Virginia is for Lovers Unless They’ve Done Amateur Porn

State House Candidate Fucked Around and Someone Found Out.

Political sex scandals are nothing new, but few are as comparatively wholesome as the one playing out in the state of Virginia right now. House candidate Susanna Gibson and her husband John have managed to offend a collection of people whose very profession sometimes seems designed to fuck over the very people it claims to serve. But they don’t do it on a porn site like Chaturbate in front of 5,700 subscribers for tips. That would be too honest and transparent.

When not promising to have non-missionary sex with her husband or indulge in a golden shower via the video platform, Gibson is a nurse practitioner. She is strongly pro-choice and running against a proudly anti-abortion candidate who hopes to ban the procedure. There is no sign that Gibson has ever committed a crime or done anything particularly shocking other than to briefly work with her husband to produce and star in streaming porn.

As so many former sex workers who have tried to join the mainstream have discovered, the very people who will jack off to erotic works while clucking their tongues about what a shame will do little to simplify the path to so-called respectability.

Gibson’s political career hinges on two things: whether her suburban voters even care and whether a jury will consider what an anonymous political operative did to be a sex crime that violates Virginia’s revenge porn law. Sadly, chances are slim that the second thing will happen since the site was not password protected and the scenes were found reproduced without the couple’s permission on multiple sites. A copyright infringement case probably has more legs, but I’m no lawyer.

Naturally, neither the mainstream nor left-leaning press seems to understand what the problem is here. Gibson isn’t some wax mannequin or full-size sex doll pretending to be a serious politician as part of some kind of cosplay scene. She’s an educated adult whose greatest sin may be having too much faith in the very system she hopes to change from within. The problem here is not that Gibson and her husband had exhibitionistic sex for the visual gratification of an audience of subscribers.

The problem is that anyone cares, especially enough to illegally record performances, forward the footage to someone in the politically opposing party who then anonymously forwards it to the Washington Post to smear a female candidate. How is what Gibson and her husband did worse than what this chain of malicious content pirates did? Because sex is dirty and should be kept secret, especially by and from women.

This seems a logical conclusion for people whose sexual behavior involves illegal or non-consensual activities, but for the rest of us, it’s more a matter of body confidence and personal preference. Some people are born performers, some are born consumers. Exhibitionists need voyeurs and vice versa.

In addition to the pearl-clutching from Gibson’s opponent’s side about the fact she’d even do such a naughty, naughty, bad, bad thing, it’s important to factor in small detail that Gibson is not merely a former sex worker, she’s a woman. And if there’s one thing that sets off the opposition party research fetishists it’s a woman refusing to conform, especially when it comes to her own sexuality.

Men in politics have traditionally had better luck getting away with violating social taboos such as soliciting prostitutes in public bathrooms, being multiply divorced, violating age-of-consent laws, having affairs, and, in at least one case, even living with an escort. But let a married woman who turns to politics have a history that includes sex with her husband on a perfectly legal subscription service and it’s time to question the morality of the known universe!

Yet, without prostitutes, there would be no San Francisco and without the intelligent and articulate voices of sex workers who refuse to apologize for their choices, there can’t be a representative government. That’s why we need groups like the Free Speech Coalition with its direct-action FSC Summit, (I met Mary Carey at one while she was a political reality).

It’s why we need women like Nina Hartley and Sharon Mitchell, who stepped up and made good things happen for performers during the height of the straight porn AIDS scare via AIM. And yes, we need more sex workers running for public office and becoming more involved with the world around us, whether grassroots local, or non-profit international.

I don’t know how Susanna Gibson’s race will turn out, but I wish her the best. As someone who has long worked within the sex industry and has also run for office in the past, I know to be extra on my toes about what I do, what I’ve done, and how I explain either.

Things have gotten so strange in the political arena that there’s no way to know how Gibson will fare, but if enough past and present sex workers, including porn stars, up their game and run for office, it will be impossible to avoid the important free speech, personal body autonomy, and employment-related issues that we wrestle with on the daily but that seem so lacking in general discourse.