RICHMOND, Va., Nov. 1 (UPI) -- U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Va., has turned to attacking the novels written by his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, to convert female voters.
Allen's campaign has cited multiple explicit excerpts from Webb's novels as demeaning to women, ABC News reported Wednesday.
The Republican's campaign has circulated the passages among talk radio and TV programs, including scene describing a stripper in the Philippines performing sexual acts with a banana.
"That is the sort of thing that happened," Webb said, defending his work to ABC. "That's from a longapo in the Philippines, there are hundreds of thousands of servicemen who have been in that environment either directly or tangentially and it is an observation about how the human species lives... in the context of a novel, that is illuminative of an environment that these people were in."
Roger Hodge, editor of Harpers Magazine, brushed aside criticism of Webb's writing, saying realistic adult literature often requires sexual content.
"Whether it's going to be graphic and clichéd and embarrassingly awful ... that's something different," Hodge told ABC. "But if you're a realist novelist and you're writing for a popular audience, it's going to be sexually explicit or violent, that's a reflection of our society."
