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\nSpeaking of smut<\/a> …<\/p>\n You’d have to have lived under a rock to not be aware of Larry Flynt during his heyday. Even if you never “read” Hustler<\/i>, his shenanigans and Supreme Court hearings made headlines. Then, of course, for a younger generation, came Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt<\/i>, starring Woody Harrelson as Flynt (a little bit of a cleaned-up version of the man, but still: an interesting film). <\/p>\n \n \nIn the wake of Flynt’s passing – I’ve been thinking even more about freedom of speech, which is on the wane – or at least, the valuing of it in principle<\/i> is – I’m shocked at artists who want to shut up other artists, I’m shocked at things like people responding to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity with “well, if those cartoonists hadn’t done what they did, maybe they wouldn’t have had to be murdered at their desks”. Like, literally. And these are “tolerant” people saying this. Salman Rushdie didn’t “read the room” and look what happened to him. These “tolerant” people wouldn’t have stuck up for him at all, they would have approved of the fatwa. “Well, if he hadn’t written what he did …” (And this is what happened back then too. So-called liberal tolerant people retreated into a kind of mealy-mouthed silence. Susan Sontag, though, became a fire-breathing dragon holding up a torch for Freedom of Speech. Good for her.) <\/p>\n You need to stick up for free speech, even if you don’t like said speech – because the boomerang could so easily swing around and YOU’RE on the chopping block, and you would want people to stick up for YOU and YOUR right to say whatever the hell you want to say. It really is the principle of the thing. Social media has exacerbated the situation. I find the rise of the term “read the room” and people’s unquestioning acceptance of its truth – alarming. Like, okay, yes, in some circumstances, you should read the room – it’s good manners – but in other circumstances, NO. I’m not “reading the room” because some rooms are SHITTY and some rooms are filled with SHITTY people, and I am not going to play by the SHITTY room’s SHITTY rules. If the room is sexist or misogynistic or homophobic? FUCK the room. If the room is racist or anti-Semitic? FUCK the room. Like most everything: one size does not fit all. One rule does not apply in every single circumstance. But people can’t deal with this, boy do people love rules. Social media values consensus. I fear consensus. What I was thinking about free speech was: the people who push<\/i> the boundaries of free speech are rarely “respectable”. If they were “respectable” they wouldn’t push the way they do, testing the boundaries, calling out hypocrisy – If you allow THIS, then why not THIS? There is no one answer to these questions, and Larry Flynt may not be your cup of tea, AND you may not want HIM to be the representative for freedom of speech protections … but if you look at history, it’s usually the freaks, outlaws, and … libertines? … who challenge the status quo. People like James Joyce. James Baldwin. Oscar Wilde. Eminem. Lenny Bruce. Larry Kramer. John Waters. Madonna. The Maquis de Sade. Mae West. Jonathan Swift (putting him on here because satire is even more dangerous than pornography). Pioneers, all. Outlaws, all. Imperfect people, all. As we all are. And what matters is not that we “settle this thing” once and for all – I’m not big on language like “once and for all” – it’s tyrannical, and I’m talking quite literally – tyranny wants to settle things once and for all. What IS important is that we keep asking the questions, that we value living in a society where people CAN test the boundaries – and even pay a price for it, if necessary – as Flynt did, again and again – but paying that price is a hell of a lot different than not allowing these questions to be asked in the first place. Not allowing dialogue is Tyranny. So no thanks. I feel very strongly about this. Freedom of speech means protecting speech I don’t like, too. This does not include calls for violence. Speech that incites violence, yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre, you know the drill, or at least you should – is not protected. But someone writing a book or a song filled with violent speech you may find offensive is protected speech. The entire world found Joyce’s Ulysses<\/i> offensive. It was banned for over a decade in the United States. Books were seized at customs. Entire shiploads of books were turned away. Because SOME people felt that OTHER people should not be allowed to read said book, because it was filthy and degenerate, and SOME people want to make moral decisions for the REST of us. Hordes of people threw out CDs by the Dixie Chicks, set them on fire, rolled over them with tractors, because of the Chicks’ comments on President Bush. Okay, fine, you do you, and you doing this to Dixie Chicks CDs is protected “speech” but when you take that a step further and start to call for the thing to be banned – so that nobody else can listen – get the fuck outta here. We’re into book-burning territory. In 1821, German poet Heinrich Heine said, in what may very well be the most prescient comment of all time: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.” Carry this all on down to song lyrics you might not like, books\/articles you might find offensive, to whatever else. People are free to not support said artist. This is not splitting hairs. It’s the difference between democracy and tyranny. Pornography has always been on the front lines of this thing.<\/p>\n I am no expert on Larry Flynt, but I wanted to point you towards two good pieces:<\/p>\n Vice did a really interesting profile of him in 2016<\/a>, which gets into all of this. <\/p>\n I really really love my friend Glenn Kenny’s obit<\/a>, published over at Rogerebert.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Speaking of smut … You’d have to have lived under a rock to not be aware of Larry Flynt during his heyday. Even if you never “read” Hustler, his shenanigans and Supreme Court hearings made headlines. Then, of course, for … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/sIR0JbhgrSjQAiGtyHYON3yRQVQrIMoqHEWi5TQOsCw.png\")
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