NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK

I don't want to fixate on this, but I wonder how many of the people who are getting all squeamish about those passages in James Webb's novels -- not to mention the people in George Allen's campaign who piously declare that Webb's novels "show a continued pattern of demeaning women" -- consider Theo van Gogh a hero.

You remember Theo van Gogh -- he was killed after offending Islamicists with his film Submission, and he became an instant hero on the American right. Apparently it didn't matter that he'd once made a movie about phone sex, and that other highlights of his oeuvre -- and his life -- made the banana squats in Webb's writing look tame:

Already in his first movie "Luger" (1981), Van Gogh, with sadistic pleasure, had a gangster push his pistol in a woman’s vagina. In the following 23 years he often spoke with much contempt of women and feminism, and of gays, whom he called "dribbling chocolate knights". "Most women I consider little speaking cunts. Women do not think with their heads, but with their cunt", he wrote. "Motherhood is the crown on your being a women!”, he often shouted. He referred to feminist authors as "the fossile little vaginal lips” of Left and feminist magazines....

Van Gogh also wrote many anti-Semitic articles. In an article in the Amsterdam university magazine Folia in the beginning of the eighties he had Jewish writer Leon de Winter perform the "Treblinka love game" with "a piece of barbed wire" around his "dick". He also fantasized about "copulating yellow stars in the gas chamber"....

(There's much, much more at the link, and also here.)

And let's not overlook the film for which he's lionized on the right, Submission:

In one image, the opening lines of the holy book, the Koran, were written across the naked body of a Muslim woman. Another image showed Koranic verses about female obedience scrawled on the back of a woman beaten by her husband, while a female voice accused Allah of condoning the violence.

I think "Most Virginians and Americans would find passages such as those ... shocking" -- wouldn't you?