Didn’t you just love Carrie Prejean? The woman was so perfectly preposterous she was impossible to ignore in all her plasticized, skin-deep perfection. In one TV clip, she was sashaying across the Miss Universe stage in a white bikini doing what Tina Fey as Sarah Palin called “fancy pageant walking.” In another she was a gushingly inarticulate, ultra-conservative spokesmodel denouncing the evils of gay marriage.
Carrie Prejean, like Joe the Plumber before her, was a product of cable TV, a nonentity blown out of proportion by the 24-hour news cycle. Sexier than Joe—although plainly a creature of untouchable tinsel—she grabbed even more airtime on CNN, MSNBC and Fox than the pontificating Mr. Clean.
Her legal confrontations with the Miss Universe organization, her undeclared breast implants, the loss of her title—and subsequent reinstatement by no less than Donald Trump—received damn near as much coverage as the war in Afghanistan. And no doubt, like Joe, this convinced Carrie she had a political future, perhaps as younger, hotter Sarah Palin draped in diamanté. Wasn’t everyone in Glenn Beck country paying rapt attention to her protestations that she was the victim of a heinous leftist plot to silence her as an “outspoken conservative woman”? Like Palin before her, she even snagged a book deal. A set of fairly innocuous semi-topless photos marginally tilted her moral halo, but Carrie carried on. The sky might be her limit.
Until we discovered that she was also a porn star.
Just as it seemed her 15 minutes of fame were running out, word circulated of a video of Prejean masturbating on camera. She was instantly back on the news cycle, right at the top of the hour. First reports claimed the tape was commercially produced, but when she was interviewed by Meredith Vieira on the Today show, Prejean made it very clear she was only sexting to a boyfriend, and it was never supposed to be seen by anyone else. Then, with stunning beauty queen logic, she asserted that it wasn’t a sex tape at all because she was on her own. Prejean was blissfully unaware she was rerunning a Rodney Dangerfield vintage classic: “The first time I had sex I was so scared. I mean, I was all alone.”
When the Carrie tape finally hit the internet, it instantly went viral. Websites crashed from lack of bandwidth as her fingers did the walking on quantum computers. She had crossed a moral line and would never run for president. And the irony was that she’d draw the line herself. Paris Hilton could walk away from her sex tapes with a vacant heiress smile. Prejean had so oversold herself as pure and spotless, she didn’t have that option once her vagina was the wonder of the web. Her protests that leaking the tape was an “attack on her Christian faith” didn’t help at all. The tape could not be talked away.
We’ve had Jimmy Swaggart and his airport skanks, and Ted Haggard with his boys and his crystal meth. Now we have Prejean’s video vagina. In comparison, adult entertainment seems positively conventional and uncomplicated. The porn industry is nothing more a community of professionals who make films of people having sex for the amusement of consumers. No lies or pretense. Shame is not part of the game and no one pushes imposed morality. No one who is commercially committed to making porn will ever look as pathetically inane as Carrie Prejean. Webcam exhibitionism is a part of the modern world and no one’s business except the participants. Prejean’s problem is that she is too dumb to realize the world is moving on from her oppressive concepts of decency.
Luckily for Prejean, the War on Porn was at low ebb. The wingnuts were busy derailing healthcare and proving Obama is a Kenyan. Maybe she can cut her losses, follow in the footsteps of Jessica Hahn, and start hanging with metal musicians. Her story does, however, present me with a rather disturbing conclusion. The porn industry is refreshingly sane, while Middle America—simultaneously watching lasciviously and waxing righteous—is seriously schizophrenic.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.
This article originally appeared in the January 2010 issue of AVN.
