Panelist Isn’t ‘Making Nice’ Over Flynt

The popular debate over “The People vs. Larry Flynt” has been tremendously revealing of cultural attitudes toward women and pornography, but you would never know that from John Balzar’s story (“Making Nice Over the 1st Amendment,” Calendar, Jan. 24). In presenting the discussion between director Milos Forman, Flynt lawyer Alan Isaacman and faculty and students at Annenberg School for Communication at USC as an evening of mere accolades, Balzar managed to erase from the event not only my pointed criticism of the film’s whitewashing of Larry Flynt but also my colleague Jonathan Kotler’s discussion of its simplification of legal issues. Readers of that article would never know that our discussion of the film covered, among other things, its failure to address the violence against women in the pages of Hustler and its use of class stereotypes to elevate Flynt as a working-class hero.

As the one woman on the panel, I found it particularly ironic that The Times chose to ignore my criticism of the film in the same way that the film itself ignores feminist concerns about pornography. The debate about pornography among feminists is complicated and not easily reduced to Hollywood formulas. Many feminists believe that the censorship of pornography is intolerable and that it’s a problem to make broad claims about pornography’s harmful potential for women. At the same time, we recognize that pornography is usually degrading and exploitative of women. Yet our responses don’t make good newspaper copy; if a feminist can’t be depicted in shrill attack mode, then why represent her at all?

The fact is that Larry Flynt has masterfully engineered his public rehabilitation. A book. A movie. Appearances on every talk show in the country. The new, improved Larry Flynt has been transformed from a man who has made billions through the exploitation of women into a likable operator who never harms anyone but himself. Audiences leave this movie feeling good about America, happy to know that even a scum bag like Larry Flynt has the right to speak.

This encourages us to forget the fact that speech is restricted every day in this country in small but very important ways. Every day, rights are violated that will never be appealed to the Supreme Court. Forman correctly points to the ways in which political and social repression often begin with sexual censorship and a desire to rid the streets of “perverts.” It is important to remember that repression is also much easier to accomplish when a culture is encouraged to feel smug about its level of tolerance.

Murita Sturken, assistant professor

USC Annenberg School for Communications