[This is another post from the old SmackChron that was posted last November.]

[Updated below: scroll to bottom.]

You know…it is really tempting for me to jump head first into the latest fracus involving the former Miss California Carrie Prejean, who recently had her Joan of Arc transformation hit another huge stumble.

The woman who has attempted to make herself into the martyr for beautiful artificially enhanced right-wing fundie Christain beauty pagent ingenues got herself caught yet again when she attempted to sue the officials of the Miss California pagent for $1 million damages from their stripping her of her title due to her supposed breach of their contract. Prejean had claimed that she was being target solely for her conservative religious views.

Well, it’s kinda hard to say you are being persecuted when you take advantage of the pagents largesse to get a boob job, or you hide from the pagent officials cheesecake topless photos you made of yourself earlier in your career…but that pales in comparison to this latest.

For, you see, the pagent officials broke out a videotape at the hearing on her lawsuit showing Ms. Prejean doing a lot more than just posing.

As in…full on naked.

As in…masturbating.

Complete with a facial closeup that proved that it was indeed her, in spite of her initial denials. “That’s disgusting!!!” she was alleged to have said at first.

15 seconds after the film ended, Ms. Prejean dropped her lawsuit.

That night, James Dobson’s fundie Right group Focus on the Family dropped Ms. Prejean from a benefit fundraiser they had scheduled her to appear in this week.

The Hollywood gossip site TMZ.com first released the news of the sex tape, with their usual snark (but without releasing the actual tape for the obvious legal reasons): “Let’s just say that she has a promising solo career ahead of her.”

And the popular reaction is of the usual range…from shrieks of denial and allegations of “Blackmail!!!” from her fans to cries of “Dirty hypotwat!” and “Skank ‘ho!!!” from her detractors.

For this man, though, there is mixed feelings.

Yeah, part of me is feeling the schaudenfreude of watching someone who lectures others on their lack of morality being hoisted on their own petard. You can’t moan and groan about gays and porn girls and sluts by day, Carrie dear, and make solo jill-off vids and softcore cheesecake at night.

On the other hand, though, I actually feel some empathy and even sympathy for Ms. Prejean…because for a woman who is raised on fundamentalist notions of sexuality, it’s not that easy to battle the conflict between everything you have been taught about non procreative sexuality being a “sin” of the devil, and those sexual feelings that young women obviously confront.

No one coerced Ms. Prejean into making that video, and I’m probably guessing that she sincerely enjoyed making it and got herself off good and plenty…and she was obviously doing it for the pleasure of herself and other viewers.

Being someone who is all about respecting female sexual pleasure, it is quite encouraging to me that even someone as bellicose and as pious as Carrie Prejean is capable of tapping into herself and her inner sexual desires. Just because she may have intended it to be only for her and her intimate partner’s enjoyment (though, I’m wondering if she might have wanted it out there for other people, but hesitated because it would conflict with her “good Christian girl” image) doesn’t mean that she or any other conservative woman isn’t capable of enjoying sex and orgasms for their own sake.

Of course, the Puritans on the Right (and not a few liberal Puritans as well) won’t take it too kindly that Ms. Prejean has missed up their preconceptions of young women as either repressed spinsters or mindless sluts. And the usual knuckle-draggers will make with all the usual insults of “We knew she was a skanky ‘ho who degrades women…now, when will we see the damn tape so that we may jack off ourselves??”

Personally, I admit it….I want to see the tape myself. Not to belittle or insult Ms. Prejean, but to honor her. I really do hope that she did have a good time making the tape, and that whomever the tape was intended for got what was intended from it.

And maybe, just maybe, all the fracus about this tape will begin a period of enlightenment for Ms. Prejean, in which she reconciles the beauty of her body and her sexuality with the voices whispering in her head that sexuality is something to be feared or repressed. Perhaps, she will see that she is a hell of a lot closer to those porn performers and “sluts” who engage in and even record their acts of self-pleasure for the sheer joy of the orgasm than she is to the Jim Dobsons and Pat Buchanans and Michelle Bachmanns who use her celebrity and noteriety to sell their own repressive fascist agenda.

Then again, she might just call it an evil gay/liberal conspiracy and continue to rant and moan about “traditional values” and the dire threat of gay marriage. Who knows??

Either way, I’d rather respect women who make masturbation videos who don’t feel shame or disgust for loving sex. Whether they be conservative, liberal, radical or not.

——————————————————————————————————————————————-

[Update 11-10-2009]

Well..I tried to give Carrie P the benefit of the doubt, but she just took it and crushed my hopes to the ground. Looks like she’s going full tilt wingnut Haggard on us.

This week, Miss Prejean has been hitting the talk show circuit hard (with stops at The View, NBC Today, and Fixed Noise’s Hannity), attempting to play her Joan of Arc act that she was merely a victim of the usual liberal media witch hunt against conservative women…even goin so far as to refer herself to being “Palinized” merely for standing up for “traditional values” and “Christian faith”. What’s so particually inane is that she’s now pimping her “tell-all” book, where she decides to blame her current troubles on not only those dirty leftists, but even dares to take shots at the secular culture and especially porn for its alleged evil impacts on society I’ll just give you some examples Carrie’s lunacy:.

Former Miss California Carrie Prejean on Tuesday defended a recently surfaced erotic video of her as a youthful indiscretion and questioned whether it could actually be called a “sex tape” since no one else appears in it.

“It was me by myself. There was no one else with me. I was not having sex,” the controversial beauty queen told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira in New York.

Prejean admitted to making the video of herself and sending it to her boyfriend when she was 17 years old. The tape surfaced during a negotiating session with the Miss California pageant officials over a lawsuit Prejean filed against the organization for stripping her of her crown earlier this year. When the tape’s existence was revealed, Prejean dropped her suit and settled with the officials, who reportedly paid her $100,000 to go toward her legal expenses.

(excerpted from MSNBC.com online article)

Ahhh….OK, Carrie….so it was a tape that you made when you were young. But…surely you were raised with all those wonderful Christian values enough that you had a sliver of thought back then about the repercussions of making such a tape BEFORE you actually made it??

And please….you “weren’t having sex”?!?!?! Last time I checked, stimulating your clit with your fingers resulting in an orgasm was still considered to be sex….otherwise, how in the hell would you criticize Bill Clinton for what he had with Monica Lewinsky?? Or, does the Bible allow for exeptions for masturbation lately??

“You can call it whatever you want to call it. If you want to call it a sex tape, that’s fine,” Prejean told Vieira. “I sent it to my boyfriend at the time. I was a teenager. I cared about him. I trusted him,” she added. “I think now they call it ‘sexting.’“Did I think it would come back now and haunt me? No. But I think that a lot of young people can learn from this. Nothing is private anymore. Nothing is private.”

Really, Carrie?? Well…it certainly isn’t private when you go out and run nonsense like this (excerpted from her soon-to-released bio, via TMZ.com):

“Unfortunately, pornography has become mainstreamed — it rushes at us through big screens, portable screens; soft-core porn is on mainstream TV cable stations, hard-core porn is just a mouse click away on the internet, and the envelope of what seems acceptable seems to get pushed farther and farther as more and more people are exposed to this material.

The result is that girls grow up in a culture where it is hard to have an innocent, healthy, normal view of themselves, how they should behave, how they should act, and how they should dress.”

“Our bodies are temples of the Lord. We should earn respect and admiration for our hearts, not for showing skin to look sexy … I have since learned that your outer beauty can only get you so far in life.”

Let’s see here….so, calling Carrie Prejean out on her hypocrisy in getting her ass caught making sex tapes and softcore porn stills while decrying the availability of such material on the public is basically “trashing conservative women.” I guess that means that Michelle Bachmann and Ann Coulter aren’t really as batshitty as we think, but are simply misunderstood and trashed by the “liberal” media??

And of course, “American values are under attack”…mostly by the overwhelming majorities of Americans who actually voted the likes of Barack Obama into office, and who,elected Democrats to super-majority status (though it is highly questionable whether that amouts to “liberal bias” to begin with) and rejected the social conservative policies represented by that other conservative martyr, Sarah Palin. But, hey, that must have been a figment of the liberal media’s imagination, too, I guess..

As for the smackdown on Olbermann….well, he had a response for that. You think that KO wouldn’t be ready??

Countdown with Keith Olbermann (MSNBC): 11/9/09 “#1 Story” segment  on Carrie Prejean’s “sex tape” hypocrisy and her call out of the “liberal” media for alegedly “attacking” her (via YouTube)