 |
A L S O+T O D A Y
Rush to defeat
T A B L E+T A L K Are we overharvesting our oceans? Weigh in on the environmental impact of overfishing in the Science and Nature area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y The ugliest story yet Sex and the single intern A new racial era for San Francisco schools Fear of fluoride Bull's-eye - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Browse the - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
 ![[ 21st: A Republican's lessons in spam ]](/news/1999/02/src/23newslinks.gif) |
||
 |
FLYNT'S REVENGE | PAGE 1, 2, 3, 4
Hustler made its name by what some people consider to be sexist and violent depictions of women, cartoons of women being chopped up and so on. While most people would defend your right to do that, is there a line over which you won't walk? One cartoon comes to mind that was passed around by the feminists in New York City. It was a couple of guys out deer hunting, and one guy says to the other one, "Well, we just bagged another one," and there's three women on the top of the car. Now maybe I'm missing something, maybe I'm insensitive, but I thought the cartoon was funny. Do you ever see stuff and say, "Uh-uh, I'm not publishing that"? You have to understand what Hustler is. It's basically a heterosexual magazine with erotic photo features. Now aside from that, we have our outrageous political satire and parodies and cartoons, which have all identified Hustler and set it apart from all its competitors. And it's very much a humor magazine as well as a sex publication. We're real iconoclasts. Being offensive is part of our editorial philosophy. When we sit down at an editorial meeting once a month, we say, "OK, who haven't we offended this month?" So there's no line you won't cross? There's absolutely nothing sacred. Obviously we stay away from things like child pornography. But other than that, it's very much on the cutting edge. When was the last time you were offended? Has that ever happened? Are you asking me if there's anything I wouldn't run that I ran before? Back in the '70s, when Betty Ford had a double mastectomy, we had a drawing of the White House, this was at Christmas time, with a silhouette of a woman standing in the window of the White House, and the caption on there was, "All I want for Christmas is my two front tits." And probably if I had it to do all over, I would not have run the cartoon. I lost my own mother to breast cancer. That was really pushing it. But I can't think of anything else. Is sex still as interesting to you as it was when you first started the business? More. Really? Why is it more? I don't know. It just is. I guess what you could say is it's not necessarily that sex is more interesting, women are more interesting. So you consider yourself a big fan of women? Very much so. How have your attitudes about sex changed since you were young? Not much. When you were 20 you had the same kind of perspective that you do now? I think when you're young, you might have certain fantasies. Maybe as you get older they might mature a little bit. But the fantasies are still the same. If we lived in a world that was completely free of sexual repression, and was just a land of free love and free lust, do you think you would be in the business you're in now? No, I don't think I would be in the business that I'm in. I've thought about that before. It's probably very hypocritical for me to be fighting to make sex acceptable. On the other hand, I want to keep it legal. This is something I really believe in. I think that many of our problems are caused by sexual repression, not sexual promiscuity. Especially a lot of the line of behaviors you see in society. Most of your hardened criminals, the one thing they have in common, they're all sexually dysfunctional. You see very little reported on that, but it's true. What people have inspired you? There have been no individuals in my era that have had a major influence on me, but historically I see Thomas Paine as the father of our country. With many people, it's George Washington, but all of the ideas of our democracy came from Thomas Paine, and I think his book "The Age of Reason" is probably one of the most important books ever written. If you had five lives to pursue five different careers, what would be your five lives, other than this one? A gynecologist, an evangelist, a brain surgeon, a lawyer. I could be a bum for a few years. Why do you think human beings have such a strange relationship to their needs for reproduction, such a complicated relationship to sex? The one medium that we use to communicate with more than anything else is sex. You'd think we'd make an effort to understand it a little bit better. And other than the desire for survival, the strongest single desire we have is for sex. It's important to explain how the repression and guilt came about. The church has had its hand on our crotch for 2,000 years. And the government is moving in that direction. Feeling that if they can control the pleasure center, they can control you. But it's like the genie's out of the bottle now with the Internet and the way we communicate. The elite doesn't really have the ability to dictate anything to us about our mores. Since the Victorian era, the rich and the privileged have always had their erotic bound editions of pornography. But today, the newsstand and the video store has become the poor man's art museum. And governments around the world are having trouble dealing this. Because the effort before was to always control the people. Now it's obvious as we move into this era of wireless communication that we aren't going to be able to control the people. Speaking of being controlled, is there anything that you feel like people haven't understood about you, or that the media has misrepresented? Anyone who interviews me feels immediately they have to distance themselves from me by calling me a pornographer or a smut peddler. That's just the nature of the media, that's just the way they are. It's mainly the stigmatism associated with Hustler. There are efforts to constantly reinforce the fact that this guy is just a smut peddler, he's not to be given any credence for anything else. I like to remind them I'm a smut peddler who cares.
|
||
