How a Porn Star Became More Credible Than the President

[Wilhelm]

 

Stormy Daniels enters federal court in Manhattan, April 16, 2018.

By Lucas Jackson/Reuters.

It wasn’t so long ago that the sort of person who made their livelihood by starring in a film called Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure, or who staged a nationwide strip-club tour under the banner “Make America Horny Again,” would have had some serious credibility issues. Yet ever since she emerged as a fetching national figure, Stephanie Clifford, the adult-film actress and exotic dancer known as Stormy Daniels, has resoundingly appeared more credible than the president. It’s the result, certainly, of Trump’s own complications with honesty, or “white lies” as Hope Hicks once called them, which brings to mind the novelist Mary McCarthy’s bon mot about the dramatist Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” And it also has something to do with Clifford’s sangfroid as a canny, press-savvy entrepreneur and entertainer. Fellow performers and friends have praised her fearlessness and candor. She seemed preternaturally collected during her much-hyped appearance on 60 Minutes. Indeed, after federal agents raided the office and hotel room of Michael Cohen, who offered Clifford $130,000 in hush money, it is the president who has seemed ruffled and the porn star who seems demure. One presumes they will both be watching her appearance on The View on Tuesday.

But Clifford’s credibility also owes to a less obvious transformation that took place during the 1990s, when the culture, if inadvertently, was beginning to normalize porn. Long considered a medium that degraded women, exploited actors, and de-valued sexual intimacy, pornography began gaining mainstream traction in the 1980s. It became inexpensive and ubiquitous thanks to videotapes, cable, satellite, pay-per-view, and CD-ROMs, developing into a multi-billion-dollar industry. The infamous sex tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee (a private video stolen from their Malibu home and then dispensed across the digital ether) is considered by many to have been a watershed in driving first-time browsers to the fledgling Internet. So-called pornos lost much of their stigma: the corner Blockbuster stocked them, they were a safe-sex alternative in the shadow of the AIDS pandemic, and portable camcorders allowed frisky amateurs to roll their own.

After the introduction of the World Wide Web, in 1991, a new boom followed: online porn, which opened the kimono to every age, demo, geographic region, and kink. And with a culturally progressive president occupying the White House, porn prosecutions—which had been on the rise under Ronald Reagan—virtually dried up. “There wasn’t one [major] pornography conviction in the U.S. during the entire eight years Clinton was in office,” says the former smut publisher (now high-end art-book editor) Dian Hanson.

At the same time, baby boomers were coming of age, and many of them, children of the counterculture, considered porn a form of pop-culture camp. The guy and gal next door suddenly realized that they, too, could make a career for a while by getting down and dirty in front of a video camera. Hard-core actors such as Jenna Jameson, Jeff Stryker, and Ron Jeremy were becoming household names. Porn’s tropes invaded gangsta rap and music videos. Porn’s legends were depicted in splashy Hollywood features: between them, The People vs. Larry Flynt and Boogie Nights would land five Oscar nominations.

The 90s was also a period of peak erotic indulgence and adult entertainment. Massage parlors and “spas”—fronts for sexual favors—set up shop in suburban strip malls. Several thousand gentleman’s clubs, many of them decidedly upscale, operated across the heartland. The stories and struggles of exotic dancers, adult-film performers, escorts, and sex workers—who were often socially and economically disadvantaged to begin with—surfaced in the press and on the screen. Americans everywhere knew the narratives of countless other Stormy Danielses—women and men who were their neighbors, their acquaintances, the characters in their favorite films. Which is another way of saying that Clifford’s stock-in-trade had become rather ho-hum—a career so common that it would not disqualify someone like her from comporting (or posing for pictures) with a future president—a man whose name until recently graced Atlantic City’s Taj Mahal, once home to a strip club.

All of this occurred against the backdrop of the tabloidization of the news. In the 80s and 90s, news items that involved infidelity, crime, violence, or graphic footage were referred to, among America’s editors and news directors, as sexy. The 24/7 news wars—first waged in 1996 when MSNBC and Fox News were launched as rivals to CNN—helped amplify salacious stories that in earlier years would have been pushed to the margins. Meanwhile, TV newsmagazines and supermarket tabloids were turning the nocturnal exploits of public personalities into addictive serials. Jim Bakker/Jessica Hahn begat Gary Hart/Donna Rice begat Bill Clinton/Gennifer Flowers, ad infinitum. (In the current scandal, The National Enquirer has remained front and center, its parent company, American Media Inc., having bought and shelved the story of Karen McDougal, a onetime Playboy model who claims to have maintained a year-long relationship with the married president.)

And now, of course, Clifford seems almost a conventional player in a Trump-era news cycle that has brought us Anthony Scaramucci, Don King, and the Mnuchins taking selfies at the U.S. Mint. During these crazy days, a scandal with a porn star is at least a crisis with precedent.