I respect a man who seeks consensual sexual thrills with an experienced sex worker. Should he be newly married, a father to the newborn child of his betrothed, and hiding all this thrill-seeking from his new family, not to mention everyone else, he forfeits all that respect.
I respect sex workers, Sex work is work. Should a sex worker be seducing a famous man to compromise him and compel a large lump-sum payment for her silence later, she forfeits that respect. Doing honest work doesn't grant her license to cause harm. She knew about his family.
So, let's be clear about what I see as the problem here. While I don't know the actual truth here, it sure looks like we've got two people taking advantage of each other in a way that displays significantly narcissistic self-investment.
It is not at all inconceivable that they also genuinely enjoyed each other's company. It's also not inconceivable that he had his wife's blessing and the rest of the theater of deception was just public relations.
It's also possible this blog post could win a Pulitzer prize. Let's be sure to cover all the bases.
In the grand scheme of things, the President and the Porn Star is not a big deal to me. I believe that the President is such a lost cause with regard to moral character that whatever this episode actually represents fades into irrelevance. The only thing that separates him from the ranting subway car preacher I stood next to this morning is celebrity. What bothers me is the assumptions that are being played out in the public conversations about this which are so widely held that they seem invisible.
Stormy Daniels is regarded as so much human furniture in this situation, as if she had no choice but to participate once a rate was agreed upon. No, she had a choice. I don't know who is who in the adult video world, but she is described as a "porn star," that suggests she enjoyed some professional success before this episode. I find it hard to believe financial hardship compelled her involvement, though I concede it's possible. Not all sex workers are good with money..
There's the assumption that she had this planned all along, seeing an easy mark and moving in for the kill. That really assumes that she is a bad actor, and I believe the invisible subtext here is that all sex workers are bad actors. That's aggressively misogynistic. Sex workers are people. Some of them are great, some of them aren't. Their line of work doesn't define them as people.
I suspect their relationship ended badly, most relationships with this man do. I suspect he big-timed her, acted like a cad, and the drama now being revealed about the pre-election $130,000 payment probably included money he owed her from that time. Perhaps she only exercised her leverage at this time so that she could be paid the money she was still owed. There are multitudes of other contractors who would have exploited such a chance. This man doesn't pay his bills.
There is the assumption that this is what ultimately and inevitably happens to people who enjoy recreational sex, particularly with sex workers. As if the mistake made here was getting too involved in sex in the first place.
A man who asked to be spanked with a copy of the Forbes magazine with his picture on the cover is not there for the sex. Sexual union is a meeting of two individuals in a singular union of sensation and emotion. This was status-seeking behavior, narcissistic supply. Sex was a tool here, not the point.
Narcissus is not a symbol of power. In Ovid's Metamorphoses he stared at his reflection and lost his will to live. He died because he lacked the power to tear himself away from his reflected image in a pond.
These assumptions, that the sex worker was not a decision-maker, that there was a single victim here, and that it was the sex that ethically stained all of this, all obscure the reality of what happened here. This is yet another episode of this man making a mess of things because he is obsessed with his status. In this case, he had the help of someone similarly making a mess of her life.
None of this makes this man's role in my life any more or less alarming.
