For God, for country, and for...'Hustler?'

If you've never seen Hustler magazine on the inside, you have never met the real Larry Flynt. Hustler has limited circulation and sells for $8.99 an issue. Therefore, be it resolved: most Yale students are not Hustler subscribers. Be it further resolved: most Yalies have probably never cracked open an issue of Hustler in their entire lives.

COURTESY HUSTLER

Not that this stopped the Yale Political Union crowd from giving Flynt a standing, cheering ovation for his usual riff on Mon., Jan. 24. But maybe this is excusable—anyone who watches South Park knows that the funniest jokes have to offend somebody. So if stuffy conservative critics and militant feminazis can't appreciate Flynt's kind of cutting-edge humor, surely the younger, hipper generation of Yale students can.

With this in mind, I went out and bought myself the January 2000 issue of Hustler. Hey, there's nothing wrong with a little porn—last year my suitemate's mother sent us the November 1998 issue of Playboy featuring the article "Sex and Man at Yale." (It's been on display in our common room ever since.)

However, as I was soon to discover, Hustler is no Playboy. Not by any stretch of anyone's imagination.

Flipping to page nine of this month's issue, I encountered "A Message From the Ass-PCA: Hustler's Bitch Rescue Program," in which four naked women are posed as dogs. "Thousands of problem chicks will be put to sleep unfucked this year. Help Hustler throw these troubled mutts a bone—adopt yours today!" One woman is chained to a doghouse, holding a purse in her mouth and crouching next to a dish of dog food, and is described as a "Newfoundland bitch" who needs "love, space, constant attention and jewelry." Another sits upright in a begging position with a leash in her mouth. This is "Becky, a friendly stray who doesn't mind being tied up all day."

I took a moment here to imagine the well-deserved and widespread outrage a white racist magazine would generate by putting black men in similarly bestial positions.

At least Hustler does not restrict these photo ops to white women. I flipped back to page six to re-examine an ad for the imaginary anal-cleanser "Enemidget," which pictures a smiling black woman with a midget's leg lodged up her anus. Splattered beneath her is what looks like blood or liquid feces. Written below is the disclaimer, "Not to be taken seriously. No midgets were stuck up asses for this parody, though some black girls could easily hide one up there."

Well, it certainly sounds like a South Park joke. Except this is no cartoon, and the photo was sickening, even aggressive.

But is this issue really a fair representative of Hustler? Good point—a lot of the back issues are even worse. As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert points out, the June 1990 issue "showed four photographs of women's bodies in various stages of mutilation. The photos are attached to what appears to be charred human skin. Razor blades are scattered about. Nipples and what appear to be clitorises are attached to the skin with fishhooks and safety pins. Some of the women in the photos have been decapitated, or have lost limbs. A dead woman, naked, is shown lying beside a toilet." Another Hustler photo essay shows "a woman escorted from a prison cell by Nazi-like guards. She is handcuffed and all hair from her body is shaved. She is raped. The last frame of the sequence shows only the word, `Poof!' Hustler's equivalent of a deadly final solution."

Here, I admit, I started to lose faith in Larry Flynt's sense of humor. Obviously, feminists like Gloria Steinem aren't the only ones who refrain from hailing Flynt. Few people were laughing at his January 1983 issue, in which a woman was depicted being gang-raped on a pool table. As Steinem pointed out, "A few months after those pictures were published, a woman was gang-raped on a pool table in New Bedford, Mass. Mr. Flynt's response to the crime was to publish a postcard of another nude woman on a pool table, this time with the inscription `Greetings from New Bedford, Mass. The Portuguese Gang-Rape Capital of America.'"

Flynt claims that the "violent" photos in his magazine are not about rape—they are about bondage, which "happens to be a popular fetish." I suppose that torturing and mutilating women are popular fetishes as well.

So fine, let Flynt and his readers have their fetishes. Let Hustler remain on the newstand. But for the benefit of anyone who cheered its editor at the YPU, here's my review—this over-priced magazine is low-grade. Like a peepshow ticket-seller, Flynt's lifework is pathetic. Maybe it's time you went out and bought yourself this month's issue of Hustler

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