Something Anal Someone Else Said

"Am I the only one to notice that President Obama's angrier critics have a curious habit of associating him with an extremely unpleasant form of bodily invasion?

Rush Limbaugh has complained, "We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles . . . because this is the first black president." You can buy T-shirts and bumper stickers that say, "Bend over, here it comes," with the "o" in "over" duplicating the one in Obama's campaign logo. National Review's latest cover features a cartoon of Obama grinnng diabolically in a doctor's lab coat, pulling a latex glove over his hand, and saying, "Just relax."

Get it? Obama's policies are the equivalent of having something shoved not down your throat but up your lower digestive tract--or worse yet, being sexually assaulted.

It's an extreme image, and as far as I can tell, a new one. Liberals who detested George Bush didn't depict him this way, and conservatives who loathed Bill Clinton found other ways to express their feelings.

Where does this link between Obama and anal violation come from? Maybe it's just the next inevitable step in the coarsening of political discourse. Maybe it's derived from the jokes in raunchy movie comedies involving male buddies. Or maybe it's the product of some weird subliminal reaction to the first black president.

But whatever the source, it's an ugly tactic that conservatives ought to discard. I don't enjoy or expect to enjoy the results of many of Obama's policies. But I'm willing to bet they're nothing like being raped." -Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune

I too have noticed many conservatives' penchant for using the threat of an assault upon one's back road as a supposedly legitimate avenue (yes, pun intended) for political attack, be they petulant poli-sci profs (NTTAWWT!!!!!!) or lipless newspapermen (...go to a Castro Street glory hole, offering up your rump to complete strangers, while bragging that you've got more than 25,000 hits on your blog in the past 13 months...). As I've said before, these guys obviously have some real hangups when it comes to sex and especially when it comes to homosexuality, the latter of which automatically translates to the act of "butt sex" in their minds regardless of the topic or right actually being discussed.

Now regular readers know that I'm not one to nonchalantly play the so-called "race card" during political discussions or debates (as the aforementioned, petulant poli-sci prof so blithely did a short while back) but with Obama I can't help feeling that the recent conservative talk of cornhole violation is at least tangentially influenced by the fact of the guy's race. The anatomical legend of the black man's wedding tackle is well known and whether it's been scientifically proven or not (and before anyone says anything: No, I don't consider your porno collection "scientific"; I'm talking about actual demographic studies and they're mostly inconclusive at best, as far as I can tell in researching this post), these generalizations have been applied to several races across the spectrum of humanity (sorry, Asian guys). But to employ a well-used, if decidedly less than scientific, maxim: There's a reason that stereotypes exist. And it's not because they're always true, just that they're true enough of the time that it's difficult to dispute anecdotal evidence without hard data (that pun was also totally intended).

So when you combine this supposed cultural "knowledge" (some might call these stereotypes racist and they could very well be right: I lack enough scientific data to say for sure) with the fact that there is a fairly successful, specialized sub-genre of pornography out there dealing entirely with vulnerable white women being literally impaled by threateningly well-hung black dudes (whether this is either a cultural hold-over of racist attitudes from slave times or rather a cultural backlash against those same attitudes, I also lack enough historical data to say for sure) and then factor in the previously mentioned conservative anathema to any mention or thought of dirty sinful butt sex, the irrational fear of Nubian anal-penetration becomes something with which to adequately scare and rile up a relatively sexually repressed and increasingly Southern Republican voting block when there's a liberal black man living in the White House. Decide for yourselves, and don't drop the soap.

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