Larry Flynt did not have a sacred cow and Larry Flynt wanted to offend everybody, but that always meant challenging most hierarchies of control. He continued to do this during his bounty-hunting years, when he offered million-dollar rewards for “verified” information of major political figures committing corrupt or immoral acts. Larry Flynt found one of the biggest bullies on the playground and took his shot. Outrageous and obviously false, the genius of the “ad” is that it demonstrates the concept of First Amendment free speech in its purest form: an affront, to power. Jerry Falwell-who used his immense power and clout with Ronald Reagan and the Republican party to marginalize gay people, AIDS victims, and, yes, women-was portrayed as a drunk who debauched his own mother in an outhouse. Falwell was the lawsuit triggered by the 1983 satirical Campari ad, in which Rev. The key moment in Flynt’s life, and the reason why he will live on forever in American jurisprudence and in law school textbooks, is his 1987 victory in the Supreme Court. The Obscene Man: Flynt defended himself against multiple obscenity lawsuits throughout his career. Flynt did not demand Simon & Schuster publish Barely Legal, or scream into Substack when Chester the Molester wasn’t given a full-page in the New York Times. That was okay you knew exactly where to find him. Flynt never demanded that his speech be given someone else’s platform, that Hustler not be sold in the seedy stores on the wrong side of town. Heightening contradictions like these, a serial transgressor, Flynt became a darling for critical theorists and cultural critics.īut what set him apart from the “intellectual dark web,” the contemporary contrarians who deem any consequence for their speech choices as censorship, is that Flynt was at constant odds with the power hierarchy, and not its product nor its defender. Keep in mind what a radical and provocative act that was, less than a decade after the Supreme Court struck down the country’s last miscegenation laws.Īs VICE pointed out in a 2016 profile, Hustler also risked alienating that target base-chauvinistic blue-collar heterosexual males-when it published photos of a pre-op trans woman. Flynt was confined to a gold-plated wheelchair after he was shot by a crazed white supremacist, who was upset that Hustler had published pictures of an interracial couple engaged in coitus. In a very Hustler way, Flynt used his magazine to challenge accepted norms of racial and gender hierarchy. Flynt is sort of Donald Trump-like in that way, but he is also very hard to categorize. Hustler’s founding ethos was a direct appeal to the “forgotten man” trope, the blue-collar man’s-man disturbed and disempowered by shifts in acceptable speech and thought. Flynt offered a rejection of both politically correct feminism and a repudiation of the smug, upper-crust liberal veneer of Playboy. Hustler was in every way a reactionary response to the social-justice warriors of the 1960s and 1970s. supremacist, upset that Hustler published pictures of an interracial couple, shot him. The Man With The Golden Wheelchair: Flynt was confined to a gold-plated wheelchair after a white. He was an antidote to the disingenuous and entitled contemporaries who cry victimhood at the first sniff of conflict, at the first challenge to their platform and authority. He took a bullet, went to jail, and gambled his fortune in commitment of this ideal. He refused to be truly and actually canceled. In this way, he offered an example of what “free speech” actually is, and how precarious the First Amendment can actually be. A generation before the online culture wars and bad-faith actors popularized and then mangled the term, Flynt was a target of what we might call “cancel culture.” Except that unlike Josh Hawley whining about a (briefly) revoked book deal or Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald sanctimoniously “self-canceling” from plush jobs at the pinnacle of the mainstream media hierarchy in order to further self-promote, Flynt, a constant underdog, suffered and survived real physical and professional violence in the name of free speech, that almost always challenged a more powerful adversary.
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