Reader Discretion Advised The Stripper and the Banana: Virginia Senate Race Gets Explicit

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31, 2006 — -- In these final days of the Senate campaign in Virginia, Republican Senator George Allen needs to woo women voters away from Democrat Jim Webb. In order to do so he has launched a novel attack -- or, rather, an attack on Webb's novels.

Allen's campaign has pored over the six war novels Webb -- a bestselling author -- wrote from 1978 through 2001, and cobbled together a list of ribald excerpts that Allen has argued on the campaign trail are demeaning to women.

The excerpts have been quoted on talk radio and included passages such as this one, from "Something to Die For":

"Fogarty watched a naked young stripper do the splits over a banana. She stood back up, her face smiling proudly and her round breasts glistening from a spotlight in the dim bar, and left the banana on the bar, cut in four equal sections by the muscles of her vagina."

Webb defends the writing, telling a Washington radio interviewer, "That is the sort of thing that happened. That's from a longapo in the Philippines, there are hundreds of thousands of servicemen who have been in that environment either directly or tangentially and it is an observation about how the human species lives...in the context of a novel, that is illuminative of an environment that these people were in."

There has been some debate in Virginia and around the country over whether attacking the novels amounts to dirty -- or even irrelevant -- politics, but it doesn't take a hugely astute political analyst to tell when a candidate is serving the needs of his opponent.

Indeed if you're running for office and just days before the election you're debating whether a woman performing a sex act on a piece of fruit is a legitimate cultural tradition in the Philippines, it's fair to say you've strayed horribly off-message.

Webb's novels have been praised by conservative reviewers in the National Review and the Weekly Standard; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., blurbed one of them with effusive praise. Nonetheless the attacks seem to have had some effect.