I would commend this to your attention, you brave First Amendment Warriors of the 'Net, because I been in the front lines, and I know whereof I speak regarding censorship. Try to say something worth saying, as long as you're fighting for your freedom of "speech." OK? OK.
Hart Williams * Whereabouts Unknown * Hollywood, U.S.A.
It's tough for me to write angry. I'm more like Billy Budd, and become active and non-verbal when I can't take it anymore. But I am angry, and I'm going to get this out if it kills me.
Fuck you people.
No, not you, gentle readers. I'm talking about my 'peers' in the Industry. The writers, and filmmakers, and editors, and etceteras who portray human sexuality in the plastic arts, and are called by Phil Donahue and his ilk "Pornographers." Well, whatever we are: I have read, and I have seen things today that make me ashamed. And I almost wish, save for my love of tolerance, and hatred of censorship in any form, that Falwell would take the field, and take us back down the knucklehead road to the Inquisition. Because, in my Heart of Hearts, what I see out there makes me wish for the Torch, and the Pyre, and the Thumbscrew and the Iron Maiden.
Let me back up a little.
My roommates, Mark and Debbie, got back from Chicago this morning. Now Mark is perhaps the single most gifted writer it has ever been my privilege to know (with the sole exception of Ted Sturgeon, R.I.P.), and Debbie is a talented writer, who makes a fair living hustling articles from the major men's magazines.
What I read were: HOT TIMES (which I founded about a year ago, and have watched with the pain of a father as the sluggards and Neanderthals have hacked it into a fifth-rate hype rag for beater material), and two magazines, which, as competitors of this fine magazine, might sue me for what I'm about to say, so I'll call them DICKLESS and BRAINLESS -- closer to the truth.
Debbie has recent articles in both DICKLESS and BRAINLESS, so she bought copies (in the civilized world of another era, they send contributors' copies, understanding that impoverished writers have better things to do with their cash than fork over five bucks for each copy of a story they have in a magazine). And one of my peers -- whose identity was ascertained, hiding behind a pseudonym, because you can't hide your style, especially when it's as piss-poor as his is -- wrote an article lambasting critics (of which he is one) for the purpose, I presume, of making his new employers happy. He can't support himself through his writing, and just secured a gig as P.R. flack for one of the worst video companies in the skin racket.
Whoever this is, writing as "MAKO", says: " I feel that mostly every video as long as it has sex in it has something for someone. You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please them all the time." (sic) Uh, right, er, MAKO.
At first, I thought that the article was a lambasting of us poor critics. But poor MAKO must have stood under one brontosaurus too many, because after reading and re-reading the article, I not sure am being what place words saying Mako is trying to sense make of. Let's face it, the following is illiterate as hell, and should have gotten this poor Neanderthal held back in Remedial Stone Axes 101: "I have to assume that if a video gets a bad review it's because the reviewer did not like it, not that it is a bad video and if a video got a good review it may not be good, but it's got a better chance of being seen... Some people rent a tape based on a negative review, in some cases I guess, everything serves a purpose." (sic)
Well, fine. Mako will never rank with Kant as a thinker, and will never command Pee Wee Herman's gift of language. But I'm scared as hell. I've written a column called HART WILLIAMS PRESENTS which lampoons idiot use of language, as in BADLY MAULED CAMPER BEATS OFF GIANT GRIZZLY WITH WHISKEY BOTTLE -- but to see that level of incompetence become the industry standard makes me wonder if masturbation DOES cause insanity. Or at least post- facto mongoloidism.
And that's not the worst of it.
The attitude that men's magazine writers are taking towards sex and human sexuality (which has always been one of the great mysteries and joys of my existence) is reflected in the following randomly selected quotes from DICKLESS and BRAINLESS: "VIDEO JERKOFF ...HOT YOUNG TWATS EXPLORE LESBO LOVE ! ... TWATSQUEEZING, SWEATY, PANTING FOR DICK GIRLS ... HOT SQUATS ... SOLO STROKING ... THE HOTTEST SNATCH YOU'VE EVER SEEN! ... AMATEUR SLUT ... SCUM-SUCKING SCENES ... WAD-WALLOWING ... UNTIL SHE CAN SUCK MY ENTIRE COCK LIKE A SCUM DIVER ... OTHER SLUTS IN ASSEMBLY SPREAD THEIR PUSSIES ... STUFF IT UP MY SLIMY HOLE."
All right. I collect sexual colloquialisms. I think they're funny, and I have to admire the mindless genius of a term like "swallow my scum guppies, baby," or "she whizzed a few air- biscuits past his ears." We Americans have an addle-pated gift for language, given, and I don't want you to think I think these woids is doity, and should get dese guys mouths washed out. But if you look at the overall attitude towards sex, what you see is HATRED. I wonder if these people don't hate sex more than the Moral Majority. And although they use a slightly different pretext for it (hey, like, FREEDOM, instead of, say, "What if CHILDREN see this horrible filth") the attitude is shockingly similar. I have never been in bed with a woman (and I've been with a few) of whom I'd say I loved her "slimy hole," or "shooting my dick-scum into her meat slot." My trouser-snake only exists in conversation; I don't carry the thought into my bedroom.
All right. I'm calm, but I'm still pissed off.
I know a man who edits one of the worst offenders. He used to work with me years ago. If you read his copy closely, you'll see he's parodying that old HUSTLER style we were taught. When I worked with them -- a closely guarded secret -- we were told to do what they called "Dumb Guy" proofing. That means, you write to the level of a sixteen-year-old semi-illiterate from New Jersey. Unfortunately, a lot of people tried to copy that style, and now we get such masterworks of literary art as: "There's Gash Galore At the Jersey Shore!!!" (from the cover of DICKLESS)
Stop it, assholes. We've just finished fifteen long years of men and women tearing each other's hearts out over real and imagined 'oppression.' And we've come through the hell of Sexual Liberation -- where we all found out that yes, Virginia, nice girls can have bad sex. (And nice boys, too.) And goddamn it, we don't need this kind of sexual hatred foisted off on us as "entertainment for men." I know of habitual sexual offenders in the slammer who find this kind of crap offensive. So don't give me that First Amendment bullsquash, Brethren and Sistern. I'm all for the First Amendment. It suggests that the Good and True will win out in a fair fight. And I don't see where the habitual use by both female and male writers of offensive, stomach-churning terms for sexual activity gets any of us anywhere.
A monkey knows the difference between a good fuck and foul- smelling animal droppings. Sex is not smegma; it is not scum (unless it sits in foul water for a few weeks), and it is not ca- ca, pee-pee, or any other infantile term for waste products.
For the benefit of my fellow writers in the field who may know no better, I would like to point out that the anus produces shit, the urethra produces piss, and in sexual relations between men and women, neither product is conspicuous, except by its absence. If you hate sex, join a monastery, but don't write for the magazines. And quit cribbing your sexual terminology from Junior High School bathroom walls. What the fuck do they know about it?
All right. Now, one final point, and I'm out of here.
Years ago, when I got into the business, I noticed that it was de rigeur to use a pseudonym -- hearkening back to more unenlightened times when it was outlaw and illegal to write about those areas between the navel and the knees. Now, I'm noticing that pseudonyms are being used in a less noble manner. I know of at least two female writers who use 'cute' pseudonyms to hide behind, because they're really "too good" to write under their real names. Why, they're only in the business until the NEW YORKER buys one of their 'real' stories. This holds true for a lot of the guys, too.
A little moral courage, if you will, smut writers. If you're writing things you're ashamed of, why poison our minds with it? Why pollute our fantasies with the dark side of your psyches? Look, Charles Bukowski used to make me ill. But there is a strange and powerful fascination to his work. Or Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At least they had the balls to use their real names (or, in deference to the ladies, the labia). If your name is on it, you're responsible, at least to your own self-image. When you hide behind pseudonyms (like poor brain-damaged MAKO), well, I wonder how much of the filth and hatred that spews forth would come if you had the intestinal fortitude to put your moniker on the piece in question.
We have a right to discuss sex. It is not, in my experience, the clinical idiocy of Dr. Ruth, which makes people into psychic machines. And it is not the sniggering of the pre-adolescent. We have two-thousand years of serious "if you say that we'll burn your tongue, before we poke out your eyes" repression to face up to and deal with. If we take that opportunity lightly, we play into the hands of the folks who'd like Torquemada to stage a comeback.
So, it would be nice if, uh, we could show a little light on a subject that's been kept dark for too long. If my parents and their friends had known something about it, maybe I wouldn't have grown up in a broken home. I'd like to spare my children that.
That's not to say we should become wet blankets, or lose our sense of humor. But perhaps a little more sense of a writer as teacher, and a little less of writer as infantile self- aggrandizement machine. Somebody's got to do it, and that somebody's us.