The Pelosi Porn Strategy: Insane GOP Turns to "Outside" Artist to Demean Women

Republicans have finally found an edgy and provocative voice in an outsider artist who goes by the name Sabo. His art is also unrepentantly racist, misogynistic and homophobic. On Monday, the hugely influential Breitbart.com smugly promoted Sabo's freelance advertising campaign for its site. It included, among other startling images, Nancy Pelosi in this explicitly pornographic pose of Miley Cyrus, complete with lascivious action and prominent ass:

We talk about a Republican "war on women", and the GOP has floundered in its response.

The party has been sifting through its ideological wreckage for a solution to its demographic disadvantage. Conservative pundits dredge up the party's abolitionist history to justify why black voters should turn their way; they argue that women need to support gun-rights candidates on personal safety grounds. They've been stymied, for the most part, in how to appeal to young people. The most visible gambits have played on macho, reckless bad-assery: James O'Keefe's scripted and self-interested stunt-exposes, the smirking listicles of Breitbart columnist Ben Shapiro. Even Rand Paul's flip libertarianism, by far the most successful version of this bro-sploitation approach, has the flavor of a cigar-smoke-filled Throwback Thursday fratboy confab:

Last week, a panel of conservative women agreed that the party's lagging support among women was not a function of a "women problem" but a "marriage problem": "Everybody go out, right now, go get married if you’re not married ... and we should be able to solve all these problems." Said another: "It is the decline of marriage that is the lodestar for why people’s voting behavior is what it is."

The group, put together by the Heritage Foundation, agreed that on a solution: single women need to stop being single women. Sabo's art makes the assertion that women aren't people, and Breitbart passed along that assertion.

Sabo's iconography may be draw from Cyrus, but to put a woman who didn't choose to pose that way into that position is a form of virtual sexual assault. This is very much like when Hustler decided to demean columnist SE Cupp in an even more vulgar form. Conservatives were justifiably aghast:

When I flexed some outrage muscle on Twitter about the Pelosi image and Breitbart's role, the general response was predictable and disappointing. Among the flashes of decency (see here), most simply pointed to the Cupp image, among others, and said: "The left does it, too."

I could quibble with that. Breitbart is not Hustler, for instance. Or at least I don't think Breitbart wants to be Hustler. Hustler is not really in the business of trying to get an out-of-power political party back into the thick of the national conversation. Hustler is not trying to attract the support of female voters.

Sabo, on the other hand, may well be a progressive plant. Beyond the Pelosi image, he's also produced posters proclaiming "Fags = the new nigger." (He gave credit for the slogan to an unidentified Prop 8 protester: "Blame him.") Promote his work hard enough and Pelosi can laugh all the way back to the Speaker's chair.

I understand the reluctance of mainstream voices to shun Sabo's work. His graffiti- and pop culture-inspired posters have an angry inflection that meshes with Tea Party concerns, but with a sly wit that conjures a more desirable demographic than the grandma-forwarding-emails feel of the Hannity and Limbaugh set. No less a figure than movement darling Sen Ted Cruz has embraced Sabo's brash imagery. When a poster appeared last month, imposing Cruz's face onto a casually aggressive pose reminiscent of the Latino gang members, Cruz signed one: "The fight for liberty never ends." On April Fools’ Day, Cruz temporarily adopted the poster's addition of a Winston Churchill tattoo.

Grasping at hipster iconography and attempts to refashion existing conservative tendencies is a big turn inward, not outreach. It's a conversation happening squarely within the Republican party – within one gender within the party. It all but guarantees the GOP's downward trend into irrelevance. Republicans can blame the media all they want. (I actually agree that the mainstream press covers outbursts of conservative extremism more lustily than it does the missteps of liberal activists.) But the very conviction that the right doesn't get a fair shake shouldn't make it easier to accept the ugliness at the fringes. If you believe you're being held to higher standard than your opponent, the solution is never to sink to their level.

The argument that "the other side does it" is only a defense if you think such insulting discourse gives the other side an unfair advantage. Do conservatives really believe that? Do they think so little of the independents and single-women-who-should-get-married? Do they want to live in a country where that's the case? If we're going to re-civilize the conversation, someone has to go first.

This is not about being the thought police. This is about deciding who your allies are. Thinking bad thoughts, creating art that upsets people: I am for that. Just don't give a platform to someone just because he makes you giggle.

All this is to say, guys, you have to do something about this asshole.

Call me a concern troll if you want; call me a hypocrite. I've certainly made my share of Palin jokes and vulgar asides. Advice from a political opponent is cheap, and I'd put teeth into my suggestion if I could. I'll stop writing columns if the right begins to shun all the sexism that creeps out along the margins. I'll retire into a life of kitten pictures and hot yoga if they split the make-up of their leadership fifty-fifty along gender lines. Someone show me where to sign.