Amidst all the fast-edit snideness in Lena Dunham's nauseating 62-second-long extended vulgar double entendre video [link here] -- complete with wry leers and a conspicuously-tattooed, ample right upper arm -- is one quip so perplexing that I am still shaking my head over it after several days, and multiple viewings.

Near the beginning of the video, between seconds :05 and :09, she says -- pretending to grope for words, not looking at the camera, with studied perplexity so complete that mock silence overtakes her -- that "it should be with a guy with beautiful...," and then trails off.  While performing this bit of mummery, she holds her splayed, inexpressive, dirty-looking hands in front of her in what I have only ever seen used by men as a universal men's semaphore for conveying bosominess.

But what I found just as perplexing was the grammar, whereby what follows "beautiful," must needs be plural.  "Beautiful ... " what, Lena?  "eyes?"  "emotions?"  "poems?"  "high school grades?  "socialist political convictions?"  Had she said, "with a beautiful ...," well, the necessarily singular next word might be easier to guess, if more overtly vulgar, and less coyly mysterious.  (Oh, excuse me.  "Mind," "heart," "soul," "birth certificate."  Right.)  And it would have comported with the voting-as-girl-guy-sex motif which is as subtle as a mule kick throughout the excruciating minute.

But "breasts" is what she pantomimed.  Overtly, the ad mocks virginity; equates Obama as the guy to "do it" with; and distastefully impresses girls and young women into the meretricious campaign service of a most execrable candidate.  Yet, with its subtextual intimation of sexual ambiguity, is it not also a sotto voce lure to confused, murky identities within the LGBT demimonde?  And, no androgyne could ever be more a hybrid than the half-this, half-that Obama. 

Vote like you "do it."  Come one, come all, Obama is yours: be his.

Richard Kantro may be reached at rk4at@hotmail.com