BY Lux Alptraum
November 6, 2008
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5 Comments

So, Barack Obama got elected, and that was pretty awesome. Hey, it made me happy — I’ve been a fan of Mr. Obama’s ever since I learned he supports comprehensive sex education. It made all my neighbors happy — they were dancing in the streets. And hey, it even made the adult industry happy — they’re all convinced that an Obama presidency means progress for the porn world… or at least a few years of freedom from obscenity lawsuits.

Except I’m not so sure that that’s the case. Let’s be real about something: Obama is unlikely to be a pro-porn president. Any president who actually manages to get elected is unlikely to be vocally pro-pornography — but I’ll come back to that point in a minute.

Before I became Queen of Fleshbot, I worked for an after school program, providing comprehensive sex education to teenagers. In spite — or perhaps because — of the fact that I was teaching teens that it was okay to masturbate, that gays are just great, and that premarital sex is fine if you protect yourself; I was under a great deal of pressure to present myself as conservatively as possible. I had to dress a certain way, I had to act a certain way — I had to prove that, even though I was talking about sex, I was a totally “normal” individual, a fine upstanding citizen.

I had to pretend to be someone that I’m not, because, as a queer girl with a history of polyamory, love of sex toys and kink, and a sex work background, I was — in some ways, at least — exactly the stereotype of the freaky sex-obsessed individual who should never be let near children. And so if I wanted to keep my job, I had to keep myself “safe for work,” as they say.

But back to Barack Obama. It’s exactly this sort of sentiment, this fear of the depraved, crazy liberal, that keeps real change from being made. Of course Barack Obama is a married Christian with two kids — that is the exact profile of a person we have deemed fit to lead. God forbid that he be polyamorous, or in an open relationship, or even gay; despite the fact that there are many, many Americans who fall into those categories, we, as a country, can’t seem to understand that one’s relationship status or sexual orientation has zero effect on one’s ability to lead.

Which, in a roundabout way, returns me to my original point. Barack Obama cannot be a pro-porn president, because to be publicly pro-porn is to be socially deviant, even as the majority of the nation enjoys its adult entertainment behind closed doors. To the extent that Obama may, perhaps, be a friend to the adult industry, it will be through the guise of increased acknowledgment of a right to privacy, the government’s lovely way of allowing us to do what we want while simultaneously refusing to condone our behavior.

And I guess, in the end, that the reason why this makes me so sad is because of how much it all has to do with me, personally. I tend to think that I’m a good person, beyond that, I’m proud of what I do. But there’s this strange disconnect between my work and polite society: for me, the “What do you do?” question is always somewhat loaded, with even the benign “sex educator” response leading to more than a few raised eyebrows.

And really, the much larger point is that I like Barack Obama, and I have my hopes that he will be a good, perhaps even a great, president. And it breaks my heart to know that it is unlikely that I will ever be able to hear my President(-elect) commend the accomplishments of my industry, commend the work that I do — that we fine upstanding perverts are always perverts first, and fine and upstanding a very distant second.