Larry Flynt

I watched the people vs. larry flynt this weekend and it raised some interesting questions for me. For those of you who have not seen it, it chronicles the life of Larry Flynt, the creator of Hustler magazine. He ended up fighting a lot of legal battles to keep his magazine legal and himself out of jail- he wasn't always successful. In the end though, he went all the way to the Supreme Court where his lawyer gives an excellent arguement about free speach and artistic satire. I am not an advocate of pornography, and believe it to be the most obvious form of mysogyny available today, however, the lawyer makes a strong arguement about freedom of speach, which I also firmly believe in.

I was definately reminded of the reading we did earlier in the term by Susan Satong about photography and its function in our society. During a speach, Flynt brings up the idea that murder is illegal yet it is not illegal to take pictures of murder. This is something we talked about in terms of photography as non intervention- the photographer chooses to take a picture of a crime rather then intervene and stop the crime. Is the artist then in no way responsible for the crime?

Pornography however is different because sex is not illegal in the US- at least not coital, heterosexual sex. However, we culturally view these pictures as more perverse and wrong then pictures of murder, which we have socially condemned as a crime. This is an interesting standard to me and I wonder if porn were seen, on a cultural level, as artistic rather then perverse- would it carry as much power as it does? Does calling something art take away its ability to strike up a heated debate?

Obviously this can't be true, if you think in terms of such periods as Dada when toilets were being signed as works of art. There were definatley heated debates over whether or not you could call a toilet art, but did this concept change our society at all? In the same way that pornography has?

And where do we draw the line between nude photographs and porn?

I think it's critical to question our social standards and seek out what influence they have on our lives. If you would like more information about porn as violence against women you should look up Andrea Dworkin, she recently died, but while alive she wrote extensively about the sex industry from an anti- porn, feminist perspective.