IN PRAISE OF
indecency
IN PRAISE OF
indecency
THE LEADING INVESTIGATIVE
SATIRIST SOUNDS OFF ON HYPOCRISY, CENSORSHIP
AND FREE EXPRESSION
BY PAUL KRASSNER
For Margo St. James,
who continues to serve on the front lines
of the Women’s Liberation Movement
Copyright © 2009 by Paul Krassner
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press Inc.,
P.O. Box 14697, San Francisco, California 94114.
Printed in Canada.
Cover design: Scott Idleman
Cover photograph: Alfred Gescheidt/Getty Images
Text design: Frank Wiedemann
Cleis logo art: Juana Alicia
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Krassner, Paul.
In praise of indecency / Paul Krassner.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-57344-350-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Satire, American. I. Title.
PS3561.R286I5 2009
814’.54--dc22
2009006703
CONTENTS
Susie Bright Interviews Paul Krassner
Lenny Bruce Meets Blow Job Betty
In Praise of Indecency
Masturbation Helper
The Man Behind The Aristocrats
Showing Pink
Pee-Wee Herman Meets Pete Townshend
Satirical Prophecy
The Marriage of Hip-Hop and Pornography
Porn and the Manson Murders
Rape and Porn
Bizarre Sexually Oriented Spam Subject Lines
Meet an FBI Porn Squad Agent
Remembering Pubic Hair
The Taste of Sperm
Disinformation Porn
Hobo Sex and Crack Whore Confessions
Eating Shit for Fun and Profit
Porn Dogs
"I Fuck Dead People"
Porn Provides Product Placement
Addicted to Porn
The Governor, the Hooker and the Porn Star
A Letter to “Judge Porn”
Women and Porn
About The Author
SUSIE BRIGHT
INTERVIEWS PAUL KRASSNER
SUSIE BRIGHT INTERVIEWS PAUL KRASSNER
Susie: Paul, what’s the story of the first “dirty picture” you ever saw?
Paul: When I was eleven or twelve, my older brother, George, had somehow obtained nude photos of movie stars, like Rita Hayworth and Burt Lancaster.
“What are these for?” I asked.
“To give you a hard-on,” he replied.
And so we started selling them for 75 cents each. Our parents never knew. In retrospect, it seems like destiny that I ended up writing a column, “One Hand Jerking,” for AVN (Adult Video News) Online—a slick magazine that serves as a trade journal for the vast, lucrative Internet porn industry—where the content of In Praise of Indecency originally appeared.
Also in junior high school, my classmates were passing around these little three inches high by four inches wide anonymous, underground, eight-page comics, known as “fuck books,” consisting of comic-strip characters, famous actors, sports heroes, political figures, traveling salesmen and notorious criminals—all having sex, accompanied by vulgar speech balloons.
In 1997, Simon & Schuster published Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s. In an introductory essay, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Art Spiegelman wrote: "... This sort of psycho-sociological analysis is important, but inevitably sounds like a defensive ploy to inject Socially Redeeming Value into the concupiscent stew. Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist and, briefly, Hustler, aptly insisted that ‘appealing to the prurient interest is a socially redeeming value.’”
Susie: You were a child prodigy at the violin... was there any erotic aspect to playing the strings, or learning that discipline, obvious or not so obvious?
Paul: I began playing the violin when I was three years old, practiced myself right out of my childhood, and didn’t really wake up to my own existence until I was six, onstage, playing the “Vivaldi Concerto in A Minor,” in the process of becoming the youngest concert artist ever to perform at Carnegie Hall. There was nothing erotic about it.
However, the next year, I saw my first movie, Intermezzo. It was also Ingrid Bergman’s first movie. She fell in love with her violin teacher, and I fell in love with the background-music theme, the song “Intermezzo.” I couldn’t fathom why it just felt so good to hear this specific combination of notes in a certain order with a particular rhythm, but it gave me such pleasure to keep humming that sweet melody over and over to myself. It was like having a secret companion. Now that was an erotic experience, not to my genitals but to the depths of my soul. I couldn’t wait to tell my violin teacher that I wanted to learn how to play “Intermezzo.” But he obviously didn’t share my enthusiasm. ‘“Intermezzo?”’ he sneered. “That’s not right for you.” His words reverberated in my heart. That’s not right for you! How could he know what was right for me? This wasn’t merely a turndown of my request. It was a universal declaration of war upon the individual.
Susie: So many people have a Deep Throat or Linda Lovelace story. I washed her car, for a few bucks, parked up the street, when I was in high school. My first acid trip coincided with seeing her introduce Deep Purple at a monster rock fest on a desert racetrack.... What’s yours?
Paul: Deep Throat inspired me to write a little book—Tales of Tongue Fu, a New Age media satire about a man with a 15-inch tongue—which has just been republished. In this fable, Tongue Fu sees the movie and considers Linda Lovelace to be his soul mate because her clitoris is in her throat.
Susie: And really... have you ever been in a porn film?
Paul: No, not that I know of... unless, of course, there was a hidden camera in the room.
Susie: What is the best drug, in your experience, to accompany sex? The worst? I asked a group of older folks once, about their favorite combo, and they said: pot and espresso.
Paul: The best enhancer has always been marijuana, combined with LSD, and later on a terrific aphrodisiac called MDA— which would have been distributed in America by one of Charles Manson’s victims—and, more recently, good old Ecstasy. I was once going to be in a threesome with two ex-girlfriends, but we had all ingested Quaaludes and fell asleep. That turned out to be the worst.
Susie: Are you jealous, or have you been attracted to jealous lovers? What is your masochism tango on the monogamy question?
Paul: As for jealousy, I only experienced it when I felt insecure in a relationship. And I was distracted by jealous lovers who kept needing reassurance. As for “masochism tango,” well, that’s a loaded question. I’m totally pro-choice about abortion rights, drug use, ice-cream flavors and sexual practices. So, in my life, there have been times when I’ve enjoyed promiscuity, other times when I’ve enjoyed celibacy, and currently I’m enjoying monogamy with my wife, Nancy, not because of any wedding vows we took—obviously, marital vow-taking has never prevented adultery—but rather because it’s my choice.
Susie: When you were a kid, who did you think were the “sexiest” stars?
Paul: Ann Sheridan was an actress who became my first fantasy babe.
Susie: How did that chang
e, or not, as you grew up?
Paul: Later it was Brigitte Bardot. And the latest was Halle Berry.
Susie: Women often say, when asked why they were attracted to a man, that “he was funny, he made me laugh.” Not so many men would answer that way when asked about a woman’s appeal. What do you make of that?
Paul: Well, virtually every man I know is attracted by a woman’s sense of humor. Personally, I find it almost inextricable from physical attraction. Occasionally, in fact, when a woman has made me laugh, I’ve actually gotten an erection.
Susie: Did you ever give your daughter sexual or romantic advice? What was the result?
Paul: Her mother, Jeanne, took care of all that stuff. A few years after our marriage broke up, when Holly was seven, I moved from New York to San Francisco. We stayed in touch by mail and phone, she would stay with me on her school vacations, and I would come to New York a few times every year. She came to live with me for a whole year when she was eleven, accompanied me on a shamans and healers trek in Ecuador when she was fifteen, and lived with me again for a few years when she was seventeen.
When Holly was ten, on one of my trips to New York, I took her and Jeanne out for dinner.
“Mommy told me all about sex,” she confided in the restaurant.
“Oh, really? What did you learn?”
“Oh, she told me about orgasms and blow jobs.”
I blushed. They laughed.
One evening, when she was sixteen, Holly called me. “Hold on a second,” she said, then held her phone to the speaker of her stereo, and I heard Carly Simon singing, “Daddy, I’m no virgin, and I’ve already waited too long....” Then Holly hung up quickly. I began to laugh and cry simultaneously. I was laughing at the creative way she had chosen to share this news—my generation had avoided communicating with parents about sex altogether—and I guess maybe I was crying because I never got any when I was sixteen. The sexual revolution had still been just a horny dream back then. Now I was delighted to see its legacy in action, yet I also felt a certain vestigial resentment. “Why, these young kids today, they just don’t appreciate the joy of yearning.” I had to be careful not to let the memory of my own blue balls turn into sour grapes.
When Holly visited me for the Thanksgiving holidays that year, I teased her, “Did you bring your diaphragm?”
“Oh, Daddy,” she responded, “even if I fall in love with someone, it doesn’t mean we have to go to bed right away.”
She had found her own place on the spectrum between abstinence and promiscuity.
LENNY BRUCE
MEETS BLOW JOB BETTY
LENNY BRUCE MEETS BLOW JOB BETTY
As a friend of Lenny Bruce, as well as the editor of his autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, I would’ve preferred this little story to have been included in the book from Lenny’s point of view, but anyway...
I remember sitting in an office with a few Playboy attorneys. They were anxious to avoid libel, so they kept changing the name of any person in the original manuscript who might bring suit. For example, Lenny had mentioned an individual called Blow Job Betty, and the lawyers were afraid she would sue.
“You must be kidding,” I said. “Do you really believe anybody would come out and admit that she was known as Blow Job Betty?” The book ended with a montage of Lenny’s life experiences, cultural icons, folklore and urban myths:
“My friend Paul Krassner once asked me what I’ve been influenced by in my work.
“I have been influenced by my father telling me that my back would become crooked because of my maniacal desire to masturbate; by reading ‘Gloriosky, Zero’ in Annie Rooney; by listening to Uncle Don and Clifford Brown; by smelling the burnt shell powder at Anzio and Salerno; torching for my ex-wife; giving money to Moondog as he played the upturned pails around the corner from Hanson’s at 51st and Broadway; getting hot looking at Popeye and Toots and Caspar and Chris Crustie years ago; hearing stories about a pill they can put in the gas tank with water but ‘the big companies’ won’t let it out—the same big companies that have the tire that lasts forever—and the Viper’s favorite fantasy: ‘Marijuana could be legal, but the big liquor companies won’t let it happen; [trumpet player] Harry James has cancer on his lip; Dinah Shore has a colored baby; Irving Berlin didn’t write all those songs, he’s got a guy locked in the closet; colored people have a special odor.’
“It was an absurd question. I am influenced by every second of my waking hour.”
The lawyers edited Harry James and Dinah Shore out of that paragraph, but for some unfathomable reason, Irving Berlin remained. There was one incident, which they decided to omit entirely from the book. Lenny had been working at Le Bistro, a night club in Atlantic City. During his performance, he asked for a cigarette from anyone in the audience. Basketball star Wilt Chamberlain happened to be there. He lit a cigarette and handed it up to the stage.
“Did you see that?” Lenny whispered into the microphone. “He nigger-lipped it....”
Lenny and I had an unspoken agreement that there would be nothing in the book about his use of drugs, because it could be used against him by law enforcement. When I first met him, he would shoot up in the hotel bathroom with the door closed, but now he just sat on his bed and casually fixed up while we were talking. That’s what we had been doing one time when Lenny nodded out, the needle still stuck in his arm.
Suddenly the phone rang and startled him. His arm flailed, and the hypodermic came flying across the room, hitting the wall like a dart just a few feet from the easy chair in which I sat uneasily. Lenny picked up the phone. It was Blow Job Betty, calling from the lobby. She came up on the elevator and went down on Lenny after some kissing. In front of me.
Lenny had introduced us. “This is Paul, he’s interviewing me.” At one point, while she was giving him head, Lenny and I made eye contact. He looked at me quizzically, and his eyes said, “I’m not usually an exhibitionist.”
My eyes replied, “And I’m not usually a voyeur.”
A little later, Lenny said to her, “I really wanna fuck you now.”
Blow Job Betty gestured toward me and said, “In front of him?”
“Okay, Paul,” said Lenny, “I guess the interview is over now.”
In retrospect, I understand the mindset of Bill Clinton when he testified under oath that he “never had sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” The president had simply made the same distinction between intercourse and oral sex that Blow Job Betty had made.
Incidentally, those Playboy lawyers insisted on changing Blow Job Betty’s name to Go Down Gussie.
“I hope there actually is somebody out there named Go Down Gussie,” I told them, “and I hope that she sues Playboy for invasion of privacy.”
IN PRAISE OF INDECENCY
IN PRAISE OF INDECENCY
The late Harry Reasoner, who was an ABC news anchor and a Sixty Minutes correspondent, wrote in his 1981 memoir, Before the Colors Fade:
“I’ve only been aware of two figures in the news during my career with whom I would not have shaken hands if called to deal with them professionally. I suppose that what Thomas Jefferson called a decent respect for the opinion of mankind requires me to identify those two. They were Senator Joseph McCarthy and a man named Paul Krassner or something like that who published a magazine called The Realist in the 1960s. I guess everyone knows who McCarthy was. Krassner and his Realist were part of a ‘60s fad—publications attacking the values of the establishment—which produced some very good papers and some very bad ones. Krassner not only attacked establishment values; he attacked decency in general, notably with an alleged ‘lost chapter’ from William Manchester’s book, The Death of a President.”
I appreciated Reasoner’s unintentional irony—I had started as a political satirist in college, poking fun at McCarthyism—but now I resented being linked with McCarthy. He had senatorial immunity for his libels. I risked lawsuits for what I published. What I really wanted to do was crash a
party where Reasoner would be. “Excuse me, Mr. Reasoner,” I would have said, “I just wanted to say how much I enjoy your work on Sixty Minutes.” And then, as a photographer captured us shaking hands, I would add, “I’m glad to meet you. My name is Paul Krassner or something like that.” Instead, in 1984, when my one-person show opened, I decided to call it Attacking Decency in General. It ran for six months, and I received awards from the L.A. Weekly and Drama-Logue. That was my kind of revenge.
Decency is, of course, a sublimely subjective perception. And so arbitrary. In 1964, Lenny Bruce was found guilty of an “indecent performance” at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. In 2003, New York Governor George Pataki granted Bruce a posthumous pardon—but it was in the context of justifying the invasion of Iraq. “Freedom of speech is one of the great American liberties,” Pataki said, “and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terrorism.” Lenny would have been outraged.
Earlier that year, when rock-star/activist Bono received an award at the Golden Globes ceremony, he said, “This is really, really fucking brilliant.” The FCC ruled that he had not violated broadcast standards, because his use of the offending word was “unfortunate,” but “isolated and nonsexual.” You see, it was merely an “exclamative” adjective. The FCC did not consider Bono’s utterance to be indecent because, in context, he obviously didn’t use the word “fucking” to “describe sexual or excretory organs or activities.”
But in 2004, during a duet with Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake sang the lyric, “Gonna have you naked by the end of this song,” and in what was defended as “a wardrobe malfunction,” exposed her breast for 9/16th of a second during the halftime extravaganza at the Super Bowl. I had never seen the media make such a mountain out of an implant.
In 2007, a CBS lawyer argued unsuccessfully that the network shouldn’t be fined $550,000 for Jackson’s breast-baring because it was fleeting, isolated and unauthorized. Nevertheless, that Nipplegate moment had provided a perfect excuse to crack down on indecency during an election year. So the FCC reversed their own decision, contending that Bono’s utterance of “fucking brilliant” was “indecent and profane” after all.
In Praise of Indecency Page 1
