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Penthouse

A year after Deep Throat, Penthouse went pink, becoming the first major men's magazine to reveal female genitalia. Playboy followed, then reversed itself in 1977. Hefner thought such exposure unromantic and bad business. He realized that if he kept showing spread vaginas, he'd lose his readership without gaining those of Penthouse and Hustler.

Hefner's private tastes are far raunchier than his magazine. He owns a large collection of porn films and perhaps the world's largest collection of bestiality flicks. Linda Lovelace describes Hugh's fascination with human-animal sex in her book Ordeal. The star of Deepthroat had sex with animals such as dogs for the edification of Hefner and his friends.

In contrast to Hefner's public life, Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione, born around 1927, lives quietly with his third wife, Kathy Keeton, born around 1940.

By showing pubic hair and couples, Penthouse circulation shot to its high of 4.7 million in 1979.

Cheri magazine debuted in 1976, showing fingers poked inside vaginas and other raunchy material. Puritan went further, showing full penetration and cum shots, becoming the first newsstand hardcore magazine. At the same time, Hollywood producers seriously considered using real sex in their movies.

During Jimmy Carter's presidency, it appeared that explicit sex would pervade America. But pornographers abuse of their freedom through child and rape porn prompted a new national mood that through the 1990s increasingly regulated and harassed sexual entertainment.

Beginning in 1977, sex magazine circulation plunged. Puritan moved off the newsstand into adult bookstores. Cheri stayed public by toning down. With the success of porn video in the early '80s, Hollywood producers abandoned their flirtation with real sex.

During the late '80s, Cheri, along with other magazines like Hustler and High Society, began showing increasingly erect cocks, cum shots, and hints of penetration. But it was too late. Though magazines grew even bolder in the '90s, their era of importance was over. Moving pictures had triumphed over still, just as pictures had earlier triumphed over writing. Porn's reason for being after all, is to make masturbation easy.

Hart Williams fell into writing for sex magazines in the late '70s. "It was not so much that I wanted to be in it, as that I didn't mind doing it. I began writing audio-cassettes (we called it XXX radio) and wrote about 50 at 15-30 pages each. I ended up at Hustler, which ended my first marriage. She didn't mind the $200 each script brought, but Hustler was too much…"

Hart says most pornographers do not like their work. "Complaints were universal. But that's what customers wanted, so that's what we had to do. An old joke asks: "Is sex dirty? Only if you do it right." America has this assumption that sex must be dirty to be good. I don't feel that way. Not many did. It is the very act of 'illegitimacy' that creates the industry. If sex were viewed as natural and normal, porn would not be profitable. Indeed, the profitability of the industry declines in direction proportion to its legality. Europe found this out. Porn reflects the Collective Obnoxious. The same prophets who decry porn create its 'dark' appeal.

"I remained in the industry because I was fascinated from a young age by how 'sex' drove people insane. They screamed if you talked about it, they decried it, and, at the same time, they destroyed their homes and families trying to get more of it. They withheld it, they gave it, they spent all their time obsessed with it, but living an equal and opposite anger at it. So, I thought, "here's an unparalleled opportunity to see what all the fuss is about, and go where everyone secretly dreams of exploring: sexual nirvana." Boy! What a letdown!

"Actresses are usually from California and are rebelling against their background. They have a "bad boy" boyfriend. They desperately need money. They are in the business for an average of one month and are gone. Most actresses are Roman Catholic school girls and most of the actors were Jewish.

"The average starlet was a high school dropout [like Sindee Coxx, Brandy Alexandre], or just barely made it. An inordinate number drove Chevrolets. The industry learned to pander to their fantasies by making them into "stars" for awards shows and conventions. The average starlet has a strange boyfriend - one who gets off in some way, on watching her screw other men. Few boyfriends make the transition. Few starlets come into the business alone, or, if in, remain alone for long."

Penthouse publishes Forum which includes articles oriented towards women. Unlike skin mags, Forum doesn't include nude pinups of women but rather matches stories with softer illustrations.

While Forum includes nonfiction articles on sexually related topics, Penthouse also offers its reader a more lurid magazine called Variations. Devoted almost exclusively to first-person narratives describing almost every sexual experience imaginable, Variations editor, V.K. McCarty, who is referred to in the industry as "the grandmother of kinky sex," insists that all the letters are genuine.

Unlike the more discreet Forum, Variations offers photographs of men and women in all sorts of strenuous poses, but McCarty believes the magazines is something "any American housewife would find palatable." As women began to show up in their rising circulation figures, the business department told editorial "to soften the graphicness of the sexuality." McCarty took "bare nipples off the cover," and dropped "incest and bestiality" from the magazine's menu of sexual dishes.

S-M was one form of sex that Variations didn't have to drop to broaden its circulation. The editor was a notorious "dominatrice," a female expert in sexual dominance, who told all in a 1982 article in Penthouse called "S&M for Beginners." A year earlier Variations devoted an issue to bondage, female domination, female submission, humiliation, the gay leather scene, branding and more. It contained everything anyone wanted to know about S&M, supposedly from the mouths of typical married women. (Re-Making Love p.116-117)

Following the lead of Hustler, Penthouse began publishing explicit pictures of sexual penetration in 1997. In the 7/98 issue, regular columnist Alan Dershowitz wrote:

Though Oklahoma law defines obscenity to include "sexual penetration," the Supreme Court of the United States requires that for material to be considered obscene it must - viewed as "as a whole" - be "patently offensive," appeal to "prurient interests," and lack "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific values."

Penthouse is a serious publication that has contributed important literary, political, and scientific material to the marketplace of ideas. It has helped to change attitudes on a number of important issues, many of them not related to sex...

… There is no scientific evidence that the degree of explicitness of a photograph - whether it merely suggests or actually shows "penetration" - has any bearing on the alleged "evils" of obscenity. Even the Reagen-era Edwin Meese anti-pornography commission acknolwedged that there was no evidence to support the view that the promotion of sexist attitudes "varies with the extent of sexual explicitness…"

..Penthouse's decision to publish more-explicit photographs of couples having sex is a political decision. It is a form of visual protest against longstanding artificial tabooos on publishing such photographs - just as convention earlier tabooed photographs of full-frontal nudity, before Penthouse broke that absurd convention. Complaining about Penthouse's decision to publish these photographs of sexual intercourse is to express hatred of the politics and protests of its publisher. Were the state to try to prevent such publication, it would be censoring a substantive viewpoint, presented pictorially (as well as in written form). This would fly in the face of the First Amendment's strong prohibition against any such censorship."

Guccione began painting again during the 1990s. He had an opening of his work in late 1997 at the Las Vegas Art Museum.

Earl Miller is the most published photographer in Penthouse history. The former actor got a hefty tax refund in 1968 and bought a camera. Two years later he picked up an early issue of Penthouse. In 1972 he met Guccione and his career took off.

"I don't think of it as tits and ass," Miller told the Spring 1998 edition of Exotic Dancer Bulletin. "It's the feminine mystique. Women have a special magic quality that is a never-ending source of inspiration.

"I really do love women. There are a lot of people who don't who shoot them and are rude to them. You can see it in their work. They present women in a brutish way. I just don't see women that way. What stimulates me is to try to deal with their vulnerability and their sensitivity, not just exposing themselves, showing their pussies. I love pussy shots. I think a woman's vagina is one of the great places of the world. It's the birth canal. It's the way we create life.

"I'm constantly searching. The minute I see a girl that's photogenic I know it. It all starts with the face… It's through her face that all her feelings get expressed.

"Every time I shoot a girl, I try to discover the girl through the process of photography. There's no technique to that except you have to know how to listen, and you really have to know how to feel people so that whatever is being communicated, whether it's verbal or non-verbal, that you're receiving it. If you do that, then you inevitably portray each woman as a very specific individual." (Exotic Dancer Bulletin, Spring, 1998)

Here are excerpts from an article in the 7/25/99 Sunday Telegraph on Penthouse publisher Bob Guccionie:

I ask him if he has ever had a face-lift. This is, of course, fantastically rude, but something about Guccione's relaxed manner seems to allow it. He answers as though it is the most normal question in the world. "I had cosmetic surgery almost 20 years ago when I had a cancerous tumour removed from my scalp. They had to pull my sideburns up into my head to put my hair back and then they had to pull the other side of my face up to even it. But that's it. I haven't had anything done since."

Guccione rarely gives interviews but has agreed to this one to coincide with the publication next week of the 30th anniversary issue of Penthouse magazine in the States. In Britain it is even older - 34 years - but it is the more explicit US edition which is the flagship issue, known, stresses Guccione, as much for its serious reportage as for its pornography. Not that pornography is a word that Guccione would use.

"Pornography is associated in my mind with a vulgar depiction of sexuality, not an artistic, elegant, beautiful show . . . Explicit sex is part of a political statement. I frankly believe that all consensual sex is beautiful and natural and we shouldn't be ashamed of it."

From the April 17, 2000 issue of the New York Observer:

...[T]he company that brought crotch shots and phone-sex ads to America’s newsstands now faces collapsing revenues, soaring operating losses, an ocean of cash-flow red ink and $52 million of junk bonds that are due by year’s end. Fundamentally the company breaks even on an operating basis but goes into the hole with roughly $8 million of interest expense and, unfortunately, the direction is south. Thank goodness we’ve got Macho Man’s sinewy muscles-arms aloft like Lawrie’s Atlas-holding the whole business from gravity’s ultimate embrace. Otherwise, can you imagine where we’d be if America’s inmate and garage mechanic populations lacked access to the sort of literature that Macho Man has made so famous?

Mr. Guccione is on the ropes for a simple reason: In the American media’s race to the bottom, his business has become a purveyor of such raw and unappealing trash that nobody wants to have anything to do with it anymore. (Try this: Leave a copy of Penthouse on your desk for a day and see how people look at you thereafter.)

5/30/00

Penthouse Copyright Violation

From Stunningcurves.com: Yahoo News has a report that Penthouse is going after people who post their copyrighted material on Usenet.

After months of observing the illegal posting of the copyrighted contents of its members-only section of its website to Usenet Newsgroups, Penthouse.com announced today it has moved against one of the worst offenders, "Muad'Dib@dune.com."

Following the issuance of a temporary restraining order and a search and seizure order from a United States District Court in New England, federal law enforcement officials and representatives of Penthouse.com served the orders on "Muad'Dib." Officials entered the subject's premises, which were then searched and all computer equipment and storage media found there were seized and placed under seal.

This action concluded a three-month investigation by Penthouse.com into the theft of its copyrighted materials.

Penthouse alleged that for some time "Muad'Dib" and others had been invading the members-only area of Penthouse.com's web site, where they would copy large portions of the site and then post the images and text in wholesale quantities to Usenet Newsgroups, most notably alt.mag.penthouse.

The theft and copying activities were carried out using anonymous email addresses. After determining the true identities of the most flagrant violators, Penthouse proceeded to assert its rights to the full and complete protection of the law.

Gerard Van der Leun, Vice-President of Online and Internet Services and Director of Penthouse.com, at General Media Communications in New York City made the following statement: "For some months now we have seen tens of thousands of our images copied wholesale from our site and posted to the Usenet Newsgroups by users operating under false email addresses and identities. The sheer scale of their activities and the clandestine manner in which they operated would leave no one in any doubt that their motives were malicious. Although we regret having to take such drastic actions as raids and seizures, we felt we had no choice for two reasons":

"First, our private members' area is a pay site. To protect our business, we need to control access to its contents and assert our ownership of our exclusive copyrighted images and material. Unlike many adult sites, our images and material are exclusive to Penthouse.com. They can be seen nowhere else on the web and are part of Penthouse's total inventory of over 150,000 images. They are our inventory as much as a bookstore's inventory is composed of the books on the shelves in the store. No business can tolerate or sustain this level of theft."

"Second, and equally important, is the fact that our pay site is an adult site. It is for adults only and we mean it. We take the responsibility of limiting access to our site and our content to adults very seriously. Once material is stolen from our site and posted to a global newsgroup we have no control whatsoever over who sees it. We certainly cannot tolerate or abet such a situation."

"Given the fact that 'Maud'Dib' has not only boasted of having more than 20,000 of our images on his computer, but was in the habit of filling requests for material from other members of the group, we felt we had no choice but to pursue this course of action. In the course of tracking down the true identity and location of 'Muad'Dib', we also had the opportunity of discovering the identities and locations of other members of this group. The action we will take against them has yet to be determined. We will, however, actively pursue and prosecute online theft and the unauthorized posting of our material from this point forward."

A settlement in the case was reached between "Muad'Dib" and Penthouse.com this afternoon. While a number of details of the settlement will remain sealed, Mr. Van der Leun stated that other actions will be forthcoming in the near future.

Muad'Dib@Dune.com writes alt.mag.penthouse: Many of you know me from my Usenet posts and from #SDC in Dalnet. I haven't been posting lately and there has been a lot of discussion about whether that was because Penthouse sued me for copyright infringement. I wish I could tell you that it wasn't true - but it is.

As most of you know, I had copied and reposted lots of Penthouse.com pictures - literally tens of thousands of them. I also developed and posted CSV index files to help others collect and organize these pictures. I now understand that I was doing was illegal, but I didn't think it was a big deal at the time. I was wrong. It turned out to be a really big deal. On April 20, 2000, federal Marshals came to my home and removed my entire collection of Penthouse files and my computer equipment. I had to hire a lawyer to handle the civil lawsuit that Penthouse had filed against me.

Copyright laws expressly permitted the Marshals to seize my computer equipment, especially in my case where the scope of the infringement was in the thousands of postings. Penthouse had an extremely strong case against me for "willful" copyright infringement because of my postings. If Penthouse had wanted to pursue the case, it could have obtained the type of monetary judgment against me that I could have worked my whole life and never been able to repay. Fortunately, Penthouse offered to settle the case for far less than my full liability would have been. I got lucky - Penthouse was interested more in stopping my postings than in ruining my life. The settlement also included a promise by Penthouse not to disclose my real name to protect my wife and family. Of course, I also had to promise not to post copyrighted photos to the Usenet anymore.

What happened to me could happen to you or anyone else uploading copyrighted information to the Usenet. Now that the case has settled, I can make this last post to warn you. Listen - you don't want to go through what I just did. Believe me, it isn't worth it - even though you might think that I got off kind of easy. I didn't. In addition to the embarrassment and inconvenience of the seizure, I still have to pay Penthouse damages under the settlement. As part of the settlement, I also agreed (after this post) not to speak about the matter anymore, so don't expect any replies. It is not in my interest to get Penthouse angry at me again. I might not be so lucky next time.