One of the hallmarks of this new era of wokeism that we’re all living through is that we’re constantly treated to new terminology for old concepts. Race riots have gotten a makeover, they’re now known as BLM protests. Goth kids, cross-dressers and other miscellaneous groups now have all found new labels for themselves under the umbrella of “gender identity.” Anti-white and anti-Asian racism, especially when enforced by the government, now goes by the name of “equity.” And, in maybe the farthest-reaching rebrand — the one that really goes back thousands of years, — the modern Left has even managed to redefine the term “prostitution.” Now, instead of calling prostitutes prostitutes, we’re supposed to call them “sex workers.”
The idea is to rebrand prostitution as something other than morally depraved, reprehensible conduct that no civilized society should ever tolerate, much less embrace. And as you might expect, many media outlets, including the New York Times, are on board with this change in terminology. The paper of record recently ran a whole op-ed about the importance of “meeting the needs of sex workers.” According to the piece, we need to end “the social stigma” surrounding sex work. CBS News, for its part, has run several sympathetic stories about policies that can “legitimize the industry” of sex work.
Given all that, it’s with great interest that I checked out the websites of both The New York Times and CBS News last night to see how they were covering the story of a Virginia state house candidate named Susanna Gibson. Gibson, as you may have heard, was just outed as a cyber prostitute. She live-streamed videos on a porn website of herself engaging in various sex acts with her husband in exchange for money from strangers. She even offered to urinate for viewers if they paid up. To be clear, Gibson’s husband was aware all of this was happening. In fact he solicited donations himself at various points. And these were not private videos. They were not password protected, anyone could access them. And without going into too much detail, people could obtain even more salacious footage if they threw money at Gibson, in the form of “tokens.” Gibson assured her audience that the money was going to a “good cause” — perhaps her political campaign.
Now, if the New York Times and CBS News truly meant what they’ve been saying all these years about the legitimacy of sex work, you’d think this would be the easiest imaginable story to cover. Here you have a strong independent woman, engaging in consensual acts of prostitution with a willing partner. What could be more liberating than that? Truly this is what decades of feminism have been leading to, all along. This is the ultimate feminist success story. A “sex worker” becomes a politician —going from one form of prostitution to another. It’s the new American dream.
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Except, strangely enough, that’s not how these outlets covered this story. Instead of defending Susanna Gibson’s conduct, both the New York Times and CBS News lied about it. And these were not subtle lies. They were as obvious and lazy as they could possibly be. The Times decided to ignore the facts of this whole situation, and instead reported that Gibson’s videos had somehow leaked. This was their headline: “State House Candidate in Virginia Condemns Leak of Sex Tapes.” What they’re doing is hiding the fact that Gibson uploaded the footage herself. They’re implying that someone else leaked these videos, which they know is not what happened. For its part, CBS News ran this headline: “Virginia election candidate responds after leak of tapes showing her performing sex acts with husband.” Below that headline, CBS News copy-pasted an accurate Associated Press article describing what happened. So, CBS News’ only contribution to the story was adding an obviously false headline to mislead as many people as possible.
This is all more than a little strange. Here you have a perfect opportunity for both of these outlets — the New York Times and CBS News — to report honestly on the sex work that Susanna Gibson was engaging in. That shouldn’t be a big deal, because as these organizations have established, sex work is as noble as any other form of work. But instead of doing that, they’re lying about basic facts of the story. They’re pretending that Gibson wasn’t selling pornographic videos for money. Instead, they’re pushing the lie that she was hacked and her private videos somehow found their way on the internet. When in fact they found their way onto the internet because Gibson put them there on purpose. In case you’re keeping track, these are the same outlets that went wall-to-wall on Donald Trump’s so-called “pee tape,” which didn’t exist. Now they’re telling you that you’re not allowed to discuss a Democratic Party candidate’s actual pee tape, which she uploaded on the internet. Brazen does not begin to describe this.
But it gets even more brazen. Susanna Gibson herself went even further than these outlets. She claimed to be the victim of a “sex crime”. Watch:
Let’s think about this for a second. Susanna Gibson voluntarily uploads footage of herself having sex with her husband, with her husband’s consent, to a porn website. She and her husband both solicit money from anonymous viewers on this website, and in return, they promise to engage in even more sex acts. None of this is occurring on some private channel. Anyone with a working internet connection can see it. Some of these sex acts, by the way, were broadcast after Gibson announced her run for office in Virginia.
Now, Gibson tells us, it’s a “sex crime” to share this footage. It violates Virginia’s revenge porn laws. If that’s true, ironically enough, it would mean that Susanna Gibson and her husband are guilty of sex crimes, because they’re the ones who shared the footage. So it’s not just a facile argument that we’re talking about here. It is completely and totally absurd. It’s the kind of argument you make when you’re ashamed of what you’ve done, and you know there’s no defense for it, so you blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. Saying that it’s a sex crime for people to share a sex tape that you published on the internet is like selling your car to someone and then calling the police and claiming they stole it. Or perhaps you remember when Anthony Weiner claimed he was hacked, because he had no defense for why he was sending pictures of his crotch to random women on the internet. It’s a bit like that as well.
The level of desperation is really something to behold. They’re so desperate that they’re co-opting the same terminology they told us was sacred — the language of the #MeToo movement — as a political cover for behavior they know is repulsive. They’re saying we’re all sex criminals for noticing what they’re uploading on the internet. This isn’t simply hypocrisy, these are the panicked cries of feminists who are afraid to confront the logical endpoint of their entire movement, which is that feminism doesn’t actually liberate women from anything. Instead, it encourages them to become slaves to their most degenerate, base sexual desires.
A great illustration of this hypocrisy comes to us from the feminist blog Jezebel. Jezebel, like the New York Times and CBS News, is currently claiming that Republicans are demonizing Gibson for the crime of having sex with her husband. That’s the strawman they’re running with, as unsurprising and predictable as it may be. And Jezebel of course repeats the line that even talking about Gibson’s videos might amount to a sex crime.
What’s especially interesting about Jezebel’s coverage, though, is that they just ran a long post about the personal life of presidential candidate Tim Scott, saying he needs to be more open about why he doesn’t have a girlfriend at the age of 57. The piece mocks Scott for allegedly being a virgin until he was middle aged. It also suggests he’s suffering from “marriage-related trauma” from his upbringing after his father, a Vietnam War veteran, developed a drinking problem. So the progressive feminists at Jezebel are allowed to mock Tim Scott for all of these personal issues — which they haven’t even remotely verified. But at the same time, Jezebel also says you can’t talk about multiple sex tapes that a woman running for office in the Democratic Party published for public consumption. There’s a lot of this on the internet now. The same media outlets saying we should respect Susanna Gibson’s privacy — even though she didn’t respect her own privacy — are also reporting incessantly about their speculations about Tim Scott’s private life.
To be clear, some questions about Scott’s personal life are legitimate. He seems very much to be lying about having a girlfriend, who he refuses to identify in any way. It does sound a bit like he’s pulling the old “my girlfriend goes to another school” move. And if we’re being honest, it’s weird to have a 57-year-old bachelor running for president. But at the same time, there’s an obvious double standard in the way the media treats questions about a politician’s private life, depending on their political party. Another example is the incessant reporting on the whereabouts of Melania Trump, who has been absent from the campaign trail. Again, I think objectively those are perfectly valid questions. But by the same token, once we allow for all of that, then it’s clear that a political candidate’s history as a porn star is also very relevant.
There is a reason the Left is denying this, and it has nothing to do with one state-level candidate in Virginia. They’re lying about what Susanna Gibson did because her behavior highlights a very uncomfortable truth about the great experiment that the Left has conducted for so many years. That truth is this: After multiple “waves” and generations of feminism, which supposedly were all about treating women like people instead of objects — that’s how it was sold, anyway — pornography has now become so normalized and mainstreamed in our society that we have a bunch of soccer moms whoring themselves out on the internet for a few extra dollars. These aren’t young girls getting sex trafficked or turning to street prostitution out of desperation. They’re bored middle-class women with loose morals looking for validation and a little extra spending cash.
I’ve talked many times about what I call the trajectory of leftism. With any item on their agenda, anything they promote, it always starts and ends the same way. First, they deny that they are doing the thing. Then they admit they’re doing it, but insist that it’s good. Then they say that since it’s good, it should actually be celebrated. And finally, they invite — or demand — that we participate. Now we see that pornography has followed this same path, and we have finally arrived at the participation stage — where the problem becomes terminal. First they denied that they wanted to make hardcore pornography mainstream and accessible to everyone, including children. Then they said that actually porn is good and should be mainstream. Then they demanded that we celebrate the free expression of porn stars. And now porn has been opened up for all to actively participate in it — an invitation that many attention-starved women like Susana Gibson have responded to.
The problem — one of the many, many problems — is that selling your body to random creeps online is depressing and soul-crushing. Eventually, these women all get sick of it and want to move on. But there is no “moving on” in the internet age. Everything you’ve done there, you do forever. It lives on, whether you like it or not. That doesn’t make you a victim or give you the right to cry about “invasion of privacy.” It just means you need to make better choices, as Susanna Gibson, and many women like her, have now discovered.