I didn’t really think it was a huge story that Ted Cruz, or someone who has access to his Twitter account, clicked like on a porn tweet. I made a few cracks about it on social media and laughed along with everyone else making puns.
The tweet of a video that Ted clicked like on was described by The Washington Post: “The video clip itself is just over two minutes, details of its contents mostly unprintable. It features a sectional sofa, the pornographic actress Cory Chase, her fictitious nude stepdaughter, and a very energetic young man.” How tawdry.
It’s especially tawdry for a man who has advocated against what people do in private behind closed doors. If Justin Timberlake brought sexy back, Ted Cruz has tried to take it away.
As Solicitor General of Texas, his legal team tried to defend a law banning the sale of sex toys. His office drafted a 76-page brief that argued that the government had an interest in discouraging “autonomous sex.” It further stated, “there is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for nonmedical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.”
Cruz’s freshman-year college roommate once tweeted, “Ted Cruz thinks people don’t have a right to ‘stimulate their genitals.’ I was his college roommate. This would be a new belief of his.”
Republicans are the only people in the world who will claim that they have never viewed porn. Of if they did, then they had a very good reason, like researching for an article or a legal case. These were the kids you knew in high school who claimed they had never touched themselves. They also had a girlfriend you can’t meet because she goes to a different school in another town.
Cruz claims he did not click the like button, and he blamed it on a staffer. There were a lot of puns about “staffer” on social media. It happened late at night and was unliked by 2:00 AM.
Cruz keeps having little silly conflicts with porn. During the 2016 primaries, he hired a porn star for a campaign ad. I’m starting to think Ted Cruz doesn’t watch anything else but porn.
Ted Cruz is icky. Maybe he wasn’t the individual responsible for liking a porn video, but just the thought of him making an O-face is enough to make one hurl their cereal. Nobody likes Ted. Nobody wants to touch Ted. Nobody even wants to be in the same room with Ted. So, certainly nobody wants any sort of mental image of Ted doing anything porn related.
I’ve said it before, and more than once. I’ll say it again. You can judge a person by their opinion of Ted Cruz. If they like him, or even voted for him, cut that person out of your life. He’s an asshole, and he’s probably just as deceitful, condescending, smug, smarmy, and slimy as Ted Cruz.
This cartoon may be a bit out-of-date. Did I use a porn theater like one would insert (no pun intended) a phone booth into a political cartoon? Are there still theaters for porn, or is everybody viewing it on the internet like Ted Cruz?
I have actually been to a porn theater once in my life. It was the late 1980s, and I was living in Los Angeles. My little brother and I went to Hollywood and while there we decided to check it out. I had never seen one before. Porn, yes. An actual theater, no. I don’t recommend it.
The first part of the theater was a store where they sold the tickets and sex toys. Nice. The actual theater was dark. Darker than a regular movie theater. You couldn’t see anyone, but occasionally you’d hear a cough….or an even more disturbing sound. The floors were sticky, and not popcorn sticky. We walked in during the middle of the movie, or at least after it had started. I don’t think anyone goes for a start time or even for a specific title. The weirdest thing, the movie stopped playing in the middle of a sex scene. Why did it do that?
I’ll tell you why it did that. Because there was a stage in front of the movie screen, which came as a surprise. This girl came out and started stripping with all the “bow-chika-wow-wow” music playing. She stripped for 30 minutes. I remember this because I timed it, and it actually got boring. It nearly turned into a personal and horrifying tragedy for me. The kind of thing someone like Ted Cruz would probably get off on.
I was 21-years-old. I had just met my father, and my younger brother. So, hanging out with Bobby, my brother, was new to me. So, hey. Let’s go watch a porn. I’m gonna go with that being Bobby’s idea. I had also just met a little sister and a step-brother who was my age. I was also told that there was another sister. A half-sister. And, I was told she was a mess and my father didn’t want me to meet her. Weird, right? I don’t know if it’s true, but I was once told she’d occasionally make spare money by rolling people in alleys.
So during this porn-theater striptease, my brother leans over and says, “dude, I think that’s our sister.” If I was drinking anything, I would have spit it out or choked on it (no porn puns there please). It wasn’t my sister. Thank god. I was in sheer horror until the lights came up and he said, “oh, never mind. Do you think they have Raisinets here?” That was not how I wanted to meet my sister. But, I did finally meet her a couple years ago, nearly thirty years later at my father’s funeral. I also found out in the years between, that she was not actually my sister. Fuckers. And again, thank god.
Anyway, it was a very icky, awkward, situation I never want to experience again, and I haven’t. I imagine it’s very similar to a feeling one gets by meeting Ted Cruz.
Creative note: I took “rodgering” from the film There’s Something About Mary. The line was “a jolly good rodgering.” I think. I don’t know if I ever heard the term before that, but I had a good idea what it was. I hope editors don’t.
Clay Jones can be contacted at [email protected]