Men (2 page)

If men writing about manhood are preoccupied with loss—forestalling it, assuaging it, forever dancing around the subject—I suspect that for a woman writing about manhood, it's more of a gain: potency, a bit of lead in your pencil. After all, it's not like women don't have phallic aspirations too! Meaning that at least from the throne of your keyboard,
you
can be the one in the driver's seat,
you
can be the penetrator for a change—I'm speaking symbolically, don't worry—penetrating your subjects with shrewdness and insight, worming your way into their tender psyches, taking unoffered liberties.… What I'm saying is that beneath our pleasant façades, women's attitudes toward men are just as rapacious and primitive as the most notorious emblems of hardcase masculinity around. We've just been politer about expressing it—eternally polite. Some have tried to argue, on this basis, that women are possessed of better moral character, but I strongly doubt it. Or I hope not, anyway.

No, the predacious drives and motives are just more submerged. It's what we'd prefer not to know about ourselves that I'm trying to speak of here. As with Hemingway's notorious manslayer shrew-wife Margot, in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” who accidentally-on-purpose mows down her husband with a big game rifle at the exact moment he finally displays the sort of manliness she'd been mocking him for not having, sometimes your own agenda can come as a nasty surprise.

A writer looking back at a body of work is in a similar position to Margot. Some poor bastard is lying gutshot in the dirt, but your intentions were perfectly scrupulous. (Really.) You find themes and connections that are as impossible to ignore as someone pounding on your forehead with a ball-peen hammer, but it wasn't you who put them there. (Except that … maybe—unconsciously—you did.) Having previously written a rather conflicted book on the travails of femininity (
The Female Thing
), I realized only when I got to the end of it that this one is a sort of companion volume. The not-always-salutary ways that men and women figure in each other's imaginations is a theme in both books. Women take men too seriously and not seriously enough, a bipolar condition you'll no doubt find reflected in the chapters that follow. In other words, please don't think I'm offering myself up as some model of progressive or enlightened thinking on the subject of male–female relations—it's probably more like the reverse.

But does a woman writer whose subject is men want to park her buggy only on the enlightened side of the street? Which would mean what? Spending your time protesting that male novelists get more review space than chick lit writers (a recent complaint), or that their characters say dubious things about women and their books don't “get us” (ongoing complaints), and so on? What a boring path to the Promised Land of gender parity that would be. Personally, I'd hate to think that feminism means reforming anyone's weird retrograde identifications or curbing the rapaciousness of fantasy life.

Suffragette or cannibal? I say far better to devour your opponents in a gluttonous frenzy than be fated to earnestness and rebuke-issuing, and the deadly security of what you already know. Introject! Eat them alive! Chew slowly; savor those alarming new thoughts.

 

I

OPERATORS

 

The Scumbag

I met
Hustler
magazine's obstreperous redneck publisher Larry Flynt twice, the first time before he started believing all the hype about himself and the second time after. By hype, I mean the uplifting stuff floated in Milos Forman's mushily liberal biopic,
The People vs. Larry Flynt,
and dutifully parroted in the media coverage—that Flynt isn't just a scumbag pornographer, he's also some big First Amendment hero. I liked him better as a scumbag pornographer, though I realize this could be construed as its own form of perversity. Nevertheless, I had a certain investment in protecting my version of Flynt against Forman's encroachments, though, as anyone can see, I was severely outgunned in this match.

The reason we'd met in the first place was that I'd written an ambivalently admiring essay about Flynt and
Hustler,
which the ghostwriter of his autobiography had come across and passed on to Larry, and which he'd apparently admired in turn. The ghostwriter contacted me. I was invited to drop in on Larry the next time I was in Los Angeles, and as it happened, I had plans to be there the following month. A meeting was thus arranged. If I said that getting together for a chat with Larry Flynt was an unanticipated turn of events, this would be a vast understatement. The whole reason I'd written about him so freely was that I never expected to face him in person and could therefore imagine him in ways that gratified my conception of who he should be: a white trash savant imbued with junkyard political savvy. In truth, I found the magazine completely disgusting—as I was meant to, obviously: it had long been the most reviled instance of mass-circulation pornography around and used people like me (shame-ridden bourgeois feminists and other elites) for target practice, with excremental grossness among its weapons of choice. It was also particularly nasty to academics who in its imagination are invariably prissy and uptight—sadly I'm one of this breed too. (A cartoon academic to his wife: “Eat your pussy? You forget, Gladys, I have a Ph.D.”)
1

Maybe I yearned to be rescued from my primness, though Flynt was obviously no one's idea of a white knight. (Of course, being attracted to what you're also repelled by is not exactly unknown in human history.) For some reason, I tend to be drawn to excess: to men who laugh too loud and drink too much, who are temperamentally and romantically immoderate, have off-kilter politics and ideas. Aside from that, it also happened that in the period during which my ideas about things were being formed, the bawdy French satirist Rabelais was enjoying an intellectual revival in my sorts of circles, along with the idea of the “carnivalesque”: the realm of subversion and sacrilege—the grotesque, the unruly, the profane—where the lower bodily stratum and everything that emerges from it is celebrated for supposedly subverting established pieties and hierarchies.

I was intrigued by these kinds of ideas, despite—or more likely because of—my aforementioned primness. Contemplating where one might locate these carnivalesque impulses in our own time I'd immediately thought of
Hustler
, even though back then I had only the vaguest idea what bodily abhorrences awaited me within its shrink-wrapped covers (as if a thin sheet of plastic were sufficient to prevent seepage from the filth within). In fact, the first time I peeled away the protective casing and tried to actually read a copy, I was so disgusted I threw it away, I didn't even want it in the house.

Eventually steeling myself against my umbrage, I mounted another attempt.
Hustler
's assaults on taste and decency were indeed echt-Rabelaisian, I quickly saw, as even a partial inventory of its pet subjects will indicate: assholes, monstrous and gigantic sexual organs, body odors, anal sex, farting, and anything that exudes from the body—piss, shit, semen, menstrual blood—particularly when it sullies public, iconic, or sanctified places. Not for
Hustler
the airbrushed professional-class fantasies that fuel the
Playboy
and
Penthouse
imaginations. Instead,
Hustler
's pictorials featured pregnant women, middle-aged women (denounced by horrified news commentaries as “geriatric pictorials”), hugely fat women, hermaphrodites, amputees, and—in a moment of true frisson for your typical heterosexual male—a photo spread of a pre-operative transsexual, doubly well endowed. In short, the
Hustler
body was a gaseous, fluid-emitting, embarrassing body forever defying social mores, and threatening to erupt at any moment. A repeated cartoon motif was someone accidentally defecating in church.

Basically,
Hustler
's mission was to exhume and exhibit everything the bourgeois imagination had buried beneath heavy layers of shame, and as someone deeply constrained myself, whose inner life has been shaped by the very same repressions and pretensions
Hustler
is dedicated to mocking, the depths of its raunchiness often seemed directed at me personally. Reading it I felt implicated and exposed, even though theoretically I'm against all those repressions too. At least I
wanted
to be against them.

I immediately embarked on reading as many back issues of the magazine as I could locate. These were generally to be unearthed in the discount bins at the back of neighborhood porn stores—this was back in the pre-Internet days, when people had to actually leave their homes to procure porn. Hunting down old copies of
Hustler
became for a while my weekend hobby, the way some people go antiquing or collect Fiesta ware. Poring over my growing bounty of issues, I could see that
Hustler
was definitely upholding a venerable, centuries-long rabble-rousing tradition of political pornography, though it still completely grossed me out.

I wasn't completely unaware of the irony involved in surveying
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.

*   *   *

So there I was, a self-appointed expert on all things
Hustler
, seated across from the founding father himself in his thickly carpeted penthouse emporium atop the huge kidney-shaped office tower on Wilshire Boulevard, the one with his name emblazoned on the roof in towering letters that you can see for miles. If the magazine is a battleground of sex and vulgarity, Flynt's office was no less an assault on the senses: Tiffany lamps dueling with garish rococo furniture, gold and velvet-covered clashing everything—it looked like armies of rival interior decorators had fought and died on the job. The surprisingly charming Flynt presided over this expensive-looking mishmash from his famous gold-plated wheelchair (a long-ago assassination attempt by a professed white supremacist enraged by
Hustler
's interracial pictorials had left him paralyzed from the waist down
2
). All those years in the chair have given him an extreme case of middle-aged spread: his face has a melted quality, with only a hint of the self-confident cockiness from old pictures. Newly image-conscious with Forman's biopic about to be released, he told me immediately that he was on a diet. “I may be a cripple, but I don't have to be a fat cripple,” he chortled hoarsely.