Mike Edison - Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers An American Tale of Sex and Wonder

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Table of Contents

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY MIKE EDISON

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World

Good taste is the enemy of creativity.

PABLO PICASSO

In!

You Know You Want It: A Brief History of Pornography

THERE HAS ALWAYS been smut.

Long before Founding Father and proto-pornographer Benjamin Franklin invented the American magazine, paving the way for such classic fare as Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, and Screw magazinesand the outlaws behind themsexually explicit images were a cherished part of the daily routine of the Paleolithic Homo sapiens, who would scrawl dirty pictures on the walls of his cave to brighten the place up.

Artalong with toolmaking, control of fire, and burying the deadis one of the key signs of behavioral modernity and a window into the worldview and lifestyle of the society that created it. Stone-age man, just like his progeny, was a sexy mutherfucker who liked to get his freak on.

Fifty thousand years later, the ancient Greeks knew few boundaries, decorating their ceramics with man-on-man, girl-on-girl, and man-on-boy action, along with copious depictions of plain old hetero fucking and sucking. The Romans, bowing to no one in the ancient worlds love of the profane, covered Pompeii with filthy doodlesthe sidewalks were engraved with testicles and penises to help would-be customers find their way to the local whorehouse. When Pompeii was excavated in the 1800s, producing a bumper crop of crockery, sculptures, and frescoes featuring every possible coital combination (not to mention murals that advertised the services of Pompeiis better brothels), those pieces of art deemed obscene and unfit for viewing by the simple-minded masseswhose sense of moral well-being, at least to the aristocracy, always seemed to hang in the balancewere decried as pornography and locked away in a secret museum in Italy.

Victorian England was so shocked by the flimsy sexual mores of the Romans that it promptly crapped its pantaloons and got busy writing the worlds first antipornography law, the Obscene Publications Law of 1857, to put the kibosh on works written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of a nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency in any well-regulated mind. A few years later, the law was rewritten to graciously allow the people who made the laws to keep their own dirty works with impunity and only target the more vulnerable, plebeian porn lovers, those whose minds are open to such immoral influences. It was the beginning of the institutionalized double standard.

Not to be outdone, an uptight American hemorrhoid named Anthony Comstock yelled and screamed and ranted and raved until he got his way and had his own law passed in 1873. The Comstock Actwhich would never really go away, kind of like a dormant case of hep Cput the hammer on anyone who

... shall offer to sell, or to lend, or to give away, or in any manner to exhibit, or shall otherwise publish or offer to publish in any manner, or shall have in his possession, for any such purpose or purposes, an obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material... [He] shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six months...

Among those who felt Comstocks wrath were medical students who received anatomy books by mail.

Beginning with Gutenbergs invention back in 1439, which may have been built with the best intentions of printing Bibles and disseminating the Lords word, crafty perverts started to poison the minds of the populace with pornography, first with lurid little pamphlets, racy novellas, and sordid comics, and eventually with bona fide eye-popping skin rags.

The camera was invented in 1832, followed quickly by the first picture of a naked lady. Eight years later the photographic negative was invented, which meant that photographs of naked ladies could now be reproduced ad infinitum. Men being men, and liking gadgets almost as much as sex, they went hog wild and modern pornography, alongside modern photography, was born.

It wasnt long after the invention of the halftone printing process in 1881, allowing for the inexpensive reproduction of photographs in printed matter, that American shores began receiving some frightfully wonderful literature from France featuring gloriously topless burlesque dolls and can-can girls. Comstock was already in a state of advanced ire at Americas moral deficits, so this latest development really put his knickers in a twist.

Comstock, a busybody painfully unaware of the medical benefits of masturbation, appointed himself chief inquisitor of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a cabal of like-minded eunuchs suffering from sexual inadequacy and chronic boredom. His swath of righteousness was positively Bunyon-esque: Legend has it that he destroyed fifteen tons of objectionable books and nearly four million pictures of varying degrees of naughtiness, not to mention put the cuffs on four thousand filthy-minded Americans. Still not satisfied, Comstock boasted that as a weeder in Gods garden, he was responsible for fifteen suicides.

But no amount of divine intervention was going to stop Americans from getting their smut, and in the end, the Comstock Act worked out about as well as other forms of American prohibition. Thousands of obscenity trials later, and despite the best efforts of puffed-up attorneys general, moral watch groups, television preachers, government tools, cranky feminists, scared conservatives, and politically correct liberals, America and the world would enter the twenty-first century with pornography of every conceivable quality and subject matter being more easily obtainable than ever before.

THE FIRST COPY of Playboy I ever saw belonged to my grandfather Hyman Drubner, whom we all called Pop. He had a big stash of them that were not so well hiddenat least, not so well that eleven-year-old me wasnt going to find them. They were in a big pile, a few years worth at least, behind the awful yellow couch he used to spend his Sundays on in the TV room, watching golf.

It didnt strike me as odd that he saved them, or that he kept them kinda-sorta out of the way. I have no idea what my grandmother thought of them.

I will tell you this about my grandfather: I had seen him at parties drinking and smoking, which I thought was pretty cool. He was kind of hip, or you could tell he was back whenhe was a very good dancer and always sang at weddings. Even though he was always surrounded by squares, you got the idea that he used to have more fun.

He had played trumpet in a speakeasy band back during Prohibition in Waterbury, Connecticut, which, as anyone there can tell you, used to be a wide-open town, with more places to get into trouble than most larger cities, so you can bet he had some secrets. This pile of magazines with the pictures of naked girls kind of fit into my whole image of him, on some subconscious level, at least, and even though I couldnt really parse all the signs and signifiers of the

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