While I’d love to be able to open this blog with a revelation about a sordid orgy with two famous politicians, that would be a heinous lie. I’ve never had sex with a politician, and unless one of my exes stands for office at some point, or Danny Alexander pops round when I’m too horny to be critical, it’ll probably stay that way forever.
Still, that doesn’t stop me speculating on the sexiness or otherwise of various politicians, so I’m going to do just that:
- Ed would totally get it.
- Clegg would have had it back in 2010 but now wouldn’t muster so much as a pity fuck.
- Sturgeon is undeniably cheeky and although I don’t fancy her I’d definitely nudge a mate if she beckoned them over with a sexy wink at a party.
- Cameron can get utterly fucked, but not by me.
For the Americans among you, I hope you know that I am not discriminating against your politicians. I have, on numerous occasions, had fantasies about being accidentally locked in a cupboard with Barack Obama. The cupboard’s vital because I know he’d never let me snog him if he thought Michelle might see.
Sex and politics
Did the above make you feel a bit uncomfortable? How about if I throw in Boris Johnson? Teresa May? Pick someone of a political persuasion that you don’t care for, and try to imagine silkily licking their genitals, as they moan with barely-suppressed desire. Uncomfortable now?
I read something the other day (by Stevie Martin at the Debrief, who by the way is frequently HILARIOUS), in which she ummed and erred about who to vote for. Fair enough – plenty of us do. And chances are a fair few UK people reading this won’t have voted at all. Not in a Russell Brand way necessarily, just in an indecisive way, and I can see why the question ‘which of these nuggets of dried shit would you most like to put in your mouth?’ might be a bit off-putting.
Here’s what surprised me though: she explained that her boyfriend was probably a bit of a right-winger, but that didn’t bother her much. Ultimately it didn’t matter.
Now, as I reveal myself to be a massive arsehole, I’m going to tell you that I think it does. To me, at any rate. If I find out you’re a Tory I will be less likely to fancy you. In fact, I will struggle to hold a conversation with you without shouting ‘WHY WHY WHY I THOUGHT YOU WERE NICE’ before showing you some Tumblr images of George Osborne photoshopped grinning evilly in the background of a crime scene. Does that make me shallow? Christ, probably. But it goes part of the way towards explaining, I think, why the idea of politicians shagging is so taboo.
So, sex politics (spolitics?) question 1: are you less likely to fancy someone if they’re of a different political affiliation?
Politicians are boring
Perhaps an extension of the above is the idea that – even if they’re the kind of person you’d vote for – the very fact that someone’s a politician automatically makes them unsexy. Not every politician can be Frank Underwood off House of Cards – some people have to be John Major. While certain politicians try to beef up a kind of sex appeal by riding topless on horseback, in Britain the raciest way to boost your political image is to wear a slightly brighter tie, or a pair of leopard-print high heels.
Ultimately the ‘eww’ factor – especially in the UK, because realistically I have no idea about politics elsewhere – seems heavily focused on the idea that these people who have power over us are far too dull to have lives outside of Westminster.
Question 2: do you as a general rule think politicians are dull (or would be rubbish in the sack)?
Politicians having really sweaty sex
That’s just the tip of the iceberg though. While we profess repulsion, we’re still kind of fascinated by politicians having sex, probably in part because we’re given the vague impression that they don’t do it. They’re all buttoned-down and neat and tidy – even the ones whose husbands pay for porn are quick to distance themselves from the very idea that they might be married to someone with sexual desires. Those who have affairs are often mixed up with those who haven’t had an affair, just a relationship, as the vast majority of us do. Politics and sex are like oil and water: if you’re a politician you must be squeaky clean (unless you’re that UKIP dude who is also a porn star, in which case you’re letting down the porn star community).
When the press gets wind of a good political sex scandal, they get really excited. Apart from anything else, it’s a chance to crack out words like ROMP, which you literally never see anywhere else. We get a bit curious, then ultimately dismiss the whole thing with horror – like the idea of a politician having anything other than a manifesto in their pocket is a cause for abject horror.
This election there’s been a bit more sexual tension – a whole bunch of people have been getting genuinely sexually excited over Ed Miliband – a consequence I doubt was raised in his original campaign strategy meetings. We had Ed Balls describing himself as a ‘slow burner’ in the sack, which is either metaphorical or the kinkiest shit I ever heard. Oh, and there was that weird tabloid splash story about the fact that Miliband had – shock! – had a few girlfriends before he got married. None of this adds up to a fiesty hardcore gangbang, and I’m not saying I’d want it to. What I am saying is… well… I like this political sex chat. You might just think I’m A Bit Of A Lefty, and to be fair I do find something pretty sexy about Miliband – a guy who is willing to sit down with Russell Brand and all but call him a bellend to his face. The real reason is a bit more complicated than that, though.
I find it weird that we let politicians sit in judgment of our sex lives – making new rules about porn, for instance, or telling us who we can and can’t marry – and yet we expect them all to abstain from something that most of us do pretty frequently. People tittered and giggled when Jacqui Smith’s husband was found to have put porn on her expenses, but can any of us say that we would never have been in the same boat? In most other areas, politicians go out of their way to carve ‘ordinary person’ smiles into their otherwise robotic faces – drinking pints and rolling up their sleeves and demonstrating that they’re just One Of Us. But when it comes to sex, suddenly they all turn into Mother Teresa’s more demure younger cousin, batting their eyelashes and explaining to journalists that they’ve certainly heard of sex, but it’s not really their cup of tea. And that’s really shit.
If someone’s going to be making the rules around porn, I don’t want that person to be the kind of media-cultivated puritan who has to feign horror at the sight of a bum: I want a fellow wanker. Ot the very least someone who’s met a fellow wanker, and hasn’t written them off as a deviant pervert.
Question 3: if you find out a politician has a lively/hot/unusual sex life, would it influence whether you voted for them? And if so, how?
28 Comments
Hmm…as a submissive let’s just say that there are a few politicians out there whose interests would, ahem, arouse the interests of the tabloid press. Never mind the ones who are just obvious anyway (hat tip, George Osborne).
And there are a few MPs (well, not currently MPs) who I would love to submit to – Lynne Featherstone and Penny Mordaunt being top of the list…
4 elections ago I was involved in the local count and caught the eye of the incumbent MP, (at the time a bit of a silver fox) we spent the night flirting by eye contact, later that night after he won we got together and his energy and kinkyness was very impressive.
OMG I am now so curious as to who this was. Obviously don’t tell me because I’d potentially get sued for libel, but I’m going to keep imagining and guessing =)
Boris Johnson is surely into some kinky shit and at least he’d get points for enthusiasm. And I’d never confess this in public but that picture of the Bullingdon Club has always kinda stirred my fancy. I think I’ve got a thing about posh wankers. ;0
Q1. If I find someone supports policies I judge to be selfish, nasty, or otherwise lacking in compassion, I will assume that’s an indication of their general attitude towards other people and I will undoubtedly be turned off (except perhaps for some extremely dark fantasies to which they couldn’t possibly give rational consent)
Q2. I don’t make any assumptions at all about politicians’ sex lives. Some of them are fun to speculate over though.
Q3. It wouldn’t affect my decision to vote for/against them. I’m more interested in what their attitude is towards other people’s sex lives. If they’re sex-positive, excellent; if they use some other term because they’re bothered by the “woohoo! sex!” sound of “positive” (a misinterpretation, but a common one) than fine. If they want to ban some class of consensual sex acts between adults, I’m not happy.
Favourite fantasy: a MMF threeway with the Milibands (yes, I am one of those who finds Ed amazingly desirable in that sense, and his wife would be welcome to join in). I also entertain daydreams of having a dirty thrill with Sturgeon, sneak away to a darkened hotel room, and all sweaty and scratches and groping hands on each other… mmmmm! None of the others are quite my type at the moment.
This is one of many reasons why I love you Valery =) Couldn’t agree more with you on 1. – I think that’s pretty much how I feel too, and I struggle to think of people who vote for certain parties as being compassionate. And a million times yes to your point about their attitudes towards other people’s sex lives – it’s not really about what you do yourself, it’s about what you stop other people from doing.
Sarah Palin in the US ran for Vice President as John McCain’s running mate the first time Barack Obama was elected president (2008 election). McCain/Palin got their butts kicked in the election. She was little known before that, and still doesn’t really have anything to say that anyone wants to hear, but stuff a gag in her mouth, and I don’t know any man over age 35 who wouldn’t love to fuck her.
For a middle-aged politician, she’s got a pretty face and a smokin’ hot body, and she moves like she really knows how to fuck.
She is so offensively, willfully stupid. Here’s one man, well over 35, who finds her to be just one of the creepiest beings on the planet. Knowing some of the evil, and did I say, stupid, shit that’s come out of her mouth, she looks monstrous from here. No thanks!
I think I’m probably with tbro on this. Sure, she’s fairly conventionally attractive, but I could never get past her appalling views to fancy her =(
I’ll take your turn then. Thank you. She’s gagged, and I’m not planning to reproduce with her. Repulsion and lust are strong feelings, not necessarily opposites.
Sali Hughes (my guru on matters of beauty as you are on matters of sex, GOTN) wrote a great article about dating a Tory which made me believe political alignment may not be as important as other things in a relationship https://www.the-pool.com/life/love-sex/13/sali-hughes-on-dating-a-tory
I definitely fancy people I think are generally arseholes (Jaime Lannister and an outrageously flirtatious man at work who is absolutely beautiful, and engaged, and a cunt) so I think that covers political disagreement too.
That’s a really interesting article, and quite moving. I’m not sure it’d persuade me to date a Tory, but does go partway to explaining why some family members who I love dearly can vote Tory despite not actually being evil.
One of the depressing untold stories of modern politics is the lack of understanding between sides. We used to just disagree with the other lot, now we hate them and don’t understand why anyone would vote for them. As a Tory-leaning centrist it’s pretty depressing.
1. I’ve definitely been put off of otherwise very hot people by their hideously right wing politics.
2. Having run for Parliament in the past, I’m going to have to claim that #NotAllPoliticians are dull / rubbish in the sack. :-P
3. I would love that so much. Definitely definitely a vote-winner, all else being equal or near to it.
You ran for Parliament?! I didn’t know that! You would totally have my vote.
So you’d never fuck Cameron because he’s a Tory, but you’d do Barack ‘2000+ killed in drone strikes, including children’ Obama. You have a strange polemicist vagina, if you don’t mind me saying.
Ah, a bloody good point. Problem is, I think a lot of it is down to context – Obama is, compared to many other US politicians, relatively to the left. He’s also done a fair few pretty strongly lefty things while he’s been there – Obamacare and the immigration executive order, for example.
Frankly, I think all the politicians should be lined up against the wall and shot. None of them can justify their job in any way except “might makes right”, which is insufficient justification. They all want to take away some of your liberty, and most of them want to take away so much it’s just not funny. Whether it is wanting to restrict what consensual & non-damaging sex acts you do, to who you can cohabit with (‘cept they ramble on about marriage, get the government out of marriage I say), to what you can wear (and just why can’t I wear nothing if I feel like it? or go topless? in what way am I impinging on the rights of others?), etc.
Yes, as politicians, I can’t see any of them as sexy or desirable. And then they open their mouths, and I know they are either lying, and/or saying the most awful stuff. Yes the Labour party (UK) are a bunch of twats! Greens? String ’em up with UKIP. SNP, only good thing they’ve said is “fuck the English” (and I bet that’s just a fantasy on my part – oh I love a good English accent).
1. I am more likely to not fancy someone if they aren’t of a similar political affiliation. But intelligent conversation is more important. If you can discuss intelligently why you disagree, and you meet my other standards, then I’ll shag ya.
2. All politicians should be removed from their positions of power, then the question is moot.
3. I don’t vote for politicians full stop, if I can help it.
I don’t get this in a Westminster system. I’m Australian, so our preferential voting system is different (better) to first past the post, but even so, unless you happen to live in David Cameron’s electorate, you aren’t voting for him directly. In my own electorate, I’ll sometimes vote for (or at least, strongly preference) people who belong to parties I don’t particularly like, because they are clearly intelligent and would be a real voice of reason in their party room. It’s the difference, to me, of what reason I think the politician is there. If they’re obviously a party hack, who’s only there for the money and not interested in the people, then they’re going at the bottom of my ballot even if they’re from my most aligned party.
I think that’s an interesting point – passion and commitment to what they actually believe is pretty important. Also, I am well jealous of your voting system…
Perhaps political leaders should be obliged to release a sex tape as part of their party manifesto? Might tell us more about what they stand for …
I wouldn’t rule out a hot bit of stuff because s/he didn’t vote the same way as I do/did. But then I know plenty of people who are ‘culturally’ supporters of a particular party (in the same way that quite a lot of people are ‘culturally’ members of one or other religious group) – they don’t think about it very much and if pushed will state the affiliation they grew up surrounded by. Regardless of which tribe they are with, people can be nice or horrible and certainly, this time round, most manifestos were pretty fucking similar anyway.
And I also got a sneaky little commotion in my underwear at the sight of that Bullingdon Club picture – admittedly the first time I saw it I looked at the pic before reading the caption and just went PWHOAARR posh emo-looking totty yum yum.
This post kinda rings true of what everyone thinks of people in power from the age of 3 upwards…..did you ever feel the absolute revelation when you found out your primary school teacher doesn’t in fact sleep at school and has a life?……Or see your secondary school teacher in the super market buying vodka and sniggering to your mates like OMG?….it’s not that different really. We’re taught from a young age to believe people in power are sneaky clean and the examples to be followed and finding out they’re not is like tabloid news….but if joe blogs down the road did it no one would care. It’s a bit weird for us to expect politicians to know how working class people would want their country run but don’t in fact do the normal things working class people do.
This isn’t an answer to any of your questions, but given that some of your commenters alluded to it above, I just wanted to say how tired I am of the stereotype about Tory MPs being all closet sadomasochists. Partly because it might make people think kinky people are likely to be closet Tories (perish the thought!) but mainly because it’s just such a lazy joke. It probably all started with that poor bastard who died tied up with an orange in his mouth (Stephen Milligan – look him up), but people really should have moved on by now.
On the other hand, the Liberal Democrats definitely are a party of kinky buggers, I don’t think there’s ever been much doubt about that.
Speaking as someone who has done a forced bi scene with a Tory MP, I can confirm it’s not a stereotype :p
In my experience the people who genuinely ideologically support tory policy also tend to be massively arrogant and condescending if you try to talk politics with them. They don’t ever seem to want an actual discussion, just to calmly explain that you’re too naive to understand how things actually work, which obviously goes down a treat. In response to @ValeryNorth I think it goes further than supporting policies which lack compassion for me. Calling something like benefits sanctions awful and unfair, but continuing to support the people who’ve implemented them because you fall into a small group that have been made a bit better off by something else, is almost as much of a turn off. It wouldn’t make me cut them off as a friend or bolt from a conversation but it’d definitely douse any lust pretty effectively. Total disengagement is the most unattractive.
Q2. I wouldn’t mind being in a political sandwich with Leanne Wood. Socialist, arrested for protesting trident, told Farage right off for his health tourism nonsense, former punk… And she’s got that welsh accent. She just seems like she’d know how to have a good time and she wouldn’t hold back. Much the same for Patrick Harvie, a somewhat little known gem of Scottish politics. He is my tiny secret dream lover. A less secret one is Alex Salmond, despite or possibly because of the fact that he aggravates so many people. I saw him speaking at the adoption of one SNP candidate and the charisma rolling off him could fell a bear. It’d certainly get me to fall into bed. Again he just has an air about him of being really good fun to have a drink with, and a twinkle in his eye that says he’d know what he’s about once the drinks are done. I wouldn’t assume politicians are particularly dull or particularly thrilling in the bedroom (or kitchen, living room, car, shower, other location of your choice). Much like any other large group I’d guess they fall all along the spectrum of kinkiness.
Q3. The only time I can think that a politician’s sex life would influence my voting for them would be if it shed light on some spectacular hypocrisy in the policies they were putting forward. Even then I’m not sure. What they get up to in their private lives has nothing to do with how good they are at their jobs – if it’s true for the rest of us it’s true for them as well. I think the weirdly puritan face politicians portray with regards to sex has a lot more to do with the bizarre public and press overreaction to the idea that they’re doing it. I don’t know if stopping the pretence can eventually change the reaction or just result in them getting mauled in the papers and everyone else being too scared to make a peep. I suspect the latter which doesn’t really do anyone any good.
No, it doesn’t. Whether one thinks ALL people should be treated like people, and whether one considers A Modest Proposal to be cutting satire or a brilliant economic agenda you wish you’d thought of first, is NOT like whether one prefers chocolate or vanilla ice cream.
Ah, I didn’t really mean it like that, more in the way that Scrubber was alluding to above – that if I specifically don’t fancy someone because of their politics I’m rather shallowly assuming that they have no other kind of contribution to make. And, indeed, that their politics mean they’re unthinkingly callous. I know plenty of right-wingers who *are* unthinkingly callous, of course, but the thing I struggle with is recognising that there are many people who’ll have come to this conclusion not because they’re selfish or cruel, but because they genuinely believe it’s the best thing for everyone. I was listening to a lot of talk radio yesterday (I know, rage rage), and there were a fair few Tories phoning in to say ‘I hate that we’re demonised – I genuinely think this option is better for everyone.’ Obviously I passionately disagree, and I find it frustrating/weird that, even when constantly and probably tediously preaching understanding and empathy, this is an issue I really struggle to empathise with.