The Pornographers Who (Said They) Fought for Freedom of Expression

[1]

Al Goldstein

4,942 words

The pioneering pornographer Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw and similar refined journals of onanistic art, was famous for many things. Foremost, he was a notorious culture-distorter [2]. (I’ll credit him with at least being an honest one; he said very plainly what he was all about.) Also, he was so liberal that it hurts. In light of that, it’s quite odd that his interview in the April 1978 edition of Hustler, conducted by Larry Flynt, is remarkably politically incorrect. Leftists of the Current Year wouldn’t recognize Goldstein as one of their own. Instead, they’d take one look at the interview and scream like little girls at a slasher movie.

Also, the story of their life and times is of some interest. So are the thorny matters of law and culture brought to the forefront by their commercial activities, and that of similar characters. It’s led to certain unhelpful narratives about what freedom of speech is all about (in the opinion of some), and there’s been loss of clarity as to why it’s important. The discussion hinges on the categories of political expression, artistic expression, and obscenity. There is legitimate room to debate where the boundaries should lie, which takes a minimum quantity of operating brain cells. Therefore, not to put too fine a point on it, being unable to distinguish between these categories — or refusing to acknowledge any out of willful ignorance — is moronic.

A tale of two wankers [3]

HALLOWED - I'M A COOMER(MUSIC VIDEO OFFICIAL)HALLOWED – I’M A COOMER(MUSIC VIDEO OFFICIAL)

Al Goldstein had much in common with Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler and the interviewer in the above video. The former can be considered as a predecessor to the latter, much as (to make a horribly inappropriate analogy) John the Baptist was a forerunner to Jesus Christ. The pair’s pornographic publications really put the “ass” in “crass”: unfit to line a birdcage lest it foul the fowl. Both were bipolar and also suffered from the hubris and narcissistic traits typical among people with too much money. Goldstein resembled a Der Stürmer [4] caricature in both looks and behavior, and probably would’ve thanked anyone for saying so. Flynt appeared remarkably similar to the Murdoch Murdoch drawings of President Trump [5] after it became clear that The Donald was a “glass half-empty” kind of guy. Still, these characters had their occasional moments.

Other than the usual material, Hustler typically included lots of irreverent cartoons, which actually were more interesting than the dreary photo shoots. Religion was their favorite subject, as it typically was for other pornographic periodicals of the era, and all the phony TV preachers deserved to be skewered. Other than that, Hustler put everyone on target. These cartoons often had jokes about blacks, which would be considered utter heresy lately. One example shows slaves picking cotton under the hot Sun, one remarking, “Lawdy, sho’ be glad when whitey discovers polyester!”

This doesn’t mean that Flynt was pro-white. (He wasn’t.) In recent times, the magazine has lost the amateurish look it had in the 1970s. The cartoons also became less irreverent and more compliant with Leftist sensibilities. This is one more example of creeping wokeness ruining liberal humor [6].

Although the two culture-distorters were competitors, and Goldstein considered Hustler to be a derivative of Screw, they maintained an amicable relationship. Flynt developed a small commercial empire which operates to this day. The flagship venture providing the bulk of the revenue is a chain of strip clubs. Hustler had evolved from a newsletter for their clientele. Meanwhile, despite the obvious ethnic stereotype, Goldstein wasn’t as good at business. For one thing, lack of diversification left him vulnerable. Plans to open a brothel in the Caribbean fell through, leaving him without any Third World sexual exploitation revenue to fall back on. He suffered a reversal of fortune in 2003 after Screw folded. Improvidence didn’t help; he kept spending money faster than a Congressman writing a budgetary bill.

[7]

You Can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here. [8]

And so it came to pass that the next year brought exceeding woe. Goldstein became homeless; a tremendous fall from grace. He once had a very posh four-story Upper East Side townhouse and two condos elsewhere in Manhattan, an apartment in Amsterdam for smoking his favorite herb, and another place in Los Angeles. Surely the most painful blow was losing his 10,000-square foot Pompano Beach mansion, then valued at $2.5 million and adorned with an 11-foot tall middle finger statue saluting marine traffic on Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway. These stately pleasure domes were typically packed to the roof with high-end audiophile equipment, fine cigars, collectibles, gadgets, consumer electronics, and other treasures (including a wristwatch collection worth $1.5 million), but he lost everything except some Screw memorabilia salvaged from the office. Oy veh gevalt!

Penn Jillette, the stage magician, mercifully delivered his woebegone friend from Bellevue’s homeless shelter and got an apartment for the poor schnorrer. Still, Goldstein remained impoverished until his death in 2013. Furthermore, he was lonely after alienating most of the people in his life; quite a forlorn end for the man who had boasted of bedding 7,000 women. At times, he was reduced to touting bagels. (I promise, I’m not making this up [9].) That job seems pretty slim pickings for someone who had once had savings of $11 million. Still, looking at it another way, at least the Jewish community touchingly came through for one of their brethren after somebody moved his cheese.

Life wasn’t entirely unkind, since Goldstein did attain the ripe old age of 77. As for Flynt, he survived a shooting which left him in a gold-plated wheelchair.[1] [10] He lived until he was 78, meeting his end last year. As for what fate awaited the pair in the afterlife, I can’t help wonder if Heavenly Father confined each of them to a peep show booth for eternity, without any quarters.

The Porn Wars

At the time of the interview, pornography had more or less gone mainstream. Some attribute one factor leading to X-rated films making a successful breakout to Goldstein’s glowing review for Deep Throat [11], generating much public attention at a key moment. Still, porn precariously persisted in a legal gray area all the way through the 1980s. An unusual coalition of cultural conservatives (more or less the “Religious Right”) and feminists like Andrea Dworkin [12] lobbied to suppress it.

One of those landmark Supreme Court (SCOTUS) rulings had watered down the doctrine concerning obscenity, overturning federal law that had been on the books since the Grant administration. The 1973 Miller v. California case created the “Miller Test [13]” which distinguished protected works — political and artistic expression — from obscenity, which could be regulated at discretion of the law. Although this has been subjected to some criticism, and isn’t a “bright line” standard, this is — according to my fascist opinion — about as good as it gets toward reasonably making such a distinction. Naturally, pornographers will differ on this point, disliking even the watered-down version of the obscenity doctrine. Ultimately the line has to get drawn somewhere, unless there are to be no lines at all, and there’s no position that will please everyone.

There was a compelling argument to be made that the previous Comstock law was too puritanical prior to the Miller standard. Novels such as Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Tropic of Cancer created frequent legal battles. Leaving matters of artistic expression aside for a moment, it was a waste of government resources to suppress such books. Also, the officials seemed like philistines with nothing better to do. Their efforts would’ve been better spent on catching some crooks.

If the SCOTUS rulings were meant as a correction, giving a nod to increasing worldliness and the obvious changing standards since the 1960s, things went much further than expected. Today the dialectic has shifted far in the other direction, and effectively almost “anything goes.” It’s uncertain as to whether even half of the romance novels in a contemporary bookstore could pass the Miller Test either on literary merits or propriety, but again, spicy books are hardly the end of the world. Pornography was the main beneficiary of the relaxed standards, and it’s been pushing the envelope ever since.

Effectively, the Miller standard did put manustupration magazines on the good side of the gray area, as long as they plausibly had “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” This is the reason they included interviews, such as the one described herein. Playboy had a much easier time meeting that standard and perhaps could’ve done so on artistic grounds alone, with their characteristic soft lens and focus on sublime beauty. Fare such as Hustler was considerably edgier, to put it mildly,[2] [14] which sometimes put them in the legal crosshairs. Goldstein himself racked up 21 busts for obscenity, though won some key victories in court.

Surely back then, the Right-wing Neanderthal crazies were cooking up their usual slippery slope conspiracy theories about how we’d better scrap all of our hard-won progress, or else one day society will go to ruin [15]! More seriously, mainstream conservatives alternate between two strategies [16]: attempting to hold the line, and ignominious retreat. At that particular time, there actually was an effort to push back in this front of the culture war. As usual, all they could do is hold the line until giving up, which in this case was around the late 1990s.

Until then, pornographers had a field day portraying conservatives as blue-nosed prudes out to take away our cummies. They loved to pose as champions of the First Amendment. (To paraphrase Joseph Sobran, this is like the mafia claiming to be champions of the Fifth Amendment.) This sort of posturing tends to animate the Goldstein-Flynt duet. It’s certainly good for a laugh when pr0n peddlers pull a “Have you no decency?” shtick. They turned the topic into a big morality play, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Goldstein on politics

[17]The interview begins with a long introduction, the last paragraph of which begins:

In the interest of free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment, and of the principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” embodied in the Declaration of Independence, HUSTLER’s own Larry Flynt and Executive Editor Bruce David conducted this interview with the irreverent Al Goldstein.

Break out the fife and drums, shall we?

When asked why Screw gets prosecuted so often, Goldstein says that it’s because of their irreverence, especially in regard to politics. One article in particular got him a lot of extra attention. This shows that government figures can get remarkably touchy about criticism, so let’s go Brandon [18]!

For example, I recently obtained my FBI file. Early in 1969 the FBI wrote a memo stating its outrage that No. 11 of Screw contained an article entitled “Is J. Edgar Hoover a Fag?” The FBI was so offended it instructed a New York City morals squad to arrest us. It wasn’t incensed by the explicit nature of the photos — the close-ups of genitalia, the tits, the ass. The FBI was offended that Screw had the audacity to say J. Edgar Hoover was a faggot. Of course, we all know he was a faggot.

Really, the proposition is rather uncertain [19] that J. Edgar Hoover knew the difference between teal and aqua. The case for it is built on circumstantial speculation and some very flimsy hearsay, deliberately spread by his opponents. Without incontrovertible proof one way or another, this will remain one of history’s mysteries, though not a particularly important item of antiquated gossip.

Be that as it may, things are different, according to Current Year liberal standards. Being a 175er is an extra intersectionality point and therefore a job qualification for federal office, and honi soit qui mal y pense. A magazine that outed such an official these days would likewise get in political trouble — not because it’s calumny, but for using the word “fag” and implying that there’s anything wrong with being one.

After that, there’s some further discussion of politics. Goldstein takes a rather skeptical view about democracy that is actually fairly on-point for a liberal weenie. He does have something sensible to say here:

The worst thing that any individual can do is to be resigned, to feel helpless and hopeless. When you do that, you’re like the 99 percent of the people around who are just waiting for death to take them away.

That thread continues, though he doesn’t get around to saying what would work better than democracy. (I can’t fault him for it. After all, it’s not easy to develop political theory that works in the real world and that isn’t some utopian pipe dream that would make things worse if anyone tried it.) The discussion goes to SCOTUS, and what he says about it still holds true:

The Supreme Court is a political instrument composed of malleable political creatures. It’s not some august body of intellectuals and cerebral types who are going to maximize fidelity to the Constitution. Today’s Court is frightening in its stupidity.

Score another one for the culture-distorter! He particularly had it in for the Nixon appointees (ironically including the ones who turned out to be shitlibs), as well as a couple of his unsuccessful nominees.

Good examples of the type of people that he attempted to get on the Court are G. Harrold Carswell and Clement F. Haynsworth. Luckily, both men were rejected by a very courageous vote in the Senate. Within the last two years Carswell has been exposed as a closet faggot; he tried to suck someone off in a rest room. He was also an advocate of racial segregation.

Hey, wait a minute — you’re not suggesting that there’s something wrong with “cottaging,” now, are you? These days, it’s far better for one’s reputation to get caught giving BJs in the bathroom than it is to get caught criticizing those who do so.

If the Larry Flynts and Al Goldsteins of this world don’t look out for the rights of the people, who will? The Nixon Supreme Court?

I can’t praise enough these intrepid defenders of our liberty! Nobody ever had to worry about blacklisting, silencing, or cancel culture while these guys were around, right? I’m forever grateful that the pornographers prevented Big Tech from turning into a Left Coast echo chamber, where you could get a lifetime ban for posting an opinion that their censoring munchkins [20] don’t like. They kept cyberspace a free marketplace of ideas, didn’t they? They held the digital book burners at bay, too. Boy howdy, they also made sure that nobody got hounded out of a job or lost a bank account for expressing political beliefs. When those smelly “watchdog” outfits were smearing people for unorthodox opinions, the pornographers defended freedom of expression and fought back like lions! Great googly moogly, online ideological censorship totally wasn’t even being considered until they put a toe tag on Larry Flynt last year, now was it?

Lèse majésté

Flynt tries to get Goldstein to talk about his fantasies, but the latter isn’t taking it seriously. The discussion turns to the women’s movement. (I’ll add that this is a misnomer, for one thing because most women don’t identify as feminists [21].) He’s asked why Screw gets the greatest amount of criticism from them. Goldstein doesn’t answer that directly, but he takes off on an entertaining tangent which becomes wildly politically incorrect by today’s standards:

I actually think Screw is less vulnerable simply because we exploit men and women equally. But I also feel that the feminist movement is full of shit. It is supposed to be this classless group of women, but in reality it’s elitist. It’s supposed to be protecting secretaries and barhops, but there are no secretaries, no housewives in most feminist groups. Instead, the groups consist of people who earn their living by writing. The more they disseminate feminism, the more they get for sale of their articles.

Frankly, I think these women are exploiting the movement. Also, I refuse to be made the “heavy” for the women’s movement. I’m as exploited by conditioning as women are, and yet I’m blamed for being unfair to women. That’s as stupid as blaming me for the sins of slavery. I never owned a black, and as long as I haven’t owned a black and no one can show by my own actions that I am mean to blacks, I refuse to feel guilty.

They don’t make liberal weenies like they used to! If he said that nowadays he would be subjected to a struggle session, or maybe forced to flog himself while kneeling on rice grains and chanting passages from a Robin DiAngelo book [22].

Flynt asks, “Do you support equal rights for women as well as blacks?” Goldstein replies:

Absolutely. Equal rights is a totally reasonable position. It’s the exploiters of the women’s movement that piss me off, not the question of women’s rights. The biggest phonies are the Susan Brownmillers and the Gloria Steinems. They bullshit about women’s lib, but if you don’t give them a seat on the subway, they get crazed and start menstruating prematurely.

Back then, Leftists who imagined they were struggling for equal rights surely would have been in for a surprise if they had been told what was ahead in the coming decades! For one thing, feminism still specializes in having their cake and eating it [23], as it always has [24]. For that matter, since every single demand in the exhaustive Declaration of Sentiments from the Seneca Falls convention [25] had been granted carte blanche long before, how much liberation did women really need in the 1970s?

As for blacks, after their demands were granted and de jure segregation ended during the 1960s, it took about five minutes before demands for equal rights switched to demands for equal results. Half a century later, they’re still moaning about it [26]. Nothing ever will make them happy, so why even try? Let them forge their destiny in their own country.

Then the discussion turns to gays, a conversation that would make heads explode today.

GOLDSTEIN: Faggots are sissies. And I like sissies — they know their place.

HUSTLER: You don’t really believe they’re sick, do you?

GOLDSTEIN: When I’m angry at somebody I say, “You no-good faggot.” I use it as a pejorative term to put people down. I know I shouldn’t feel that way, but I have the same liberal guilt that many people have. Ultimately, we should all really be emancipated. But I think you’ve got a few marbles loose if you go around sucking cocks. Unless you’re a woman — then I think it’s appropriate.

HUSTLER: Does Screw, editorially, discriminate against homosexuals?

GOLDSTEIN: We abuse homosexuals in the pages of Screw just as we abuse everybody else. From an employment point of view I am somewhat prejudiced against faggots. Although my key administrative assistant is gay, I don’t believe gay editors belong in the men’s magazine field, but I will take a faggot over a woman every day. At least when a faggot works late at night, you don’t have to provide somebody to protect him on his way home. Faggots take their beatings like men. Women cry a lot. With that joke I’ve just buried myself with the gays and the feminists.

HUSTLER: Do you feel gays will ever be able to achieve equal rights?

GOLDSTEIN: Not in the next 50 years. But I think we can learn from homosexuals [27]. They have gotten more acceptance than straights, by politicizing the right of faggots. They are much less prosecuted and persecuted than straight people. Homosexuals really have done a beautiful job of lobbying, and if you fuck around with a homosexual today, you’re going to have pickets tomorrow. On the other hand nobody wants to actively fight for the sexual rights of straight people.

These things are what someone who was so liberal it hurts could get away with saying in 1978, and he was willing to be quoted in print. These days, careers have been ruined over far milder expressions of thoughtcrime. I should add that Flynt became known as an LGBT advocate in more recent times, but he’s not choking on the heresy too hard at this point.

The last word

The rest of the interview discusses sex and society, the role of pornography, and so forth. It’s about what one might expect, given their occupation. (Wilhelm Reich [28] covered approximately some of the same ground.) Unexpectedly, there’s a bright glimmer here and there. For example, Goldstein’s ending quotation was rather impressive. Flynt asks him if he’s ever considered giving up, and here’s the reply:

I remember getting letters from readers as far back as ’68, ’69 — five years before HUSTLER first appeared — stating “I can’t believe a newspaper like yours is around. How long will they let you get away with it?”

I used to write these people, or call them, saying “They’re not letting me get away with anything; I have a right to do it.”

It’s a point well taken. Ayn Rand had something similar to say in The Fountainhead. Howard Roark was asked, “My dear fellow, who will let you?” He replied, “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

I corroborated for these people their validity to exist. Whether they were into swinging or nocturnal cocksucking in a theater or just masturbating or even paying for their sex, suddenly here was somebody saying “Hey, I do what you do and I do it publicly.” The readers felt less frightened.

There, he does make a good point in general about how being vocal will counteract feelings of isolation in those who are like-minded but afraid to speak out. This also applies to much more than cummies, of course, and the point should be pretty obvious.

The main thing that keeps me going is rage. Rage and anger. I am competitive. I do not want to be defeated. I do not want to lose. I do not want to be emasculated. It’s me against them. It’s high noon every day of my life, and I think I’ve been shot in the balls a few times, but I’m still able to draw my gun. If I’m going to be thought of as a bear, I want to be thought of as a grizzly.

I’ll only stop when pornography is legalized, when the Supreme Court finally grows up and legalizes what we’re doing. Then I’ll feel that the battle’s over and that we’ve won.

Imagine what such focused determination could do toward a better cause than choking the chicken!

The rhinestone rebels

From 1791 to 1973, it was more or less taken for granted that the First Amendment primarily protected political speech (useful for safeguarding against tyranny) and secondarily artistic expression (useful for cultural achievements), but didn’t protect obscenity (useful for spanking the monkey). After the Miller v. California ruling, obscenity still wasn’t protected but there was more wiggle room in defining what was protected. Pornographers got filthy rich by exploiting the newly-created loopholes, but they still weren’t happy. They asserted petitio principi that obscenity was indeed protected, too, and is no different from political speech or artistic expression.

[29]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Truth, Justice, & a Nice White Country here [30]

Although I find the Miller decision to be reasonable, I’ll grant that there are plausible counterarguments. No SCOTUS lineup — no matter how enlightened or benighted — has agreed that obscenity is protected, but court rulings aren’t exactly bestowed with papal infallibility. Luckily for the pornographers and their allies, stating their case about it wasn’t illegal! It certainly would’ve been unjust if they’d faced severe consequences simply for trying to make their point. (That’s what the First Amendment is for, hint hint.) Flynt and Goldstein certainly did speak their minds about all that. No matter their personal foibles, of course they were within their rights to advocate for their radical position.

It was for continuing to mass-distribute obscene periodicals that The System tried in vain to crush them under the full weight of its prosecutorial apparatus and secret police. It does make for a comedic underdog story, if one overlooks the degradation of our society [31] in which this pair played a pioneering part. Proverbially, one can’t fight City Hall, but these wankers survived mooning Washington and Quantico. Epic! (Surely it helps that they had an astronomical legal budget while their businesses were flourishing.) In fact, I’d almost raise a glass to the memory of these culture-distorters, especially now that there’s so little to love [32] about the glowies. The government made itself look stupid by losing a protracted and highly asymmetric cat-and-mouse battle against a couple of mentally unstable coomers [33] peddling amateurish smutty zines.

Still, they and other pornographers were hardly the heroic freedom fighters they pretended to be. In their early days, while carving out their economic niche at the bleeding edge of Constitutional Law, they suffered frequent legal woes. They surely were happy for any rhetorical support they could get from civil libertarians, as well as legal aid from lawfare foundations. When ideological conformity became an increasing problem in recent times (for example, censorship by gigantic tech monopolies), however, the porn moguls were AWOL from the battleground. Resisting globalism is the struggle to preserve and recover what’s left of our culture, sovereignty, and freedom. Surely that’s more important than beating the meat.

If the pornographers really were interested in freedom of expression, they would realize that the globalists and their radical Leftist stooges have the mentality of medieval inquisitors. They could’ve melted these special snowflakes with the same kind of withering satire they once used on the fundamentalists. They could’ve fashioned their magazines into a masculine refuge against political correctness and feminist fruit bats [34]. Instead, the pornographers have mostly been resting on their laurels.

If anything, they bent like reeds in the frigid wind while the political climate blew in a tempest of Leftist totalitarianism. For one thing, Playboy ran a transsexual Playmate [35] while the dirt was still fresh on Hugh Hefner’s grave. Showcasing a ladyboy so they could virtue-signal about radical gender theory is hardly speaking truth to power. On the contrary, they stuck a thumb in their audience’s collective eye.

What happened to these fair-weather friends of liberty, and especially the lofty principles they espoused? Whenever their own ox was being gored, the porn moguls postured as if imagining they were parading down Main Street past endless bleachers draped in red, white, and blue bunting, underneath a shower of tickertape and confetti while tooting “Yankee Doodle” on fifes, banging drums, and twirling batons while draped in American flags. If these jokers had thought of it, surely they would’ve conducted a big séance to try to get endorsements from the Declaration of Independence’s signatories. After they’d made their fortunes, and their income streams stopped receiving threats from legal challenges, however, they strangely forgot their ardent zeal for freedom of expression in its broadest possibilities. Apparently their only interest was keeping the judicial loopholes open that allow them to sell jerk-off material.

Changing times

[36]

Courtesy of Stonetoss [37]

There’s been a certain aftermath to the Porn Wars. The Miller Test standard technically remains on the books, but is largely unenforced. The Porn Wars were lost long ago. Part of this was lawfare wearing down the opposition. As I recall, one municipal official remarked that keeping an X-rated theater from operating near a school meant having to fight the entire Harvard Law faculty in court. That might not have been much of an exaggeration; certain powerful legal foundations specialize in this kind of barratry for unfathomable reasons [38].

Aside from attrition, another factor was the emergence of high-speed streaming sites proliferating in cyberspace like toadstools. They also bankrupted Screw and cut into the profit margins of other print magazines. That’s because they can deliver an unlimited supply of stronger fare for free, and for every conceivable (or not) taste (or lack thereof), some of which makes Hustler itself seem cute and innocent in comparison. With the obscenity doctrine a dead letter by then, there was no legal check to keep the deluge of free hardcore material from disrupting the market. Thereby the old periodicals became victims of their own success.

The pornography genie is now out of the bottle, and it kind of is what it is. This is unfortunate, since it turns out that this stuff isn’t as harmless [39] as once assumed. Is there a way to discourage bad taste without coming across like Attila the Hun? I’m drawing a blank for practical answers short of changing the culture dramatically. We have quite a few fish to fry already as it is.

There’s an odd legacy left by all the rhetoric and the legal battles that emerged from the Porn Wars. A sizeable fraction of the public seems to now assume the First Amendment is all about cummies. (Whether it does protect obscenity at all still remains a highly debatable proposition, of course.) Worse, they forgot that it has anything to do with protecting political expression — as well as freedom of religion and assembly. There’s a technical term for someone who can’t tell the difference between John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, the Venus de Milo, and a taco shot from Hustler. Again, this term is “moron.” Would it be expedient to hold our nose collectively about pornography in order to argue for freedom of political expression? It would be a rough compromise to make — but there are a lot of morons out there.

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

[40]If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:

To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.

Notes

[1] [41] Flynt got a serious case of ballistic lead poisoning after someone got offended by an interracial photo shoot in Hustler. Since violence is bad and stuff, I’ll have to say that it wasn’t very nice to do that.

[2] [42] I’m hardly prudish or easily shocked, but I find its typical content to be painfully tasteless. Sex isn’t dirty unless someone makes it that way, and here’s a prime example. (Flynt might’ve taken all this as a compliment.) Still, Hustler has remained commercially viable after all these years, so someone likes that crap.