If a thing exists, someone somewhere is beating off about it. Balloons, swim caps, toothbrushes, toasters, socks, galoshes—you name it and someone somewhere is beating off about it right now.

If a thing lives, someone somewhere wants to fuck it—or be fucked by it—and a living thing doesn’t even have to be alive for someone somewhere to wanna fuck it. Aliens, dinosaurs, angels, 50-foot-tall women, centaurs, moderate Republicans—none of these creatures exist but there are people out there who wanna fuck ‘em.

And there are people out there who wanna fuck Bigfoot—and the Democrat running for an open U.S. House seat in Virginia wants voters to know that her Republican opponent might be one of them.


Backing up...

Leslie Cockburn, a Democrat, is running against Denver Riggleman, a Republican, for an open U.S. House seat. Riggleman has refused to disavow Corey Stewart, the Neo-Confederate, not-so-crypto white supremacist who somehow managed to win the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate in Virginia. Stewart has been endorsed by Trump but he's so far to the right—which is a cable-news-speak for “so openly and baldly fucking racist”—that the National Republican Senatorial Committee hasn't endorsed him.

Denver Riggleman has refused to say whether he’ll be voting for Stewart or for Tim Kaine, Virginia's incumbent Democratic senator and former-and-kinda-lousy VP candidate. When Riggleman was asked whether he would campaign with Stewart—a man who thinks anti-white bias is the “real racism” in this country—Riggleman would only say, “It depends.”

Stewart’s nomination by GOP voters for that Senate seat—the nomination of a racist from Minnesota who won’t shut up about his “southern heritage”— was news, but it wasn’t big news. And that's probably because Stewart isn't the only avowed racist GOP voters nominated this year. As Jane Coaston reported at Vox earlier this month…

In at least five state and national races across the country, the Republican Party is dealing with an uncomfortable problem. Their party’s candidates are either a card-carrying Nazi, a Holocaust denier, a proud white supremacist, or all of the above.

In North Carolina, for example, GOP officials are stuck with Russell Walker, a white supremacist running for the state House of Representatives. According to his personal website (littered with the n-word), he believes that “the jews are NOT semitic they are satanic as they all descend from Satan.” ... In Illinois, meanwhile, the Republican Party shrugged off Arthur Jones, a candidate for the state’s 3rd Congressional district who boasted of his membership in the American Nazi Party. But Jones won the GOP primary. [Jones’s] campaign website features a section called “Holocaust?” in which he argues that the “idea that six million Jews, were killed by the National Socialist government of Germany, in World War II, is the biggest, blackest lie in history.”

In Virginia, the chair of the state GOP resigned earlier this month, reportedly because of alt-right leaning, pro-Confederate candidate Corey Stewart’s win in the Republican primary.

White supremacists have received the GOP nomination in Illinois, Wisconsin, California, North Carolina, and Virginia. So at this point it’s hardly news when a racist, a white Supremacist, or a card-carrying Nazi wins the GOP nomination. Their wins—the willingness of GOP voters to support racists and Nazis—has becomie a dog sieg heils man story.

So it wasn’t enough for Leslie Cockburn to point to Riggleman’s willingness to pal around with white supremacists. If being a white supremacist isn't hurting GOP candidates, being seen with one won't either. She had to point to the bigfoot erotica.

A point of clarification: Cockburn called Riggleman a "devotee of Bigfoot erotica." That's not accurate: Riggleman is a creator of Bigfoot erotica. Riggleman co-wrote an as-yet-unpublished erotic novel titled The Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him. He promoted the work on Instagram with a censored image emphasizing Bigfoot’s super-human and super-hairy endowment—an image that Cockburn included in her tweet:

From Denver Rigglemans Instagram account.
From Denver Riggleman's Instagram account.

Cockburn's tweet caused #bigfooterotica to trend last night on Twitter. And the following morning news junkies got to read this hilarious paragraph in the Washington Post:

The bigfoot genre, a subset of pornographic literature called cryptozoological erotica, was in the news a few years ago when Amazon.com and other online booksellers began deleting so-called monster porn from their websites. Critics complained that the books featured rape, bestiality and pedophilia. Some authors responded by changing their titles, toning down the descriptions of their plots or labeling their stories “ADULTS ONLY!” Amazon currently lists dozens of e-books with titles such as “Shiver for Yeti,” “Where the Wild Things Ravish” and “Bride of Bigfoot.” (Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Do they give Pulitzer Prizes to parenthetical statements? (They should.)

Riggleman, for his part, denies the book is erotica. He says it was a practical joke. But the only way for the candidate to prove that The Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him isn't erotica is for him to release the book. Then voters in Virginia’s 5th Congressional district can judge for themselves whether The Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him is dirty ha ha or dirty fap fap.

What's neither funny or sexy, of course, is that the national-news-making scandal in this race is Riggleman's alleged kink—that he might be one of those someones somewhere who wants Bigfoot to fuck him—and not the fact that Riggleman has already campaigned with one white supremacist and so far refuses to say whether or not he's willing to campaign with another one.