Larry Flynt has won. He was America's pioneer pornographer -- the man who fought against a still-Puritan nation all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to get vaginal close-ups into the grasp of every young man. This fight got him jailed. It got him shot. It got him rich. And at the end of it, the grandchildren of the people who demanded his arrest for launching Hustler magazine think nothing of clicking on XTube to view a million women splayed a million ways, or downloading their own sex tapes onto the site for everyone to see. He is the founding father of our new pornucopia. His brand of hardcore porn is everywhere, leaking into every email inbox. For him, it's a story of freedom triumphant. But does Flynt's story also show the costs -- and the casualties -- of the Dionysian frenzy he has helped unleash?
He extended our freedom by encouraging people to chuckle and masturbate over scenes of the most horrific unfreedom -- women being gang-raped, young girls being molested, "bitches" being shaved and slaughtered in concentration camps. One of his daughters says he molested her. Another of his daughters reportedly says he asked her to marry him. The cold Puritan morality of the Fifties badly needed to be relaxed -- but in Larry Flynt, did it melt down into a moral Chernobyl?
More...
0 comments
Post a Comment