Just after dawn one foggy weekend morning in early 1979, I found a copy of Penthouse magazine lying on Carmel Beach. (We lived but two hundred meters from the sand, and from the time I was eight or nine, I, always an early riser from my birth, was allowed to walk on the beach.) The magazine had been folded up, and I found it next to some empty cans of Olympia and a pile of cigarette butts. When I opened it to the centerfold, I was electrified. I had never seen pornography before, and other than the artistic nudes in a family book of Edward Weston photos, had never seen a naked adult woman. I was a few weeks short of twelve, and I felt as if my life had been transformed.
Here’s a link to a photo of the cover of that February 1979 Penthouse magazine that changed my sexuality forever. (Worksafe for almost all, but I admit it sent a brief chill through me to see that cover again.) I’d never masturbated before I found that magazine; my first orgasm came as I stared at the images within it and read and re-read the infamous “letters” section. I kept it for well over a year, until it had fallen apart completely.
I thought of that old magazine again this morning, when I heard of the death of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. It was his “artistic” style that dominated Penthouse’s layouts for years, and so more than any other pornographer, his vision helped shape my own pre-teen sexual imagination. I would use porn on and off, sometimes casually and sometimes addictively, for the next twenty years. Though I accept that many folks can integrate pornography into their sexual lives in a healthy way, I’ve never been able to do it. Too compulsive a personality, I’m grateful that I haven’t “used” porn in years. By the time I was in my late teens, I’d lost interest in Penthouse — the pictorials began to seem caricatures, absurd, grotesque. (My tastes soon ran to the more grittily authentic, and I’ll leave it at that.) But Bob Guccione’s photographs (he shot most of Penthouse’s early models himself) continued to haunt my sexual daydreams for years and years. When I hear the word “porn” even now, I think of what it was he first showed me well over thirty years ago.
Others may do as they please, but I don’t speak ill of the dead. (I offered faint praise for Jerry Falwell on this blog when he left us in 2007, and that was an act of forbearance if ever there was one.) So as I pray for Bob and for his family, let me thank him as well.
I cannot imagine a past other than the one I’ve had. I cannot know what I would have been like had I not found that magazine that misty morning near the Eleventh Avenue steps on the white sands of home. I do know that what I first felt that day, staring at those pages of the February 1979 issue, was a high unlike any I’d ever felt. I chased that high in pornography for years. I chased it through my first couple of marriages and nearly a decade and a half of reckless, desperate, obsessive promiscuity. The journey of sexual healing I’ve been on for the last dozen years has been a great gift in my life. Whatever gifts I have to share around these issues are a result of the work I’ve done, the wisdom I’ve received from my mentors, and the grace I’ve been given by lovers, friends, and by God.
I won’t blame Bob Guccione for the pain I caused myself and so very many others. I take full and sole responsibility for the harm I did. But gazing in lust and wonder at his images were what first took me to a dark place; extricating myself from that place has brought me greater joy and greater opportunity to serve than I would ever otherwise have known. Bob Guccione was a panderer and a visionary whose place in the history of American sexuality will surely rank below those peers who survive him, like Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt. But I was not a boy shaped by Playboy or Hustler. For a few pivotal, confusing years, I was a Penthouse lad, loyal to the particular style I’d first discovered when I was not yet twelve.
Thank you, Bob Guccione, for opening a door for me. Through that door I walked to some very dark places. And because I went to those dark places, I found some extraordinary gifts. For me, at least, that healing is also part of your legacy.
Flights of angels, Bob, flights of angels.
Hugo, how the hell did you just make me cry for Bob Guccione? Jesus.
Thank you for your honesty. This blew me away.
If you hadn’t found that mag, you’d have sooner or later stumbled on another, the same kind or a little different; you might have walked thru a very similar door or one that was not similar at all depending on your condition then; who knows.
I agree that it’s wonderful when someone manages–with the help of whoever helps them–to turn a horrible experience into an opportunity to learn, grow and teach. But I remain suspicious of anyone who rationalizes such experiences as necessary or beneficial for such growth. The fates, or whatever, bloody well could have found a better way to make you compassionate, one that didn’t leave a lot of people, or even a few, hurting for decades. I’m just glad you finally made it to better places.
The bad experiences I went thru didn’t make me a better person–being able to think, that’s what did. And I could have thought better, earlier, if I’d had some real help.
Wow, now that is something that I did not expect to have in common with you; a sexual history that was, in part, shaped by Bob Guccione’s vision of sexuality.
My first husband brought a stack of Penthouses on our honeymoon. Believe it or not, that was a radical act of intimacy from him that I admired and appreciated. He had been raised by a mother who makes Christine O’Donnell look like a libertine swinger. As an example, she once caught him looking at the bra-section of the Sears catalog punished him by washing his eyes out with soap. For him to trust me enough to bring his little secret stash with him for our first days of intimacy was a huge step. It was an act of trust, an invitation into his sexuality, which to this day, I honor.
A side-effect of having those magazines on our honeymoon was that they gave me a formula for how to be sexual. All I knew of sex going into that honeymoon was trauma, and Marabel Morgan’s instructions, which included lots of costuming, admonitions to “keep your hands moving†and her reminder that sex was the one way your husband could truly receive love. I started that honeymoon feeling that sex was the most confusing, overwhelming obligation in the world. But as we went through those Penthouse together, it was like getting a Cliff’s Notes version of sex. Penthouse was the illustrated version of Marabel Morgan’s “Total Woman†complete with step-by-step instructions in the Forum section.
Bob Guccione made it all seem so simple. All I had to do was dress up like the girls in the pictorials, make appreciative sounds and movements like they described in the Forum, and I was home free. Sex was suddenly simple, manageable and required nothing more than applying my already well-honed skills for dressing, accessorizing and grooming and acting appreciative. Bob Guccione’s vision of sex was somehow comforting, perhaps because it was predictable and relied on a pavlovian response by men and it did not require any authentic arousal or even relaxation on my part. It was a formula for sex that I followed for nearly a decade and was truly surprised when it did not offer me stable relationships or orgasms.
Marabel Morgan and Bob Guccione got thrown overboard rather forcefully when I became involved with the man who is now my husband. He did not appreciate the costumes or the artifice. He wanted me naked and real, which is so much more work than getting dressed up and playing pretend. Giving up Morgan and Guccione was the process of becoming authentically sexual, rather than just putting on sexuality like a costume, and it was difficult and painful. But sex outside of Morgan Guccione’s vision is infinitely more pleasurable.
Morgan and Guccione were a big part of my life. I conceived my two children using their formulaic sex. To this day, I can remember the costume I wore to conceive our daughter and the Forum suggestion I used when we conceived our son. I think of those times with a sort of fondness. When I followed the link to the cover the magazine which captured your attention, I smiled with nostalgia remembering a kind sex that is contained, civilized and perfect in a plastic way. It was sort of like believing in Santa or that families really work like they did in Leave it to Beaver.
So, I join you in thanking Bob Guccione and wishing him well in the Great Hereafter.
“I agree that it’s wonderful when someone manages–with the help of whoever helps them–to turn a horrible experience into an opportunity to learn, grow and teach. But I remain suspicious of anyone who rationalizes such experiences as necessary or beneficial for such growth. The fates, or whatever, bloody well could have found a better way to make you compassionate, one that didn’t leave a lot of people, or even a few, hurting for decades. I’m just glad you finally made it to better places.
The bad experiences I went thru didn’t make me a better person–being able to think, that’s what did. And I could have thought better, earlier, if I’d had some real help.”
I echo this tenfold…I could have gone the same route as I always did, shutting down my desires for the desires of others…but thank GOD there was a little part of me deep down, that had enough respect for myself not to.
Folks, I’m not making the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. I’m pointing out that this man’s vision shaped mine, and that extricating myself from the damage done was an important part of my journey. His images are the ones that haunted my youth, not Flynt’s or Hefner’s or someone else’s — so my coming to a greater clarity about sexuality was in countless ways a coming to clarity about Bob.
Understood…I was still echoing the sentiment, just clarifying it was less the material, and more the person (this means you, yourself) that was responsible for the change…that can’t be ignored, or implied…sometimes you give people too much credit to read into what you’re saying, hell it was difficult for me to see it at first given my blindspots as a feminist and my experiences as a woman.
And in posts like this, I’m musing. I sometimes write in one take, as it were, and don’t even go back and edit. (This is such a post.)
K.. =)
This post made me sick. When I think of the damage these pornographers did to women worldwide and the ground work they laid for the exploitation of women, I just fully celebrate the death of that exploiter. Read Gail Dines latest book on pornography, and she places this “early” stuff as the very beginning of the nightmare we have today. And you’re teaching women’s studies? You must be joking!
I use Gail Dines’ work and Bob Jensen’s. Agourial, I am deeply troubled by the harm that porn does, and am quite clear that it did harm in my life. Not all feminists feel the same way about pornography, and as you surely know, there is no litmus test on porn that determines whether one has feminist credentials or not. (And there is no credentialing agency to begin with.)
And it’s important to remember that the exploitation of women exists without porn, it existed before porn. Men rape and abuse for reasons that have nothing to do with porn. Like blaming eating disorders primarily on the fashion industry, it’s too simplistic to point the finger at pornographers like Guccione alone.
Agourial’s post made me sick. Bob Guccione was a human being. Pornography has existed since the dawn of time and often under much shadier conditions than the established corporation Guccione ran. I don’t approve of the industry he chose but he is nothing like many pornographers today.
Agourial, as one of Hugo’s former students and a staunch feminist, you have no right to judge him. His honesty about his past makes him human, his commitment to being a better man gave me hope. I went on to double major in women’s studies thanks to Hugo.
He’s more of a feminist than most women I know. He’s not perfect. Does a feminist man have to be?
Hugo,
One of the things I like most about this post is that you acknowledge how important Guccione’s vision was in shaping your early sexuality–as it was in shaping mine (we are, I think, not so far apart in age), though my initial experience was with my grandfather’s not-very-well-hidden pile of Playboys–without beating yourself (and by extension other men) up about it. I remember once having a conversation with a class about pornography and one male student said in exasperation something like, “Yes, I know porn is not realistic, that it can be violent, degrading of women and everything else you have said, but what else do you want us to do? It’s all we have, and it’s often all we have to learn about sex from.” Obviously, in an objective sense, he was wrong. There were and are plenty of other places from which he could have learned about sex–some of them as explicit in their own way as mainstream heterosexual porn–but his exasperation was real. He literally could not imagine another form of expression that would have given him the understanding of his own desire and of the desires of women that he had and he understood many of my comments to be intended to make him feel guilty about those desires–which they were not, but I did not make that fact clear enough in the conversation. The class, freshman comp, was not one in which I could have taken that conversation to the next logical step and begin to explore other forms of sexual expression and representation, but I have always remembered and valued his honesty.
I have, for anyone who’s interested, been writing a series called Fragments of Evolving Manhood and one of the things I have focused on is my own initial encounters with pornography (here and here).
I sometimes write in one take, as it were, and don’t even go back and edit.
No, really?
I’d just never write a tribute to a pornographer who did unbelievable harm to women, and who helped create the porn saturated world we live in. Never celebrate these people, for you should be talking to the women who escaped porn. You should celebrate the anti-porn activists, and the women who are exposing the men who use this stuff.
One of my friends told me recently that at her office, they caught a man she sat near watching Internet porn. Got him red handed, guards came, he was escorted out in handcuffs and fired. That’s how a major corporation handles men who watch porn on company time. I celebrate this as more advanced than this website, because my friend had to sit next to that creepy man for years on the job. Just who is standing up for women who are subjected to men’s “harmless” porn fantasies or who force their girl friends to do sex acts they hate. Who puts a stop to it? So celebrating this porn provider is about capitalism that subjects women to degredation. At least one major corporation fired a guy, and that is a feminist victory. Handcuff, escort out and fire!
If nothing else, Agourial, I share with you a strong view that folks shouldn’t view porn at work, particularly when their computers can be seen by others. That’s sexual harassment in most instances.
But we do feminism — and women — no favors when we assume that pornography is the primary cause of the sexual abuse of women. Long before the camera, rape and molestation flourished. Porn reflects as much as it inspires. that’s not a defense, just an acknowledgment.
Well, I have the feeling that this disciplinary action was due more to a. wasting company time in such a flagrant manner, and b. as Hugo said, it could be considered sexual harassment.
I also have a hard time believing that he was escorted out in handcuffs, nor would I celebrate that, it seems a bit much.
I’m with Ordo. It is a bit much. I suspect that the guy might have done more things that someone didn’t like earlier, and this might have been a last-straw deal. But as one who has been mistreated by several companies, I find myself sympathizing with him just a little tiny bit.
Last place I worked, some of the women went into squealing ecstacies, and I suspect wasted some non-break time, certainly a lot of printer paper which I had to refill, over online images of puppies–and houses–they coveted. But then some guy got caught looking at porn and I don’t know what happened to him but all our surfing privileges were taken away. Gee, thanks. I’m sure that the houses, and perhaps the puppies, weren’t exploited in the same ways as whoever was naked in the pictures, but still, I don’t know if the male viewer was really any more out of control than the women with their images. [Me, I would hunt up funny stuff and ROFLMAO. On my breaks, that was all.]
It’s a mess. A few people waste company time, but the companies just have too damn much power over their people. I lost that job because someone half my age and 1/4 my intellect lied about me, and there was no sort of appeal. All right, I will end that digression. But I’ve seen a lot more harmful things go on in the workplace–and go un-stopped–than some idiot looking at stuff that exploits people in some other workplace.
You want mistreated… try being a telemarketer…wooo weee… the men in the office in attempts to amuse themselves make passes at every woman, the callers try to get you to have phone sex, you’re constantly told you are stupid, rude, or whatever insult…even the callers that are nice are manipulating you..I’ve gotten a few good callers that would brighten up my day and I was truly thankful for them. Although, as bad as telemarketing was, it left me with some experiences that shaped me…I still feel guilty selling stuff to people who told me about their life…that still haunts me, but overall I don’t regret it.
My sympathies, Kristina, and I sure didn’t mean to play any sort of “oppression olympics”.
I resolved some while back to try not to be an asshole to the poor so and so behind the counter or on the phone. Of course, having an unlisted number helps…
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