The first issue of
Hustler
appeared in 1974. The magazine became successful, and world famous, in 1975, when it published a five-page photo spread of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the nude. The pictures had been taken by an Italian paparazzo, with a telephoto lens, who had staked out the Greek island of Skorpios, where the Onassises had a house. They had been offered first to
Playboy
and
Penthouse
, the established magazines in the field, but
Playboy
and
Penthouse
turned them down (exercising scruples they would soon find good reasons to abandon). Flynt bought them, he claims in his autobiography, for $18,000, and the issue of
Hustler
in which they appeared sold a million copies off the newsstand in a matter of days. It was the perfect combination of titillation and personal violation, and once Flynt got his hands on the formula, he never let go.
Now, the distinctive thing about
Hustler
is that it was not
Playboy.
This is a point that gets made in
The People vs. Larry Flynt,
but made in the wrong way. The filmmakers stress the fact, which is undoubtedly correct, that Flynt set out to create a magazine for downscale readers.
Playboy
was a self-proclaimed lifestyle magazine. It accompanied its photographs of partially clad and unclad women with articles on fashion, high-end audio equipment, and expensive cars, and with fiction by big-name writers like John Updike and interviews with noteworthy figures like Buckminster Fuller. Flynt’s initial insight was that the typical consumer of nudie pictorials was probably not realistically in the market for high-end audio products and did not have much interest in the views of Buckminster Fuller. So he set his sights on the sort of reader for whom solemn interviews with noteworthy figures represented the height of pretension—the sort of reader who would get more pleasure from seeing such people lampooned than from reading their interviews.
Playboy
would have interviewed Jerry Falwell;
Hustler
ran a Campari ad parody.
All very fine and democratic, but it leaves out a more significant point of contrast, and that has to do with the partially clad and unclad women. Playboy published its first issue in 1953, and in spite of its liberated attitude toward sex, it was, in its attitude toward women, very much a magazine of that decade.
Playboy
women were naked, but they were in every other respect as inaccessible and chaste as nuns. They were women who had been somehow reduced to flesh and elevated to sanctity at the same time. They represented some fantasy of fifties bachelorhood: upstanding, clean, and miraculously free of guilt. They had perfect breasts in the same sense that they had perfect teeth. There was no suggestion that they had any sexual interests of their own.
The mass-market pornography of the so-called “sexual revolution,” the pornography that emerged in the late sixties and early seventies and flooded into bookstores, newsstands, movie theaters, and ultimately video outlets, was based on a different premise. It has become common to talk about pornography as the representation of male dominance and female submission, as sending the “message” that women were put on earth for the sexual gratification of men.
This is the way it is described, for example, by Catharine MacKinnon and other feminists who advocate censorship, and the description tends to be accepted even by people who reject MacKinnon’s legal arguments. But mass-market pornography was not based, in the beginning, anyway, on the image of the sex-driven male. It was based on the image of the sex-driven female. The pop ideology of sexual liberation was that, contrary to the lesson taught by centuries of moral conditioning, women enjoyed sex as much as men, and in the same way as men were imagined to enjoy it—that is, actively, promiscuously, and without guilt. Most of the pornographic films of the era that achieved the status of cultural chic were about women in search of sexual pleasure:
I Am Curious (Yellow)
(1968),
Deep Throat
(1972),
The Devil in Miss Jones
(1973), and the soft-core
Emmanuelle
films, which began in 1974.
These movies were produced entirely for the delectation of men, of course, and when Linda Marciano, the star of
Deep Throat
, emerged a decade later to reveal that she had performed in that film under duress, she exposed rather dramatically the extent to which the promiscuous woman of the sexual revolution, despite all the popular rhetoric about sexual equality and “no double standard,” was just another male fantasy. In the early seventies, though, when Flynt was entering the sex business as the owner of a striptease club in Dayton, that rhetoric was at its height. Commercial sex—striptease clubs and pornographic movies and magazines—was understood in many minds as the natural consequence of the frank acknowledgment that men and women both enjoy sex. This is the view of the sexual revolution adhered to by the makers of
The People vs. Larry Flynt
—that Flynt was just being honest about a subject made shameful by prudes and hypocrites. And it is why they went out of their way to remake Althea Flynt.
Who the real Althea was is probably beyond recovering. The Althea of Flynt’s autobiography is the one woman he meets with whom he can share something
besides sex
, and he makes it rather clear that good sex was not the basis of their relationship. But good sex is the basis of their relationship in Forman’s movie, which imagines Althea as the very type of the female sexual athlete and aggressor
of sexual-revolution mythology. That Larry and Althea are sexual equals—that equality is precisely the lesson Althea comes into Larry’s life to teach him—is emphasized in a number of scenes, most notably one (not in the screenplay) in which Larry smacks Althea, early in their relationship, and she warns him
never
to hit her again. But in fact, the real Althea admitted that Flynt beat her, and she was once quoted in
Hustler
explaining that “I don’t see anything wrong with a man striking a woman. In fact, many women are turned on by it.”
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Getting this wrong means missing the whole point of Hustler’s accomplishment.
Hustler
was not, in the tradition of
Playboy
, about sex as play or about sex without moral hang-ups. It was about sex as a kind of violation. The nude photographs of Jacqueline Onassis epitomized the magazine’s view of sex. When that issue of
Hustler
appeared, the governor of Ohio, Jim Rhodes, was caught buying a copy at a newsstand, and this indiscretion became widely reported, much to Flynt’s delight. The episode is presented in the movie, where it is played as another proof of the fake prudery of official culture. Rhodes wants to see the pictures, but he is ashamed of it, and this is portrayed as an example of the sort of hypocrisy men like Larry Flynt dare to expose. But it is not hypocrisy. It is natural to want to see pictures of a famous woman naked, and it is also shameful, since the pictures violate her privacy in the most flagrant way. The itch to see the pictures is completely bound up with the sense that it’s wrong, the sense that the itch itself is somehow personally debasing. Far from constituting another step toward a more honest and democratic sexuality, this association between sex and guilt, between (as Althea was made to say about being beaten) pleasure and indignity, was a throwback to the world before
Playboy
. Larry Flynt put the shame back into sex.
Jerry Falwell was on the same mission, and the parallel is less superficial than it may sound. Falwell’s relation to the sexual revolution was, on a certain level, exactly the same as Flynt’s: he, too, hoped to exploit the sense of sin and shame that the revolution had supposedly made obsolete. Falwell would have been no more imaginable without
Playboy
, and everything that followed from it, than
Flynt would have been. They were both sexual reactionaries. The intertwining of the world of televangelism and the world of sex magazines was, in fact, one of the most remarkable phenomena of the period covered in
The People vs. Larry Flynt
, and it is too bad that the filmmakers didn’t find more to say about it.
Falwell emerged on the public stage when Jimmy Carter, then running for president, confessed in an interview in
Playboy
to having sometimes felt “lust in my heart.” Before Carter’s confession, Falwell had been known mostly in the neighborhood of his native Lynchburg, Virginia, where he had established an immensely successful ministry, at the Thomas Road Baptist Church, and where, in 1971, he had founded Liberty Baptist College. Most of his preaching had been directed against alcohol and drugs, but after seeing the national attention he attracted by his public criticism of Carter (who, of course, had identified himself as a born-again Christian), Falwell changed his targets to abortion, homosexuality, and pornography. It was an excellent career move.
Carter’s election, in 1976, suggested to many people that outspoken Christianity was a way for even a Democrat to win elections, and in 1979, a group of conservative political and religious figures asked Falwell to head an organization named, by the conservative activist Paul Weyrich, the Moral Majority, whose mission was to mobilize Christian voters on behalf of Republican candidates. The Moral Majority took considerable credit (with what justification remains a matter of dispute) for the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and although Reagan was careful not to associate himself personally with Falwell, he was also careful not to dissociate himself publicly. So that when
Hustler
ran its ad parody, in 1983, it was not firing off a random attack on someone who had strayed accidentally into its line of fire. The ad was part of a campaign against Falwell, who had already been honored as
Hustler
’s “Asshole of the Month.” For Falwell was not only the personification of the sort of officious sanctimoniousness
Hustler
’s readers were supposed to enjoy lampooning; he also was a man in a position politically to damage the commercial empire of Larry Flynt. Falwell and Flynt were each other’s devils, but they were also each other’s raisons d’être.
By 1983, Falwell had an empire of his own. He had, in fact, two
empires, a ministry and a political organization. The core congregation of Falwell’s ministry was the church in Lynchburg, which had seventeen thousand members in 1983 (up from thirty-five when Falwell took it over, in 1956). But Falwell also had a television program,
The Old Time Gospel Hour
, which was carried weekly on 373 stations—more than any other televangelist of the time. By the early eighties, the program claimed to have twenty-five million viewers, and was bringing in a million dollars in contributions a week. Fund-raising was, in fact, its main activity, so much so that, as Frances Fitzgerald reported, five of every seven dollars raised was spent just to keep the show going.
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When the Moral Majority was formed, it started its fund-raising drive using the television program’s mailing list, and brought in $2.2 million in the first year. The ministry’s newsletter, the
Journal Companion
, was turned into the political organization’s newsletter, the
Moral Majority Report
, which was sent to 840,000 homes with a readership estimated at three million. More than three hundred radio stations broadcast Moral Majority commentary daily. In 1983, the organization claimed four million members, which is probably an exaggeration, but which indicates the scale on which Falwell conceived of himself and his influence at the time.
When the Campari ad appeared, in 1983, Falwell was quick to sue, but he was also quick to turn the ad to financial account. He sent out two mailings under the aegis of the Moral Majority to members and “major donors,” requesting funds to “defend his mother’s memory,” and a third letter to 750,000 viewers of
The Old Time Gospel Hour.
The mailing to the major donors—there were 26,900 of them—included copies of the ad, with eight offensive words blacked out. The letters raised more than $700,000 in thirty days. When Flynt learned of them, he countersued Falwell for copyright infringement—for reproducing the ad without permission from Hustler. He lost this suit, but he made his point, which was, of course, that Falwell was so far indifferent to the reputation of his mother (who was, by the way, no longer alive) as to disseminate to thousands of people who had never seen it the parody that traduced heir.
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Who received these appeals? Falwell’s constituents, like the
constituents of all the televangelists who flourished in the 1980s, were generally downscale. They were not well off, and they tended, in the words of an official of the National Council of Churches, which paid close attention to the phenomenon, “to be alienated from mainline America. They feel they are on the short end of things, that they haven’t gotten what others have.”
13
The profile of Falwell’s audience, in other words, apart from the obvious difference, was remarkably parallel to the profile of
Hustler’s
audience—a circumstance beautifully illuminated by an event which took place while Flynt and Falwell were in the midst of their legal war over the Campari ad.
In 1986, Alan Sears, the executive director of the Meese Commission, which had been set up at the direction of President Reagan to examine the issue of pornography, wrote a letter, on Justice Department stationery, to twenty-three companies accusing them of being “major players in the game of pornography.” The letter gave the companies three weeks to respond, with the implicit threat that they would somehow be exposed in the commission’s final report if they did not. Among these companies were 7-Eleven; Rite-Aid, the drugstore chain; and Kmart, which owned Waldenbooks. All were accused (Sears based his letter on testimony before the commission by another fundamentalist crusader, the Reverend Donald Wildmon) of retailing
Playboy, Penthouse
, and other sexually explicit magazines. The effect on the magazines was devastating. 7-Eleven convenience stores, which are not ordinarily the source of goods for upscale consumers, were in fact the major outlet for
Penthouse
, and they sold 20 percent of all copies of
Playboy
. The companies buckled—since, clearly, they were also patronized by many churchgoing, fundamentalist shoppers who regarded pornography as sinful, and who could be expected to be susceptible to calls for a boycott.