's extramarital affairs? Or is it that the association specifically with Donald Trump means that nobody is shocked that he would go out and try to fuck a porn star while married?

There are other implications and contributing factors of course, like the fact that there is no Republican Congress looking for any excuse to abuse or impeach a presidency they saw as illegitimate (because Democrat!) like there was in 1996, a whole body of the United States government with a stake in sensationalizing and demonizing and slut-ifying the whole business, sordid though it might have been on its own merits. And Stormy Daniels is not only a fully realized adult the way Monica Lewinsky wasn't, she's also a savvy media professional who understands how press and publicity work. Far from doing everything she can to limit her exposure, she's actively fighting to talk about this more.

On the one hand, I applaud us as a nation for shaking off some of our puritanical predilections.

On the other hand, if she wins, we may end up living in a universe that includes publicly available images of Donald Trump's dick. So in spirit I can be pro-Stormy, but as a practical matter I'm forced to hope she doesn't entirely succeed.

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*Pulling off bangs in 1996, when everyone else was rocking The Rachel