Susanna Gibson, a Democratic legislative candidate in Virginia, had an unconventional side hustle until recently. She and her husband live-streamed sex acts for tips on a site called Chaturbate.
This has raised all kinds of questions: about the legitimacy of sex work, about whether or not an individual who has participated in such can viably run for office, etc.
Allow me to give you my two cents.
I’ve always held that consensual sex work should be legal, so long as a.) it involves only consenting adults, and b.) it is done discretely enough so that uninterested parties can easily ignore it.
This would preclude brothels and sex shops in shopping malls. Of course.
On the other hand, I never understood the government’s persecution of Alexis Wright, the so-called “Zumba prostitute” in 2013. Wright was then a 29-year-old woman, selling her own sexual favors in the privacy of her own Zumba studio, to men who were mostly in their 40s. This was the ultimate victimless crime. Yet Wright spent six months in jail.
Susanna Gibson and her husband were not breaking any laws, however. One of the perverse contradictions in the law is that it’s legal to charge money for sex, so long as it’s done on camera for third-party consumption. Ergo, Gibson violated no law when strange men paid her to have sex on camera with a man (her husband, in this case). But if one of them had paid her to have sex with them off-camera, then a crime would have been committed. Go figure.
But no one—not even Gibson’s eventual Republican opponent—has proposed that she be jailed for her naked entrepreneurial endeavors. The issue is whether or not this should have a bearing on the viability of her campaign.
That’s a complicated one, because individual voters will ultimately decide for themselves. Historically, candidates have often dropped out of races in the wake of sex scandals.
The oldest example I remember is that of Gary Hart, a Democratic hopeful for the presidential election of 1988. Hart dropped out after he was photographed with the much younger Donna Rice in the infamous “Monkey Business” photo of 1987.
Yes, that was a long time ago. Around 15 years ago, New York Governor Eliott Spitzer resigned after he was caught paying call girls for sex. I suppose that is vaguely analogous to Susanna Gibson’s peccadillo.
The problem is that what we do online, for a mass audience, is public information, ipso facto.
Consider this blog post. In the above paragraphs, I make the case that consensual, behind-closed-doors sex work should be legal for adults, both as sellers and buyers, under certain conditions. Had I not put that online, you wouldn’t know that I held such an opinion. My decision to put it online makes it no longer a “private” matter.
If I were to decide to run for office as a family-values Republican at some point, one of my opponents would surely dredge that up. And that would be fair game.
Susanna Gibson has accused her detractors of engaging in “the worst gutter politics” since her [paid] sex videos surfaced. Members of Gibson’s unpaid cheerleading squad in the media, meanwhile, have leveled charges of misogyny. (Were Gary Hart and Eliott Spitzer also victims of misogyny?)
But this ultimately comes down to a question of common sense, not sexual morality. Could Gibson not have foreseen this outcome?
Alexis Wright, the Zumba prostitute of a decade ago, was engaging in paid sex behind closed doors in a non-public setting. She had a reasonable expectation of privacy. So, arguably, did Eliott Spitzer, who paid for sex with high-class call girls in the closed enclaves of hotel rooms.
Susanna Gibson, on the other hand, had her paid sex in the very public arena of the Internet. By all indications, she made no effort to conceal her identity.
Yet now she’s crying foul because, lo and behold, someone saw those publicly distributed videos and said, “Hey, that’s a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates!”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not painting anyone with a scarlet letter here. Whatever else we might say about Susanna Gibson, she is certainly not boring. When describing her open marriage arrangement, Gibson reportedly told her online viewers, “I’ve had three [men] in a day actually. Don’t tell my husband he was the third.” As Bill Murray told a character in the 1981 movie Stripes, “I want to party with you, cowboy.”
But if I were a voter in Virginia, I would have my doubts about her qualifications. Not because of the sex, not because of the open marriage, and not because of the money….but because Susanna Gibson seems genuinely surprised that this all unfolded as it did.
That bespeaks an inability to anticipate the consequences of a given set of actions. Is that the kind of representative that any voter wants?
Voters in Virginia seemed to feel the same way. Gibson lost the election.
-ET