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Hustler from this somewhat rarefied intellectual vantage point, especially given how allergic the magazine itself is to all forms of social or intellectual affectation, squaring off like a maddened pit bull against the pretensions (and earning power) of the educated classes. That it was so often explicit about its class resentments reassured me that there was more going on than just raunch for its own sake, though its politics could also be maddeningly incoherent, with its arsenals of vulgarity deployed at American leaders and public figures on every side, systematically sullying every national icon and sacred cow. Of course it ranted against the power of government, by definition corrupt; dedicated countless pages to the hypocrisy of organized religion, with a nonstop parade of jokes on the sexual predilections of the clergy, the sexual possibilities of the crucifixion, the scam of the virgin birth, and the bodily functions of nuns, priests, and ministers; and especially despised liberals (along with, needless to say, feminists), all epitomes of bourgeois conventionality in its book.
    Yet the magazine was also far less entrenched in misogyny than I’d assumed. What it’s against isn’t women so much as sexual repression, which includes conventional uptight femininity, though within its pages, not everyone who’s sexually repressed, uptight and feminine is necessarily female: prissy men were frequently in the crosshairs too. In fact, Hustler was often surprisingly dubious about the status of men, not to mention their power and potency; often perplexed about male and female sexual incompatibility. On the one hand, you certainly found the standard men’s magazine fantasy bimbette: always ready, always horny, up for anything, and inexplicably attracted to the Hustler male. But just as often there was her flip side: the leagues of women disgusted by the Hustler male’s sexuality—haughty, rejecting (thus deeply desirable), upper-class bitch-goddesses. Class resentment was modulated through resentment of women’s power to humiliate: “Beauty isn’t everything, except to the bitch who’s got it. You see her stalking the aisles of Cartier, stuffing her perfect face at exorbitant cuisineries, tooling her Jag along private-access coastline roads.…” Hardly the usual compensatory fantasy life mobilized by typical men’s magazines, where all women are willing and all men are studs, as long as they identify upward, with money, power, and consumer durables.
    Once you put aside your assumptions about Hustler -variety porn aiding and abetting male power, you can’t help noticing how much vulnerability stalks these pages. Even the ads play off male anxieties: various sorts of penis enlargers (“Here is your chance to overcome the problems and insecurities of a penis that is too small. Gain self-confidence and your ability to satisfy women will skyrocket,” reads a typical ad), penis extenders, and erection aids (Stay-Up, Sta-Hard, etc.). The magazine is saturated with frustrated desire and uncertainty: sex is an arena for potential failure, not domination. You don’t get the sense that the Hustler reader is feeling particularly triumphal about his place in the world; that these guys are winners in the sexual caste system.
    I wrote up my somewhat conflicted thoughts about Hustler ’s pornographic truths and Flynt’s self-styled war against social hypocrisy, and though I took a somewhat sardonic approach to both, I suppose I ended up kind of a fan. A nation gets the pornography it deserves, which is obviously why so many people are affronted by it. Once the essay came out I kept getting requests to write more about pornography, which was irksome because I was never all that crazy about any of it, Rabelais notwithstanding. Still, I guess you could say Flynt turned out to be kind of an influence in my life.
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    So there I was, a