hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2475.txt

Episode: 2475
Title: HPR2475: Information Underground -- Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2475/hpr2475.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:49:45

---

This in HP are episode 2475 entitled Information Underground, Sex, Bloods, and Rocknroll, and
in part of the series Information Underground.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks, and in about 43 minutes long, and Karim an exquisite
flag.
The summary is...
Did I you guys end up in the first sexual revolution in America, back your impregnation?
Today's show is licensed under a CC hero license.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Welcome listeners to Information Underground and Hacker Public Radio.
I'm Deep Geek and I have with me Lost in Drunks.
Hello everyone.
And Klaatu.
Hello everybody.
And today what the topic I would like to open up is the roaring 20s and prohibition
error as the first sexual revolution.
So a quick note on the beginning of this topic we were recording another episode where
Hugh Hefner came up in a poor light and I felt the need to defend him in some way.
And so I mentioned that he was the forerunner of the second American sexual revolution.
And you might say to yourself, what, the second sexual revolution?
Wasn't the only one the hippies with the sex and the drugs in the Rocknroll in the sixties?
Well it happened before.
I am utterly fascinated by the American prohibition of alcohol in the years 1920 to 1933 because
it is a culmination of many things and truly a changed America's character.
America had a truly puritanical character with most of the features we today call patriarchical.
Women were non-working, stay at home home makers with zero political say.
The group was a formal process involving permissions and shaperoning prior to the 1920s.
According to one survey, only 14% of women had premarital sex before the age of 25 while
34% of women who came of age in the 1910s and 20s reported that they had lost their
virginity prior to marriage.
The biggest problem in the eyes of many housewives prior to the 20s were the saloons.
30 male only establishments where many married men would literally drink away the money needed
for the household.
This led to a temperance movement aimed against saloons.
However, when the Christian women's temperance movement found allies with rural price and
ethics about sobriety coupled with anti-immigrant and anti-black prejudices, a powerful political
force was established for the 18th amendment.
Life's thought they would get rid of the saloon, white's thought blacks would get deprived
of drink, Americans thought immigrants would be deprived of drink, soft liquor drinkers thought
hard liquor was being illegalized, people were truly surprised that after the 18th amendment
and the Volsette act that they were deprived of their own favorite vice as well as their perceived
enemies.
Here's the rub, speak easy rose, simultaneously with the 19th amendment women having the
right to vote.
This resulting in modern political women being a possibility.
Speak easy didn't care about the gender of their clients and this led to dating because
men and women could now escape being shaperoned, a private movie and dinner and drink was now
possible and with taxis and cause private transport while out in public was a possibility
too.
Prohibition, the first sexual revolution, jazz was the rock and roll, liquor was the
drugs and flappers were the sex.
After prohibition we had dating but we still had an amazingly repressive sexual attitude
that would not change until a normalization of pornography in the late 50s.
This led to an open dialogue about sexuality and a variety of changes quickly on the heels
of the normalization of pornography came shifts in attitude regarding fantasy and masturbation,
women's sexuality, prematial sexuality and homosexuality.
And that's how I want to get into the topic and I suppose guys this could go both ways
both in deeper into the prohibition side of the topic and into the change in American
womanhood but let's go from here.
Well I would like first off before we dive into the history of this.
I would like you to expand a bit on your defense of Hugh Hefner and how prohibition links
to the second sexual revolution because I think for a lot of people that thread might
be a little bit thin or a little bit hard to see.
Well Hugh Hefner got into the publishing industry through S. Quire magazine, a well-known
men's magazine but he was also deeply disappointed with it so he slurred out to start his own
magazine and pornography was taboo until that point until he came on the scene.
But he bought with it a philosophical basis and a literary character as well as pictures
of the most beautiful woman of the day in the roar.
And I remember seeing cartoons about playboy magazine from the fifties, literally cartoons
like political kind of cartoons showing men waiting for a train and they would have the
nose and would copy a playboy while they waited and the thought bubble would say, yes
this is okay now, you know.
But it greases a groove therefore Hugh Hefner kind of, if there was a boy with the finger
and the die, he's the one who pulled it away and that's my chief defense of Hugh Hefner.
Okay.
Jumping back again a bit.
Now what exactly is unclear about the role of flappers?
Oh, nothing.
I mean, I can go on.
Yeah, no, I mean, they were raw sexuality for the time.
Yeah.
There's no argument to that at all.
Just for the sake of the listeners, we were chatting about this through email for a couple
of weeks actually leading up to this episode.
And one of the things that I mentioned in an email to DeepGeek was I'd like to see
a little light shed on, now during prohibition, during the rise of prohibition, that is where
the power of American gangsters really came into play.
You know, that's the legacy of the American mafia.
It really rose during prohibition in America during that time.
And in addition to alcohol, they got into an awful lot of other areas including gambling,
prostitution and pornography.
Now pornography and the rise of video or I should say film and photography during this
time period and how much easier and smaller all of this equipment became how much easier
it was to operate so that you didn't have to be a photographic expert anymore to actually
use a camera.
The Codec Brownie had popped up at some point during this time.
And pornography became more widespread and kind of entrenched in American culture.
And a lot of that was controlled by the gangsters during the same time period.
So that you had to speak easy that were promoting a, you know, a more sexually free lifestyle.
You also had gangsters very often gangsters or at least criminal elements that were also
providing pornography at the same time period.
Now we go like say 1925.
We go from pornography being illegal pretty much everywhere, probably pretty much everywhere
in the world at that time to 1955 is that give a give a take when Playboy came out something.
I think it was 55, I think it was 52 that Denmark legalized it.
Okay.
I have a book on that someplace in here.
Okay.
30 years we go from a social mindset or a social view where everything about the human
body except your face, your hands and your feet and your feet have to be in shoes.
All of you know everything.
That was the Victorian standard.
Yeah.
Those were Victorian standards.
And we go from that mindset where those were the only things you could show anybody
ever to Hugh Hefner in 30 short years.
So well, I mean, I think this is an interesting point about the control of all of this, about
it being the mafia or whatever because my problem with Playboy and Hugh Hefner and that sort
of industry is that we all have assets that we can capitalize on whether they're natural
skills or whether you don't feel like you have natural skills, but you have a great
body or whatever.
We all have something, right?
And one of the most basic things that we all have is sex and there's a market for sex.
There's a desire for sex.
So it's something that you could feasibly bargain with if it were permitted, but something
back way back in history, whether it was, I don't know, you can blame religion, you can
blame capitalism, you can blame mind control, the illuminati, whatever.
Something said, oh no, you can't do that.
You can use whatever you want, but not your body.
That's a bad thing.
That's evil.
Yeah.
And that's how it's been.
That's how it's been.
So I don't really see sort of one guy, Hugh Hefner, capitalizing on that control as actually
being very praiseworthy.
And I almost, I would equate him with the mafia because they kind of were doing the same
thing, right?
They were like, oh, you guys made drinking illegal?
Well, we'll manufacture and sell the alcohol then, you know, and it's kind of like that
same thing.
They're finding loopholes, but the loopholes are always coming back for their benefit.
And I don't, I don't find that praiseworthy.
I don't find it praiseworthy that Bill Gates put a PC in every home because he was a, I
think he's an evil guy.
I don't find it praiseworthy that Steve Jobs made a happy computer.
I don't find it praiseworthy that Napoleon unified the culture of Europe by bringing war
throughout the whole thing.
You know, it's just like, I don't, I don't look at the result and say, oh, you guys did
a good job because they did it for themselves.
So you feel their motivation matters more than the accomplishment?
Yeah, because I think that the accompli, I don't think that they solved the problem.
I think they brought about like Debik says a conversation and they kind of made it more
acceptable, but it's, it's not more acceptable, right?
Because playboy, yes, sure, they've, it's made pornography somewhat more acceptable.
I mean, certainly it's prolific.
It's not illegal.
But I mean, the base, the, the problem still exists and that is that some people somewhere
are saying, hey, you people, you have to be subject to what we say is okay.
And we, we, we say pornography is okay now, but prostitution is still not okay.
You still can't sell your actual body, but you can sell pictures of your body.
That's, you know, and it's just, it's this deep rooted problem of someone else being
in control over what we can or cannot do.
That problem is deep rooted, but I mean, you know, the interesting thing is the function
that he serves as an icon and it goes back also to the first playboy centafold Marilyn
Monroe.
And there's no reason why you have to think of her as the first sex symbol either, you
know, but that's, you know, something that we assigned to their character or their role.
Well, she obviously she wasn't the first sex symbol.
I mean, you, you were just talking about the flappers.
You go back to that era and there were tons of movie stars who were considered sex
symbols at the time.
Josephine Baker, too.
Oh, there you go.
Fantastic.
She goes, she goes back.
Fantastic.
Yeah, she was amazing.
And she, I mean, if you see any pictures of her dancing today and there is some video
as well, or film that survived, I mean, that was an incredibly good looking woman.
She's, yes.
Incredibly hot, even today by today's standards.
So you know, Marilyn didn't create that whole concept, however, she was the sex symbol
of the day.
And the fact that she chose to reveal her, you know, her body in the nude at that time
was considered revolutionary and it helped to add to her mystique and her kind of legend
as it were.
I think, I think a colleague of mine said it very well that at that juncture and time
in America, we needed to have a very high visibility sex object.
So there.
And I think that, I, I think glad to hit on the right terminology for this.
I think that these people, Hugh Hefner, Marilyn Monroe, these people helped open a dialogue,
a general way that we can discuss and approach these changes in our societies, changes that
clearly society wanted.
I mean, you can argue whether or not someone like Hugh Hefner was a good person, but I don't
think that anyone today, any reasonable person today would look at a woman who wants to
wear a tank top on a hot summer day as being immoral or terrible, but you go back a few
years before Hefner.
And if a woman walked around like that, she would have been arrested for indecent exposure.
Now, I've seen photographs from the 1930s where people were being ticketed on Coney Island
Beach in New York City for wearing, quote, unquote, risqué bathing suits, right?
But those bathing suits where they were actually measuring from decap to bond with the
suit.
Exactly.
Oh, my God.
That's that picture is so funny.
Yeah.
And it wasn't, it wasn't just women.
Men were, if men were wearing just their trunks without a top on, they were getting tickets.
And in such a short time, they went from that to something far less restrictive.
By that standard, you know, most women are walking around almost naked today.
And many of the men as well.
And I don't think anybody would want to go back to a time period when that was different.
Any reasonable person anyway would want to go back to a time period where that was considered
the proper thing in society.
Now, you can wear whatever you want that makes you comfortable.
But I would never want to live in a society that would you were person negatively for wearing
comfortable clothing.
Yeah.
Neither would I.
I'm 100% with you on this one.
Yeah.
But I really, I really think that the roaring 20s and the prohibition wore the turning point
and did to get back to Kletto's point.
No one liked gangsters until prohibition when they became kind of a, I guess you would
call it a Robin Hood-esque figure because there are some law passed and people saw that
the law was bad way before the halls of government admitted it was bad.
And the gangsters were buying it and defying it openly.
And people appreciated it and it made the gangsters less evil in their eyes.
How much that applies to monographers, I don't know, but that's interesting that the
law was actually that bad that it made.
The gangsters look good.
Deep kick.
In my mind, speakeasies, they were very busy places, but they were sort of like underground
raves might be considered today, right?
Yes.
Yes.
And underground raves, while they might have a significant impact culturally on the wider
dialogue because almost everybody has heard about them, but I don't know very many people
who have actually ever been to one.
One of those things.
I'm wondering.
I've been to a BAM.
I don't know what that is.
A BAM is when you and five to ten friends or so decide to have a street party, a block
party in an impromptu manner and you literally pull into a cul-de-sac blocking the world last
year radios begin drinking publicly and dancing in the street until they get afraid that the
cops are about to come and you split.
So I've done that.
It's a BAM.
It's BAM.
You're there.
Bam, you're out.
Okay.
Well, I've never done that.
But my point is speakeasies had a major, major impact on American culture, but how many
people actually participated?
Can we assume that the average person who had to get up and go to work the next day probably
never went to one of these things?
They even to note, the drinks were priced, similarly, what drinks are priced now.
Probably there was a large proportion of people who were living vicariously through
them, who knew of them, you know, and some of it depended on the city.
I mean, some of the brownstones, there are stories of brownstones in Manhattan that had
to put up signs that said we are not at speakeasy, we're trying to sleep, please do not knock,
you know.
I mean, New York, New York, New York, New York, I should say, has always been a very wet
city.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know how much it carries over to other places, but the speakeasy itself is not
isolated to the only venue for drinking.
No, I know.
In fact, it was probably in the minority when it came to the amount of alcohol that was
being consumed.
I know for a fact that there was a lively, well, a lively gray area prescription business
being done by many doctors who were prescribing alcohol for, quote unquote, medicinal purposes.
That was a phenomena that led to the expansion of Walgreens from a chain of 25 stores to
what it is today.
They owe it to the fear that was written into the Vulsad Act for massive delirium
trements, and doctors were allowed to prescribe, and it was legal.
And some of the prescriptions are actually on the internet.
You could read them.
They're funny, as in take one ounce per hour for stimulation until stimulated.
It's absolutely hysterical.
What interests me more than that?
And actually I happen to like prohibition error drinks, something I picked up at my father's
knee.
God blesses.
God blesses.
You mean cocktail recipes, you mean?
Yeah.
There were two.
One was called the three mile limit and the 12 mile limit.
Have you heard these terms?
If heard the terms, I've never heard of those cocktails, though.
Yeah.
They're rum and brandy concoctions.
The three mile limit that Coast Guard was founded, you know, maybe three years before prohibition.
And you could go out three miles and be in no man's land in the other little waters
at that point.
You're in international waters.
And so people would sub party boats and you want to talk about burdellos and bars and gambling
establishments.
Well, they became ships out at sea that were cities of vice, little mini-loss vegasis floating
three miles off the shore.
And people would take a 20, 20 minute steamboat right out to them.
So the Coast Guard still trying to figure out how to do their job in four or five years
into prohibition.
They made it the 12 mile limit and essentially quadrupled the area of sea that the Coast
Guard was supposed to be patrolling, making it even easier for nautical rum runners to
do their job because they were spread that much more.
Another interesting thing is that American prohibition as opposed to say Canadian prohibition
at that time or even current day Canada still has prohibition in the northern territories.
American prohibition didn't illegalize possession.
Just distribution.
Yeah.
Just distribution.
That's why moonshine was a thing, right?
Moonshine or bathtub whiskey, I get what it bathed something gin.
Those things have different roots.
Yeah.
And production was still illegal too.
I believe you.
Oh, yeah.
Actually, hard liquor.
It's still illegal.
Technically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can, you can make well, in our country, not clatous.
Oh, I admit I have not looked into my own.
Your current country, my friend, is one of the few that allows hobbyist distilling.
Wow.
Wow.
I did not know this.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
But the reason that was written in was more for the rich people because establishments like
the Harvard Club, which perfectly the Boston Harvard Club actually stockpiled 14 years
of liquor, leading up to the implementation of the Volstad Act.
So if you were in the right social class, you were legally allowed to drink from the
stockpile and you could actually write out the whole noble experiment as it was called
at the time, which is funny.
Apparently, the northern provinces of Canada where they have Eskimos have prohibition and
disastrously possession is outlawed.
And can you imagine why it's disastrous?
It's the same issue I would imagine that we have with prohibition era gangsters.
By outlawing something that there's a very, very clear demand for and I would imagine
up there, the area is fairly hard to patrol.
You end up creating a criminal class and opportunistic people are going to serve that market.
Yeah.
But the reason why possession, the problem the Canadian and the France that have a possession
is this, if you take as an example, and I saw this on a vice news reel, a vice news
did a special on this, a liquor runner will say go to South Canada and pick up a bottle
of Spurnoff, which is a Connecticut vodka, and that will cost $75, transport it north,
and now it's worth $575, but possession is illegal.
So when he sells it, they have to drink it all in one blast.
Wow.
So it creates a binge drinking, which has all those negative effects on the consumer at
that point.
So if you want to have a drink, you have to have $25 because you don't want to get caught
having owning the thing.
Well, I live in Arizona and the Navajo and Apache reservations are very nearby.
And as anyone who knows anything about modern or even historical Indian culture in the
United States, alcoholism is a massive, massive problem among Native Americans.
So I would imagine the same as, you know, true of indigenous Canadians as well.
I mean, I know it's a big problem in Alaska, so it has to be a big problem in Canada as
well.
They do have a drinking problem.
Getting back to the sexual revolution or the first sexual revolution and then our connection
to the second one, what do you think the legacy of the first sexual revolution up to
and through prohibition?
What do you think that legacy was and how did it set the stage for someone like you have
there?
Oh, the legacy was what the character Tom and the great gaspie called the problem of the
modern woman.
You know, I don't know how familiar with the novel, but I read it a long time ago.
Yeah, the character Tom was against the modern woman, which was she could drink and smoke
and vote and have her own affair.
If it was really Tom's problem, we'll find out later.
So you believe that the fact that women were less disenfranchised, if we put it that way?
It was a watershed moment for women's disenfranchisement because of what male culture was, male
working class culture was where men were expected to work hard, labor hard, and were given
the privilege of drinking hard.
And now the woman's domain was now allowed to penetrate the public drinking sphere.
That was a watershed event.
So now we're getting into sexual politics and really gender politics as well, I would
imagine, right?
We're not, I mean, at this stage trying to understand where the sexual revolution of
the 60s really came from, we have to probably understand where the ability for women to
have some sort of power for themselves as opposed to the only power they were given
was to serve the men in their lives.
As house makers, as home makers, as home makers.
Now first off, I would like to point out that much of what we're talking about in my opinion,
anyway, much of what we're talking about when it comes to how women were, they were
just seen as wives and mothers and that's all they did.
That was a social perception, but the reality was that many, many women, many women, in fact,
almost every woman who was not comfortably middle class was forced to work for their
living, even if their husbands were also gainfully employed because poverty being what it was,
at least in the United States, it forced women into sweatshops, it forced them into the
fields, it forced them into all sorts of day long labor.
And that was primarily, that's what they did all their lives and they were also responsible
for the children and for cooking and cleaning at home.
So I think it's probably a good idea to point out that much of what we're talking about
was social perception, but the reality, a lot of women probably somewhere in prohibition
era probably looked at these guys who worked all day, worked really hard, were allowed
to drink, were allowed to party and said, I've worked all day, where's my time off?
That's a really good point.
That is an excellent point, actually, but are you calling it pre-1920s for torn woman
as a homemaker only a myth loss from Bronx?
I think it's an archetype.
I think you can always go back and find tons and tons of examples that support it.
I also think that reality doesn't always reflect social perception, I strongly agree.
For example, and not to get super political, but the political landscape in the United
States is quite fractious right now.
We have a president who was voted in and many people don't like him right now.
We have other people that are in great support of him, but in point of fact, most of the people
that I speak to on a daily basis in the United States are not feeling fractious, they're
not angry at everybody, they're not fighting all the time.
Much of what our social perception is isn't necessarily reflected on the ground.
At ground level, we're not really that way.
That just seems to be how we see ourselves, and I think much of our perception of history
is a reflection of social perception and not necessarily reality.
I don't know if that makes any sense.
No, it makes a lot of sense, and I'm right with you.
I think, yeah, I've always kind of hated history class in school because of that reason.
It was just so—it was always such a blanket statement being made.
It was always like, everyone at this time was exactly like this, and you just kind of
knows in the back of your head that that's not everybody's experience, and when people
look back at the—even people looking back at the 80s and 90s now, they characterize
it in a certain way, and I was growing up, so maybe I wasn't aware of certain things,
but certainly in the 90s, I was lucid, and a lot of the cliches about that just aren't—it's
just like that wasn't my experience, it's just, yeah, it's inaccurate.
I've had that experience when I released 80s albums.
Yeah, exactly.
We would hate tell variety, yeah, that wasn't what it was like.
Well, even things—you know, not to rag on the 80s anymore because I hated the 80s,
but, you know, even things like fashion.
I mean, they'll show women's with the big hair and the jackets with the big shoulders
and portray that as average 80s fashion, and I can tell you for a fact, back in the 80s,
when you saw a woman dress like that, you laughed out loud even back then because it
looked silly even then.
Yes, it might have been, quote, unquote, fashionable, but the average woman never wore
clothes like that, except maybe on a dare or going out with their friends and they really
wanted to dial up and look modern or, quite frankly, the women I knew never dressed like
that.
Again, we look at that, and that's the 80s, that's what we see as the 80s, you know?
My high school scene was deeply populated by big hair girls with hair dryer shrunk
quarter-orchains.
Again, there's going to be certain fashions and stuff like that, but I've also seen tons
of photos from the 50s and 60s, you know, these characters that, you know, since we know
it's from the 50s, we would call them greasers, but if you've said it was from the 70s, you
could have said they were outlawed byker gang.
If you said it from, you know, the 80s, they were punks, you know, you could, you could
have signed it.
And yet, I've read some place once that the poodle skirt was a complete mythological construct
that just wasn't fashionable to have poodle skirts in the 50s.
So again, I'm not saying that our perception of flappers is inaccurate because I think
on some level, it doesn't really matter how many of them they're actually ever wore,
right?
Or how many women were flappers, how many women were taking back their sexuality and becoming
more in charge of their own lives and destinies and their bodies.
There was a social perception that this was happening, and that's all that mattered.
You know, because a housewife in Oakland, California might read about all this great stuff
that's going on in the Speakeesies in New York and say, look at her.
You know, she looks great.
I wish I could look pretty good, you know?
That wouldn't be bad.
And that sticks in her mind.
And from that point on, she sees the world a little bit differently, you know, and so does
everybody else.
I'm saying the housewife, but so does everyone else.
They look at the world a little bit differently because they see a media that is saying this
is now happening.
This is now the new normal, and we all sort of agree with it, you know?
And to think about fashion and the new normal is a famous personally from this era was
Coco Chanel.
And look at the empire that arose from that sense of fashion and sense of what a woman
deserves and what a woman should have and a woman should have what she wants, you know?
Yeah, her biggest first move was, you know, we're talking about bringing, we were discussing
bringing a man's world to the women and they showed the same privilege and her biggest
move was the adaptation of pants by women horse riders was her first big move.
Just on pants, I remember that I think it was Lauren Bakal in the 30s who very famously
went about with very fashionable pants was a Lauren Bakal might have been Catherine
Hepper who wore pants in public and it was like, wow, that is so daring because only
like 10 to 15 years before women were being arrested for wearing pants in some cities.
So it's astounding to think of it, you know, and there were women doing that in the 1800s
like 18, you know, the 1890s because they were suffragettes and they were fighting for
that.
So, you know, it was part of a dialogue that it took a long time.
It took decades, but it was part of a dialogue, a social dialogue, you know, that ultimately
culminated in a different sort of social acceptance of normality for the sake of women and their
lives and their sexuality.
I honestly wish that right now we had a female perspective on all this.
It is.
Yeah, I'm, yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
I feel kind of weird about us.
I mean, I don't usually think that, oh, we should invite someone else on to this show
because it's been established that this is, this is the show.
Yeah, that's the same time of us.
When discussing something so technically without, you know, outside of our domain, I think
that it probably would have been a good idea, but it didn't occur to me until just now.
Well, let, why don't we just say this that it's entirely possible.
We have absolutely no idea what we're talking about.
Hey, yeah.
We'll just talk with you.
We'll just talk with you.
You know, well, I mean, I'm still, I'm afraid that I'm still not, and I'm not even sure
what we're talking about at this point.
I'm still not clear on what we're discussing.
But the one thing that I will say is I don't know how any of this equates to playboy having
liberated women.
That's, that's the problem.
Well, wait, wait, wait.
Who said, who, who was talking about Hugh Hefner as a liberator of women, this is news
to me.
Oh, okay.
Liberator of people's bodies.
Okay.
That's a little bit more like it.
I mean, I wasn't thinking of Hugh Hefner as a great liberator of women.
I am fascinated the idea of the professional call girl as a liberator woman or as a, as
a, as a somehow, some kind of a result of woman's liberation.
I mean, I don't, yeah, I don't think that, that, that in order to be, you know, that
in order to be modern, someone has to go take off their clothes or, or sell their bodies.
You know, that's not, that's not the, the measure of, of modernity.
But I do think that, that is an indicator that society has stopped trying to dictate
what people can do.
And that's important to me.
But society will always dictate what people, what they, what it thinks people can do.
That, that's something that's, that's, that's just not going to ever go away.
By definition, that is society, you know, everyone has an agreement about what is proper
and appropriate.
Well, one of this, one of the statements I didn't touch on and, and, and, and did happen,
you know, outside the show, maybe we should bring it in was that I don't think that I personally
could survive in, say, the 50s or the 40s.
Yeah, it would have been rough.
Yeah, yeah, agree.
Because, because I am, I am a very god damn it.
I'm just honest, and out there, and I just, I honestly blame my sexuality for my lack
of success in the corporate world, but you know what, you know what, though, because I,
I used to think the same thing, like, like, you know, I went through the, the typical
thing where it's like, oh, I'd have been so cool to live back then because it, look
at how they dressed and, and how they talked.
And then later, I was like, oh, you know what, I would have hated it because it was just,
it was just so oppressive.
But then I saw, I went to film school and I saw some avant-garde films by people like,
you know, Ginsburg and, uh, Burrows and other people like that, and you, and you do get the,
you get the idea that there was like this, you know, there wasn't underground.
And I guess there always will be an underground, uh, ideally.
And, and yeah, I don't know how real it was or what it was like or how inviting it was,
but I mean, there were people doing what they wanted underneath the surface.
And that brings me some hope.
And see, there we go, because Haffner brought about something that had been underground.
It had been under the surface.
I mean, pornography had been a big business before then.
It big business.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
But he brought it out into the light.
Now, I guess the question I'm having, I'm not certain how I feel about it.
I guess I can see a bunch of different sides to this thing.
But I guess my question is, was it necessarily a bad or a good thing that this happened?
I, I feel for society in general, it was a good thing, okay?
Because I think it opened up our dialogue.
It made us question.
I mean, we're having this conversation right now because of this, right?
So I think it's a good thing to always be able to talk about this because it's something
that happened and it was important.
It was, it was an important moment until Deep Geek brought this subject up.
It had never occurred to me that this was not this lightning moment where everything
changed.
But in point of fact, he was probably the last major element of that change that began
during prohibition, during the flapper era.
He was probably the tail end of that and not the beginning of this new movement.
You know, the new movement came afterwards.
You know, it's like, as that cartoon, as he said it was where people said, I guess we're
doing this now or I guess we can do this now.
Basically, I think that was the door finally opening and everything that came afterwards.
That's a new era.
But I wouldn't necessarily say Hefner awesured in the era.
I would say Hefner was the final moment of the previous one.
But that's just how I'm thinking right now.
And that could be a very good point because his, when I think of Playboy Magazine, I think
of it as a literary magazine.
That's my personal perception of it and that actually goes back to my enjoying reading
the interviews and the articles and the advisor column and it had an editorial content that
I just thought was utterly amazing and I remember distinctly come, you know, being leaving
school and having all my PO box mail forwarded to my parents' house and here comes, you
know, amongst the other anarchist of Madness that that entailed a copy of Playboy Magazine
that had left my mother apoplectic and eventually I just pulled out, she was an artist and
I pulled out one of her exacto knives as we argued and I literally cut the nudes out
of a copy of Playboy and said, here, you're happy.
I'm going to go read the articles now.
Well, no, I mean, I wouldn't argue that Playboy did not have good editorial content
in the show and what I've read in compilations like Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Hunter S Tom Thompson.
Yeah, I've forgotten his name.
Thomas Hunter S Tom, geez, I love it.
And since we're all science versus fans, since we're all science versus fans, we shouldn't
forget that Fahrenheit 451 was first serialized alongside of Marilyn Monroe's, that first
issue of Playboy.
Yeah, no, I mean, I get that, I get that they had great, yeah, Bradbury's one of my, literally
probably my favorite author, like he's, he's amazing, I, I have several, but here's
the thing in old soren, go ahead and old soren pornography is that when it's illegal,
and it has to be underground, is you add redeeming value to it by trying to make it
litter or something.
So instead of having a girly magazine, you have a book about artistic representations
of ladies' lingerie, you know, and is this addition of editorial content, the last vestige
of dressing up pornographic magazine, or is it actually to say, this is a holistic
view of men's interest?
Well, even as late as the 1970s, films were being assessed in towns across America, almost
every major city in a lot of smaller ones, second, second tier cities throughout the country
had those porn theaters, you know, adult movie theaters that people would go to, mostly
men, and almost all of them had them, and they were legal in some places, most places,
they were legal, but what they were showing, there were restrictions about what kind of
pornography could be shown.
So you couldn't have something that was purely gratuitous, even up to the 70s, right?
That's why there's the old joke about bad acting in porn movies, because they weren't
actors, they didn't hire them for their acting abilities, but there had to be a plot,
there had to be dialogue, or else it was considered smut, and it was banned, and they couldn't
show it.
So, you know, I knew a guy, this is back in Waterbury, Connecticut, where I'm from, and he was
a teacher at the local college, and they asked him to sit in on a showing of a porn film
that was being shown in this movie theater in town, and he was among a group of other
important people in town, and they had to assess the artistic value of this thing, because
if it didn't have some kind of artistic value to it, it was going to be banned, and the
theater was going to be fine, because they broke the law, and this was going on all across
the countries, and this is all the way up into the 70s, that this sort of perception that
sexuality had to have some other framework around it, you know, in other words, it couldn't
exist for its own sake, it couldn't be gratuitous.
And yet, that's now turned on its head in a certain way, now you have people trying
to get an R rating for marketing purposes, which means you're making it into something
other than it is, to have a so-called worst reputation to bring in the paying customers.
Well, in point of fact, our perception of pornography has changed quite a bit.
Obviously, people don't see it the way they did back then, but also this need to frame
it as some sort of adjunct to a story, to a plot, to dialogue, that's been thrown out
the window, because it is a waste of time, no one watched the movie for that stuff, they
watched it for the naughty bits, right?
That's what they wanted to see, and that's all they wanted to see, because that's all
anybody was ever after to begin with, they didn't feel like there was a need to dress
this up.
You know, in those days, we were still hung up on the idea that you cannot enjoy it for
its own sake, that has largely faded away.
But you think because of the isn't it faded away lost?
I do, largely, but it was already happening, but the internet was like floodgate, it just
opened it all up, but yeah, largely, I think it was.
I finally feel redeemed for 8th pure episode number 6-9, it's taken a while, but you
got there.
I think you got there.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contribute link to find
out how easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club,
and is part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment
on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released on the create of comments, attribution,
share a life, 3.0 license.