LOS ANGELES—It's probably a safe bet that no adult entertainment fan reading this article is at all troubled by seeing a woman with a dick in her mouth. Except for all-girl movies, sucking cock is a mainstay of adult video and present in multiple instances in every movie released on DVD or online.
And unless one is a dyed-in-the-wool pseudo-feminist like, say, Gail Dines or Judith Reisman or the late Andrea Dworkin, no sane person considers depicting a woman sucking a dick to be an act of degradation—probably because most women, liberal or conservative, who actually have sex have performed this act at one time or another on their male partner(s).
Which brings us to Sarah Elizabeth "S.E." Cupp.
Cupp is probably not a household name to most people, though she's written two books—Why You're Wrong About the Right: Behind the Myths: The Surprising Truth About Conservatives (co-authored with Brett Joshpe) and Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity—writes for the New York Daily News, and has appeared as a political commentator on several news-interview shows, most notably the Glenn Beck show when it was on the Murdoch-owned Fox News Channel, moving with Beck when he established his own cable network, Mercury Radio Arts, where she was given her own show on his GBTV.
Cupp claims to be an atheist, which should put her at odds with the majority of her viewing audience, but in fact her commentary on religion is about as Christian as it gets, bashing President Obama for his claimed lack of participation in the clearly-unconstitutional "National Day of Prayer" events, his requirement that religious imagery be covered before his nationally-telecast speech at Georgetown University in 2009, and quoting out of context from his inaugural speech that the U.S. is "a nation of non-believers." (Actually, he said, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.") She also claimed that the "liberal media" is involved in "a class war, a revolution with a singular purpose: to overthrow God and silence Christian America for good."
She's also under the mistaken impression that "the face of today's conservatives" is "[l]ively, witty, and thought-provoking."
In other words, she's full of shit.
She also happens to be a pretty good-looking woman—and she obviously thinks so herself, as evidenced by the photo album on her website.
So, put it all together: Good-looking woman; nationally known among conservatives; thinks she's got a handle on what's wrong with America today (hint: it's got a too-liberal, too-irreligious government backed by a too-liberal, too-irreligious media)—so why shouldn't Larry Flynt publish, in the latest issue of Hustler magazine, a Photoshopped picture of her sucking a dick? (See accompanying photo, sadly blurred out because AVN doesn't publish even fake hardcore.)
The image is accompanied by an "explanation" which reads, "S.E. Cupp is a lovely young lady who read too much Ayn Rand in high school and ended up joining the dark side. Cupp, an author and media commentator who often shows up on Fox News programs, is undeniably cute. But her hotness is diminished when she espouses dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood. Perhaps the method pictured here is Ms. Cupp's suggestion for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy."
It also has a disclaimer: "No such picture of S.E. Cupp actually exists. This composite fantasy is altered from the original for our imagination, does not depict reality, and is not to be taken seriously for any purpose."
Need we say it? Cue the outrage!!!
"We were not happy when we heard that Hustler magazine photo-shopped her into a fake, very explicit photograph that they published in a recent issue," said actress Whoopi Goldberg when she interviewed Cupp on The View. "Tell me, when you first saw this picture—and I mean it's nasty and disgusting and fake, fake, fake, we need to let you all know that—what was [your reaction?]"
(Well, of course it was "fake, fake, fake," because after all, unlike billions of other women, Cupp would never, ever put a dick in her mouth, would she?)
"I was horrified," Cupp replied. "It was disgusting and, even though I didn't actually do that, by the end of the day, I felt ashamed as if I had. And knowing this photo will be out there forever. My children will see it when I have them one day. It's sad. I'm sad."
(Yeah; "God" forbid that Cupp's prospective kids might think mom had ever sucked a dick before...)
"Whether you're conservative or a Democrat, this is not OK," Goldberg argued. "This is offensive. This is not the dialogue that we have when we disagree."
What "dialogue"? It's a friggin' picture of a cute woman with a dick in her mouth. If Goldberg wants, I'm sure someone in the adult industry would be willing to send her thousands if not tens of thousands of photos of cute women with dicks in their mouths, and just because there's no actual photo of Cupp with a dick in her mouth doesn't mean there's never been one in there. (Or maybe it does; there doesn't seem to be any information available regarding Cupp's sexual orientation.)
The point is, it really doesn't matter if the woman with the dick in her mouth is "conservative" or "Democrat"; what's obviously got Goldberg and the other View participants upset is the fact that there's this image of a semi-famous person with a dick in her mouth—and the only politics that has anything to do with is sexual politics!
Even The View's token conservative, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, seemed almost to understand that.
"It's also describing a woman as totally submissive in a way," Hasselbeck said. (You might want to re-check what Hustler said, Liz. It takes a particularly dense individual—hey, we said she's conservative!—to interpret "Perhaps the method pictured here is Ms. Cupp's suggestion for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy" to be a description of sexual—or any other kind of—submissiveness.)
Other lefties and ostensibly liberal organizations also jumped on the "bash Hustler" bandwagon.
"Sexist attacks made against women like @SandraFluke and recently @secupp are disgraceful and cannot be tolerated," someone at Planned Parenthood Action Fund tweeted.
Yeah, that's comparable! Hustler printed a photo of a semi-famous woman with a dick Photoshopped into her mouth—completely fair game, satire-wise, considering that back in '88, the Supreme Court threw out conservative preacher Jerry Falwell's lawsuit against Flynt for printing a parody of a Campari wine ad with a salacious Falwell "interview"—while Fluke, a political and media unknown, simply testified as a private citizen in favor of contraceptives being covered by health insurance plans, leading ass-clown Rush Limbaugh to decide that she "wants to be paid to have sex," that "She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception"; and "We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch."
Sadly, however, Fluke agreed with Planned Parenthood.
"@HustlerMag depiction of @secupp so offensive. Sexualization of female public figs attempts 2 limit them 2 being sexual figures & not more," Fluke stated in another tweet.
Perhaps it's escaped Fluke's notice, but Hustler is a sexually-oriented magazine. It prints photos (some of them Photoshopped) of women having sex or in sexual situations. It's printed actual photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis nude, not to mention Suzanne Sommers, Lynda Carter, Britt Ekland, Charlene Tilton and dozens more celebs, and recently won a lawsuit for having printed nude shots of WWE star Chris Benoit’s wife Nancy, whom he murdered. The problem isn't that Hustler printed those photos or the fake Cupp photo; it's that our religiously-steeped culture, which Fluke has obviously bought into, has determined that women lose credibility or it "limit[s] them" if they're depicted as human beings who have (or might have) sex!
Similarly, former Ms. magazine editor-in-chief Robin Morgan tweeted, "Larry Flynt and the editors of Hustler [have] the apparent IQs of inebriated gnats"... to which feminist comedienne and Green Party presidential candidate Roseanne Barr retorted, "Your defense of women who hate women is more disgusting than putting pics of penises in their mouths, excuse me!"
Even Cupp herself got it wrong.
"S.E. Cupp is lovely, she's smart, she's fine but she happens be a crazy conservative who is pro-life and wants to defund Planned Parenthood and for that she deserves the phallus in her mouth—that is essentially what they're saying and I have to commend that as being incredibly honest," Cupp analyzed for her boss Glenn Beck in an interview on his radio show. "They have this uncomplicated belief system that my political views, my being pro-life, my political views make this kind of behavior OK. It justifies it and I essentially deserve it. That is honesty and I have never seen it before."
Sorry, Sarah; yes, you are a conservative, which makes you one of the most deluded people on the planet, and yes, you do want to defund Planned Parenthood because you don't give a shit if millions of women somewhat like yourself (only poorer) are forced to have children they don't want and/or suffer from preventable and treatable—and sometimes deadly—sexually transmitted diseases... but we doubt that Hustler's writers think you "deserve" a dick in your mouth for that reason.
Rather, we suspect that the fact that you have spent so much time and effort distancing yourself from those other members of your own sex, that you no longer have any idea what a decent human being in a relatively high position of power (such as yourself) should be doing for women less fortunate and less wealthy than yourself—and Flynt simply wanted to remind you that pretty much everyone—you and all those millions of women you care nothing about—looks the same with a dick in her mouth.
We can only hope that some future issue of Hustler (or a similarly situated gay publication) will decide to publish a photo of Fox News superstar Sean Hannity with a dick in his mouth—and we'll be interested to see what the reaction will be to that!
