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.

So the former Navy secretary has tried to counter the attack by pointing out Republicans who have written their own steamy sex scenes.

"I'm a serious writer. I mean we can go read Lynne Cheney's lesbian love scenes if you wanna, you know, get graphic on stuff," Webb said last week.

Webb is referring to a 1981 novel by the vice president's wife that includes a subplot about two women in love. But this is about as hot as that book gets: "To Helena: my dearest lover. You are the joy of my life."

Lynne Cheney fired back on CNN: "You know Jim Webb is full of baloney. I have never written anything sexually explicit. His novels are full of, um, sexual explicit reference to incest, sexually explicit references, well, you know I just don't want my grandchildren to turn on the television set. This morning [talk show host Don] Imus was reading from the novels. And it's triple-x rated."

There is a history of prominent and powerful political figures writing books with interesting prose.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney is the author of a well-reviewed title called "The Apprentice." On page 149, it contains an interesting passage: "He could feel her heart beneath his hands. He moved his hands slowly lower still and she arched her back to help him and her lower leg came against his."

It goes on from there, but you get the point.

If you are trying to keep track, it's not easy to gauge whether Republicans or Democrats are racier writers... especially since Webb was once a Republican. But is it fair to slam political figures for including sex in their novels?

Absolutely not says Roger Hodge, the editor of Harpers Magazine, who believes adult literature demands sex.

"Whether it's going to be graphic and clichéd and embarrassingly awful... that's something different," Hodge said. "But if you're a realist novelist and you're writing for a popular audience, it's going to be sexually explicit or violent, that's a reflection of our society."

So we should be giving kudos to politicos who have tried to enter the tricky domain of fiction, such as former House Speaker and presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich, whose novel "1945" describes a "pouting sex kitten ... athwart his chest."

Or what about Fox News Channel megastar Bill O'Reilly, whose thriller "Those Who Trespass" is nothing short of raunchy? O'Reilly writes, "Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants." The rest is not printable on a family website.

Which brings us back to one of the novels Republicans hope will rock the Virginia Senate race, Jim Webb's.

It seems odd that fiction has emerged as such a point of contention in a race between two candidates who both lay claim to the mantle of Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood actor who once starred alongside a chimpanzee.

And you should have seen what that chimp could do with a banana!