Last week, Kamala Harris appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, the second most popular podcast in the world. It’s a raunchy sex show hosted by a woman named Alex Cooper, and it’s intended to appeal to “hip” young women—that is, Kamala’s demographic, the kind who believe themselves free if they can have endless sex in endless permutations, without the natural repercussion of having a child. This is where our political discourse has ended up—the Democrat candidate is on a show that is pornographic. But it didn’t start there, and I’m pretty sure I remember where it did start.

At the end of 1988, as Reagan was preparing to leave office and George H. W. Bush was set to take his place, a photographic exhibit opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia. The exhibit was called “The Perfect Moment” and featured images by Robert Mapplethorpe, a very talented photographer who died from AIDS a few months later. In the arts and commercial sphere, Mapplethorpe was known for celebrity portraits, still lives, especially flowers, and black-and-white images showing black and white people in the same images. These photos were beautiful, if dull.

Image: X screen grab.

However, the same exhibition also showcased what Wikipedia politely calls “homoerotic” images. That’s a gentle way of putting it. I went with my then-boyfriend to see the exhibition when it came to Berkeley. As I wrote in a post about that 1989 visit,

The crowds in the gallery, though, weren’t there to admire Mapplethorpe’s good lines and famous faces, which weren’t that much different from a lot of high-end photos that one found in many fashion and architectural magazines from the 1980s. People were there for one reason only: To see the infamous “X” photos, the ones showing explicit gay sadism and masochism, complete with exposed genitalia.

Penile torture? Check. Fisting? Check. Undinism? Check. Whips, chains, Great Danes . . . three on a chandelier? Well, not quite all that, but certainly the whips and chains were there too.

I’m sure many in the gallery were there purely out of prurient interest.  The majority, though, seemed to be there for the same reasons that my then-boyfriend and I attended the show:  To show how hip we were and to make it clear that we weren’t going to let some puritanical Southern “hick” like Jesse Helms censor “art” in America. (Obviously, this was during my Democrat youth.)

My boyfriend and I didn’t make it through the whole gallery. He was so disgusted by the “erotica” that he had to leave so he could throw up.

It’s that last paragraph that makes my point: Those attending were the Democrat cultural elite, and we were all making a stand about intellectual freedom and sexual openness.

That stand was important in America’s cultural trajectory because, before then, despite the AIDS coalition’s huge and still-growing power, Americans weren’t embracing as normal the abnormality of gay sex. (And yes, even if you’re a wonderful, conservative gay person who has a stable private life and deeply opposes the push to bring the LGBTQ+ agenda to America’s youth, the fact is that your approach to sex is statistically a deviation from the norm, making it abnormal.)

What was different in 1988/1989 was that the intelligentsia embraced sex itself as a political statement, something separate from its prior embrace of both feminism and gay liberation. Moving forward, America and Americans no longer saw sex as a private activity, complete with societal customs that kept it behind bedroom doors. Instead, sex replaced romance as the standard for public discourse. Once American society’s monied, powerful solons, especially those in the media, the boundaries were gone.

That’s why, just a few years later, in 1992, someone could ask Bill Clinton what kind of underwear he wore...and Clinton actually answered as if this were a legitimate political question. By 1998, when Clinton was impeached for his perjured statements about his sexual peccadillos, not to mention the fact that he was #MeTooing an intern in the Oval Office, the left had moved even further, demanding that politics “MoveOn” from daring to say that a president should not be the center of a sexual storm.

You’ve seen what’s happened since then, with leftists working hard to bring all sex, especially LGBTQ+ sex, to ever younger children, whether in the classroom, on television, or through powerful cultural actors like The Walt Disney Company (and, as I always say, the super-wholesome Walt Disney weeps in the afterlife).

There’s a straight line from that 1988/1989 Mapplethorpe exhibition to Call Her Daddy, a show that, in 2021 and 2022, was second only to the Joe Rogan show, with millions of daily listeners (again, mostly young women). If you listen to the show regularly, you’ll learn about “Blow jobs, hall passes, & frat daddies” (and no, I don’t know what the last two are), “Cheat 101,” “A Proud Basic B**ch,” “My Revenge Porn Experience,” and other illuminating and demeaning topics, all cast as female empowerment.

Before 1988, no serious politician would ever have stepped foot in a studio that churned out this auditory pornography. But since 1988—and 1992 and everything that came after—we now have one of two major party candidates appearing on the show to talk tampons:

And yes, I’m fulling alive to the fact that they talk about tampons as a woman-only thing, even though Kamala’s running mate is pretty darn sure that men have periods, too. Meanwhile her party’s Supreme Court justice (Ketanji Brown Jackson), who’s proudly touted as the first black woman on the Supreme Court, doesn’t even know what a woman is.

Naturally, Kamala also agreed with the show’s host that abortion is an unconscionable and unique form of government control over a woman’s body. As Clay Travis points out, this is false:

To add another layer to that, every criminal law ultimately exerts control over people’s bodies—usually men’s, because they’re more likely to commit crimes—because violating those laws can result in imprisonment.

The mere fact that Kamala appeared on Call Her Daddy is one more reason not to vote for her. There’s only so much further our culture can fall before it becomes too corrupt to survive. The Democrat party has become a sexually transmitted disease, and it’s killing us.