One of these men is married to a woman who posed nude for GQ. Can you guess which?
One of these men is married to a woman who posed nude for GQ. Can you guess which? Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com

For just one brief moment, the Ted Cruz campaign did something kind of awesome: they included a porn actress in a TV ad. Not doing anything sexual, just delivering a line of dialogue. Hey, that's great! It really shows that there's a place at Ted Cruz's table for people from all different backgrounds, with different values.

Except... when they realized what they'd done, they pulled the ad.

"Had the campaign known of her full filmography, we obviously would not have let her appear in the ad," said a spokeswoman. "The campaign is taking the ad down and will replace it with a different commercial."

"Obviously"? Why "obviously"? Why can't a woman who has had sex on camera appear in a Ted Cruz commercial? Well, maybe — and I'm just taking a wild stab in the dark here — there's something fundamentally incompatible between Republicans and women who do what they want with their bodies. Just a guess.

Amy Lindsay probably did not want for her New York Times debut to focus on the negative response to her roles in Erotic Confessions, Carnal Wishes, Secrets of a Chambermaid, and Insatiable Desires. The movies themselves sound like pretty standard skinemax fare. Secrets of a Chambermaid's synopsis:

"a group of people are gathered at a secluded mansion to hear the reading of a rich man's will. The assembled guests are to stay the night and learn of their inheritance the next day, but as the night wears on, many of the guests find it impossible to curb their sexual appetites. What they don't know is that their bedroom activities are being observed..."

You can watch a clip of Erotic Confessions here, if you like generic buff-body fitness porn with slow sweeping pans, crossfades, soft lighting on writhing sex, and exactly the kind of music you're imagining when you hear that description.

Amy, for her part, is justifiably miffed.


Lindsay told reporters that she is, oddly enough, a conservative Republican and is trying to decide whether to support Cruz or Donald Trump. (It sounds like Cruz has already decided how he feels about her support.)

She had high hopes for her appearance, telling Buzzfeed that she thought it could make people rethink who Republicans are: "it’s not just some old, white Christian bigot," she said. "It could be, maybe, a cool kind of open-minded woman like me."

But it hasn't really turned out that way, has it? If anything, the Republican establishment has confirmed that, yes, they are a bunch of bigots who can't bear to be associated with cool kind of open minded women like her. And if a woman does have the nerve to make choices about her body and sex, well, they have the perfect solution: just yank her appearance so they can pretend she doesn't exist.

Good luck choosing which candidate to support, Amy.