Laura Kipnis, "Disgust and Desire: Hustler Magazine" and "How to Look at Pornography"

Laura Kipnis in the chapter of Disgust and Desire: Hustler Magazine argues that Larry Flynt reinforce the first amendment "freedom of the press" (Kipnis 128) by publishing his magazine Hustler. A lot of people are not very fond of Flynt because of his magazine "Hustler," which is generally considered obscene. Flynt's magazine contrasts to the features of "Playboy," which is more standardized and made for the "male gaze." Hustler, oppositely of Playboy, sets "its mission to disturb and unsettle its readers, both psychosexually and sociosexually, by interrogating the typical men's magazine conventions of sexuality" (Kipnis 131). Hustler magazine has depicted pornography in a different way, aiming away from the typical mainstream pornography usually produced. Flynt represents different body images and is devoted to produced "grossness": an obsessive focus on the lower half of the body and on the processes (and products) of elimination. Its joke techniques are based on exaggeration and inversion, which have long been staples of pornographic political satire"(Kipnis 132). Hustler magazine exposes how we look at pornography, as Kipnis goes on discussing how people distinguish what is proper and what is improper. In How to Look at Pornography, Kipnis talks about the case of Daniel DePew, who was arrested and is now serving a thirty-three year sentence for creating child pornography. DePew was arrested for exchanging his ideas with the officers and is considered as a pervert. Kipnis uses Freud to argue that "disgust so often seeps over into sex to the child's arousal during parental hygiene ministrations. There are certain things we just don't want to know about ourselves and our formations as selves. These seem to be precisely what pornography keeps shoving right back at us" (qtd in Kipnis 171). In the DePew case, Kipnis argues that the jury had sentenced DePew according to the "culture, in coming to terms with the existence of pornography" (Kipnis 205). As pornography has become a part of the capitalist world where it will not disappear anytime soon, Kipnis hopes that we are able to learn a "few things from its civil disobedience" (Kipnis 206).