I won’t lie to you, any day where eatin’ pussy is in the news is a good day for those of us in the media. The sharks go crazy when they smell poontang in the water (though I could be mixing metaphors). So it was over the weekend when Michael Douglas seemingly blamed cunnilingus for his throat cancer. It wasn’t exactly bad publicity, per se – Michael Douglas was just keepin’ it real, people enjoy that quality these days. But celebrity publicists are mostly worthless and spend most of their time trying to justify their own positions, and one way they do that is by providing “spin control” whenever their client hits the news. And thus we have Michael Douglas’s publicist trying to deny Douglas blamed his cancer on cunnilingus.
From People:
“Michael Douglas did not say cunnilingus was the cause of his cancer,” his rep says in a statement. “It was discussed that oral sex is a suspected cause of certain oral cancers as doctors in the article point out, but he did not say it was the specific cause of his personal cancer.”
Unfortunately for Douglas’s publicist, all the Guardian had to do was go “Yo, check the game tape.”
The relevant part of the transcript:
Xan Brooks: Do you feel, in hindsight, that you overloaded your system? Overloaded your system with drugs, smoking, drink.
Michael Douglas: No. No. Ah, without getting too specific, this particular cancer is caused by something called HPV, which actually comes about from cunnilingus.
I guess you could argue that by “particular cancer” he meant “type of cancer” and not “my particular cancer,” but if you apply the transitive property, you end up in the same place (hee hee! guess where!). HPV caused this cancer, HPV comes from cunnilingus, I have this cancer. Take note, teachers, this is the kind of word problem that makes math class way more interesting.
“In the last 24 hours I have become the poster boy for oral cancer,” Douglas said at an American Cancer Society event where he was honored with the Marvin Hamlisch Memorial Award, named after the late composer.
“And just so we all understand, I think we would all love to know where our cancer comes from. I simply told a reporter … a virus that can cause oral cancers, and is one of the few areas of cancers that can be controlled, and there are vaccinations that kids can get. So that was my attempt.”
…he said, silently adding:
Let this be a lesson to you, publicists. The longer you keep a story in the news, the more opportunities it gives me for juvenile cunnilingus humor.