Porny Presidential Fanfic Isn't Just Kinky—It's Political

Internet Rule 34: If it exists, there’s porn of it. Yes, even President Donald Trump. Punch his name into a fanfiction site search bar, and you'll find yourself awash in NSFW alternate universes. A small and relatively inoffensive sampling (all these links will bring you to far more explicit erotica, so click at your own risk): Mike Pence gets pregnant with Trump’s baby, and they haphazardly coparent the infant; Pence and Trump engage in an Inauguration Day sexual tradition; Trump and Shrek bond over their mutual interest in walls and swamps, and become foul-mouthed lovers; Trump and Putin, after sharing “tongue battling” kisses, bring a Shrek doll to life, then have a threesome with the ogre.

These kinds of stories tend to be met with a mixture of disgust, confusion, and horrified amusement by the general public—if they bubble into mainstream internet awarness at all. (The only thing more baffling than the existence of a 63-chapter erotic novel detailing a fictional relationship between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is that nearly 90,000 people have read it.) But for all their far too explicit sex scenes, these stories aren’t really about sex. Or at least they aren’t only about sex.

People have been writing porn about their leaders for centuries, and it’s not just because people like to fantasize about the rich and famous. These stories, whether they’re about Trump, Obama, or French royalty, are really a memorable and surprisingly effective form of political commentary—one that’s flexible enough to accommodate both satire and political wish fulfillment. How these writers imagine presidents having sex (and who-with) is a kind of socio-political barometer, hammering out America’s most urgent hopes and anxieties between imaginary sheets.

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Though fanfiction is sometimes held up as an internet phenomenon, these stories are part of a tradition that long predates the web. According to Anne Jamison, an associate professor of English at University of Utah who researches fanfiction, these old-timey pornographic yarns took on themes like unscrupulousness and moral decay; they were more biting, less heavily circulated companions to political cartoons. Right before heads started to roll during the French Revolution, people were sharing pornographic stories about Marie Antoinette that laid bare the corruption and extreme permissiveness of Versailles. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the sexual adventures of "Lord Blank" (a name that gave the satirist plausible deniability) were used to criticize the misdeeds of whatever wanton lord was being most troublesome at the time.

“Porn is about power dynamics, and so is politics, so it makes sense that they go hand in hand,” Jamison says. “And because porn is never held up as something you ought to revere, it’s well positioned to be disruptive and attack social norms.” The stories weren’t all negative, though—the Bronte sisters wrote steamy romances about war hero Admiral Horatio Nelson, reflecting their time’s fixation on empire expansion through naval might. The characters who crop up in a fantasy say a lot about the fantasizer and their culture.

The arrival of the internet didn’t change the dynamics at play—it just allowed people to distribute and consume racy political fanfiction more easily, without eroding any of its underground edge. “Even within the fanfiction community, 'real person fanfiction' is the lowest rung. They’re not uncomfortable with pornography, but when people post RPF, they get pushback,” says Stacey Lantagne, who studies online fan activity at the University of Mississippi School of Law. “Not from a legal perspective, because we don’t own a copyright to our lives. But for a lot of people it’s a moral line you don’t want to cross.” (That doesn’t necessarily stop people from churning out scads of stories about band members and athletes and actors. According to Lantagne, political RPF only represents only a tiny slice of what’s out there.)

But these stories’ ability to generate moral panic is precisely where they get their power, and since the internet’s inception, fanfic writers have been providing pointed political counternarratives about the man in the Oval Office. “Monica Lewinsky was an entire genre of fanfiction during the ’90s,” says Jamison. “From the mainstream media there was so much about semen stains and so little about her, but the fanfiction was much more focused on the interiority of the Monica Lewinsky character.”

These stories became a way for women—many of whom felt that what happened to Lewinsky could easily have happened to them—to speak back to a culture that ignored the power differential and pinned blame on the wrong side of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. These stories are some of the first glimmers of third-wave feminism in a time when female sexuality was an even greater source of anxiety than it is now.

During the Obama years, it was the perception of the LGBTQ community that was rapidly shifting—making great bounds into the mainstream in some moments, and inspiring hateful backlash in others. And because for many President Obama was a symbol of progressivism, fanfiction carried his boundary-pushing presidency one step farther, casting him love stories with a variety of men, most notably Vice President Biden and the bonafide political heartthrob that is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. These stories are tonally very different than the ones about Trump shacking up with Shrek. “The ‘Trubama’ stories especially are genuine works of erotica,” Jamison says. “But in addition to that, being in control as opposed to being represented is empowering.” In today’s X-rated political fanfiction scene, Trudeau is getting it on with French President Emmanuel Macron in much the same way, as a kind of vehicle for inclusive progressivism and sex positivity.

Nobody—well, significantly fewer people in the fanfiction community, anyway—is genuinely yearning for Trump or Pence. Racy Trump-era fanfiction has far more in common with those centuries-old roasts of Marie Antoinette, as did fanfiction about the Bush era. They rely on cliches and stereotypes about sexual situations to make broad political points. The concern that President George W Bush was over-influenced by Vice President Cheney made for easy satirical BDSM, with Cheney cast as a dom to Bush’s sub.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s bid for the White House struck similar chords, and produced some of the most memorable, over-the-top political fanfiction lines I’ve encountered: “Screw me like we’ll screw the poor,” Romney calls out in the throes of passion. Trump-Putin fanfiction often makes use of BDSM tropes, too, and is punctuated by schlocky political references. Writing the virulently homophobic Mike Pence into gay love scenes is a transparent literary revenge, an opportunity to exercise power over someone bent on taking it away. In our stranger-than-fiction political moment, there’s nowhere to go but what fanfiction afficiados call “crack fic”—stories that revolve around outlandishly absurd situations.

America is deeply anxious about President Trump’s relationships with dictators and homophobes, about the way he wields and cedes political power in ways that strain credulity. These stories are a release valve for pent-up anxiety, and a way to lay the problems of our troubled time bare by taking them to their (il)logical extreme. “You don’t want to forget that these are real people,” Lantagne says. “But I think we tell a lot of important stories through the voices of these celebrities.” And while those stories can be truly cringeworthy and controversial, it would be a mistake to fully condemn them.