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But Steinem and other critics, notably Hanna Rosin in the New Republic, point out that the sex in Hustler is, in fact, often portrayed as bad and ugly and dirty, with women depicted in rape fantasies, smeared with excrement, likened literally to pieces of meat. Of course, a lot of Hustler's grosser features, like the infamous woman-in-a-meat-grinder cover (glimpsed briefly in the film), are supposed to be, in perhaps the loosest sense of the word yet devised, satiric. But as is the case with a lot of humor that allegedly pokes fun at demeaning racial stereotypes, the laughs don't always fall on the side of the angels. And speaking of demeaning racial stereotypes, the current issue includes two cartoons dealing with the supposed largeness of African-American penises and a curious TV spoof in which The Nanny's Fran Drescher "paints her butt with shoe polish. Then she sits on her big, black ass and collects [welfare] checks. Hilarity ensues." Well, maybe. But not in The People vs. Larry Flynt, which turns a blind eye to this recurrent aspect of the Flynt oeuvre.
Like journalists who pore over dirty magazines in order to debunk them, The People vs. Larry Flynt wants to have it both ways. A relevant point of comparison is with A Clockwork Orange, a far riskier and more complicated film that in arguing for the sanctity of free will dared to create a charismatic protagonist whose exercise of that free will was pointedly horrific. Larry Flynt has the nerve to argue for the sanctity of free speech but--for lack of a better word--censors its excesses. Fortunately, moviegoers who feel compelled to test their First Amendment absolutism need not despair. A more honest view of pornography and its practitioners can be found in the just released documentary Screwed, a portrait of Al Goldstein, who, as publisher of Screw magazine, sits even lower on the porno food chain than Flynt. As seen here in all his corpulent, wheezing glory, Goldstein is a man so full of animus toward women that he even refers to his mother as a "dumb c__." Now here is a movie unafraid to turn its audience off, box office be damned. But that's a free-speech right Hollywood has shown little interest in exercising.