An Interview with Dian Hanson by Mark Kramer

Pornographer Dian Hanson’s ventures in the skin trade span the almost twenty years that have elapsed between the age of porno chic and today’s devitalized era of sexually transmitted death. As editrix of such popular newsstand magazines as the mammocentric Juggs and Bust Out and--until recently--Big Butt, Hanson is widely regarded as the doyenne of anatomically specific smut. In a field where anonymity is generally prized by purveyors and consumers alike, the buxom, Brunhildesque, fortysomething Hanson has generated a widespread cult following through an intimate--albeit epistolary--dialogue with her readership. Dian Hanson’s mailbag is an embarrassment of raunchy riches that totals thousands of reader-written letters each year, and it has afforded her an almost preternatural insight into the obsessions that send raving the race of men. In this candid interview, Hanson discourses on sex, sin, and the culture of masturbation.

Mark Kramer: How did you make the transition from respiratory therapist to pornographer?

Dian Hanson: Well, I always liked pornography. I was interested in pornography from the first time I saw it, which was down in the furnace room where my father kept his stash. My brother and I used to sneak down there and look at it. We’d find wherever it was hidden. I was always curious to see whatever it was I wasn’t supposed to see. But I was also extremely curious about the human body. And about animal sex. I lived out in the country. Animal sex was very exciting. I knew something very powerful was going on there. Here was your own pet dog, who was very predictable and normal, and then sex would enter in, and he’d become this other creature: he’d be slobbering and barking and acting very strange. It became evident to me that sex could completely transport a being into another world. And that could not escape a child’s attention. When I was seventeen or so, I saw my first really hard-core pornography, and it just absolutely riveted my attention. I couldn’t believe it. It was really exciting to me, and I just wanted more. I wanted to buy my own pornography. And when I turned eighteen, and then could legally buy pornography in Seattle, which is where I grew up, I took the birthday money which my mother sent me (I was an emancipated child living in another state from my parents) I went right down to the “adult” bookstore and bought hard-core pornography.

Kramer: What was the first porn mag you bought?

Hanson: It wasn’t a magazine. It was the Illustrated President’s Report on Obscenity and Pornography from Greeenleaf Classics, which was just a ploy to show everything we’re not allowed to talk about: bondage, SM, gay sex, straight sex, everything. I loved it. So I always sexualized everything. I was a respiratory therapist, but I was always the one who was getting in trouble for thinking about sex, contriving to peek under the sheets to look at the patients naked, noticing if a patient got an erection, and always wanting to talk about it. So I always had a reputation for being sexually obsessed. And when somebody I knew got the opportunity in 1976 to start a sex magazine, which was Puritan, I was eager to hop aboard and work in pornography.

Kramer: Puritan seemed notable for its attempt to balance “name” writers with quality art direction....

Hanson: There was an interview with Norman Mailer. To their credit, they decided to do just hard-core, and were so pretentious about it that they were able to get these name writers. The late Marco Vassi was one of our staff members. It was really started with the kind of misguided notion--this was in 1976-that things were getting more and more open. This was the year of the greatest openness on the national newsstands. Magazines like Cheri, which came out the same year, were actually showing finger insertions. They were showing women pissing. They were showing things that you never see anymore. And the people who started Puritan, who were watching this Puritan, who were watching this progression, thought that the next thing was going to be open hard-core on the newsstand, and they were going to be the first to do that. And of course, as we know, that never happened. It’s gone steadily back the other way--which most people aren’t aware of, because pornography as a social evil is such a beloved subject to American politicians who want us to think that pornography is getting ever more explicit and violent and vicious. Whereas the truth is that ever since 1976 the censors have drawn the noose tighter and tighter around our necks until we can hardly put anything in sex magazines. We can’t even use the word “rape” , let alone show imagery of it. We can’t acknowledge that people have sexual urges under the age of eighteen--not even in letters written by readers. Details such as being aroused by a teacher in the sixth grade --that just doesn’t happen in the world of American pornography, because, Lord knows, if we write about something like that somebody might think that a sixth-grade boy gets aroused by his teacher and then...who knows what the boy might do? There’s that fabled connection between normal sexual urges and violence. I don’t know where that came from. but that’s another one of the myths that’s propagated in our country. It puts politicians in office and keeps them there.

Kramer: Child pornography seems to have taken on a mythical, folkloric dimension, along with vanishing hitchhikers and mice in Coke bottles. But there’s actually very little reality behind the hysteria. Isn’t it true that the only child pornography being produced in America today comes from the federal postal authorities?

Hanson: By the postal authorities and by European countries. It’s produced in Amsterdam, although it’s just become officially illegal there. And it is produced in Scandinavian countries--very, very small quantities of it. People will say, “You pornographers don’t want to admit that child pornography is being created.” But let’s look at it cost effectively: besides the fact that most pornographers are as morally repelled by the exploitation of children as any other Americans, how many people do you know who are turned on by prepubescent children? There aren’t very many. It’s not like this is the common thing, that everybody in the United States is saying, “We’re turned on by prepubescent children, but we’ll take women with huge breasts since we can’t get children.” It’s a very small group of people who are interested in this material. Meanwhile, the penalties for producing this material are immense, while the amount of money to be made by producing and selling it is infinitesimal. It’s tiny. So it’s not cost effective for any pornographer--for anyone who wants to make money from pornography--to produce child pornography. It just doesn’t make sense. And so it’s not done. If people thought about it logically, this would occur to them. But nobody does because you can’t say the words “child pornography” without everybody screaming hysterically and rushing around hitting you. So it never gets discussed, and they don’t want it discussed, because, once again, we need an enemy. We don’t have communism anymore, so now we have these enemies within: child pornographers and drug abuse.

Kramer: What is the psychographic profile of the average American masturbator?

Hanson: Virtually every American male is a masturbator. Ninety-eight percent of American men masturbate throughout life, from puberty or pre-puberty to the grave. But if you’re talking about a person who masturbates in preference to interpersonal sex--certainly a lot of my readers fall into this category. I encourage my readers to write to me about their masturbation practices and to be more open about their masturbation practices and to feel more at ease and less ashamed about being masturbators. I find they often come from very rigid, often religious households. They’re taught at an early age that sex is sin. And masturbation is much safer. They often grow up with parents who do not give an inspiring example of married life. Their parents fight a lot. Maybe the father’s a drunk. Maybe their mother’s overbearing. Maybe they’re beaten. they don’t want to grow up and repeat what their parents have. They look at that relationship, and marriage and family life don’t look very appealing to them. They’d rather not get that close to a woman. It’s frightening to get that close to a woman because then they might repeat what their parents had. An, anyway, they’re looking at the average American once again--and most of us grow up in dysfunctional families. But I think those are a couple of elements: somebody who learns at an early age that sex is “bad”, and marriage and family life are frightening.

Kramer: So...do you feel that society benefits from the abundance of masturbatory opportunities available today?

Hanson: Pornography and the proliferation of pornography is a sign of our becoming more civilized. People today have the leisure time to explore and enjoy their sexuality. Most men biologically have a higher sex drive than most women. Being visually oriented, they’re more easily aroused, but more easily satisfied. Man satisfying their greater desires through masturbation, providing themselves the variety they crave through pornographic fantasy, is far more civilized than coercing or cajoling uninterested women.

Kramer: When one invokes the category of “Women in Pornography”, the names that come up are Dian Hanson, Candida Royalle, and Annie Sprinkle. And on the male side, there’s Al Goldstein. It seems as if there’s no one, other than the usual suspects, willing to speak on behalf of--or identify with--pornography anymore....

Hanson: This has to do with the absolute national shame about sex. How come we don’t have an institute of sexuality? How come there is nowhere in the United States an institution whose sole concern is American sexuality?

Kramer: The Kinsey Institute...?

Hanson: The Kinsey Institute is a gathering of objects. They take your diaries, they take your dildos, they take your pictures--you can get a tax write-off if you send them that stuff. I know people who do it every year. Photographers who send them all their outtakes, and they get a write-off for giving to the Kinsey Institute. It’s just a museum. But they’re not dealing with people’s problems. If a person, a young man, say, finds himself compelled to dress up in his mother’s dress--and we know this isn’t an uncommon thing--where does he go for help?

Kramer: Oprah?

Hanson: There should be an 800-number! It should be up in the subway! “Are you worried about your sexual urges? Call this number.” And you’d have real people who understand this stuff talk to the person and help him? Or they can write to me--describe it in detail. And send photographs. (Laughter)

9/23/99

Luke F-rd Wire Services, Ltd.: Dian Hanson, Leg Show magazine’s bodaciously bosomed, cellulite-stippled editorial icon, appeared in a leggy portrait by German fetish-fashion photog Helmut Newton that ran in Variety, dated September 20-26---a full-page plug for 76-year-old Newton’s latest and biggest skin-drenched collection yet: “SUMO,” 460 pages of stylish sleaze and sleazy stylishness price-tagged at a scrotum-tightening $1500. The increasingly visible Dian Hanson, who was romantically involved with underground cartoonist Robert Crumb---and was interviewed on-camera in the eponymously titled documentary “Crumb”---can also be seen and heard at length in the more recent film “Rest in Pieces,” a disquieting portrait of apocalyptic artist and former Screw illustrator Joe Coleman, with whom Hanson was also intimately involved. Shtupwardly mobile Hanson continues to work the day shift at Mavety Media, the lower Broadway porno factory also known for gay publications including the anatomically emphatic Inches.

01/23/00

New York magazine contains a story, remarkably similar to the one on my site, on softcore pornographer Dian Hanson. Here's an excerpt:

Fetishes are narrow, even brittle, phenomena. There are men who need to see women's toes but not heels, or heels but not toes; men who need to see women in leg casts; men who need to see a specific kind of woman's shoe pushing a specific kind of car's accelerator. "That's not at all an isolated fetish," says Dian Hanson, the most cerebral pornographer in America. "There's an entire club called Pedal Pumpers. The first man who called me about it could only be satisfied with a 1959 Corvette and white pumps. It had to be white pumps. He'd bring hookers home and take them to the garage."

Hanson's SoHo office is scattered with pleasantly filthy memorabilia: photos of penises with her name written on them, a comic of Wonder Woman removing her panties, crutches tied together with a leather whip. Hanson has pinned up production schedules for the three soft-core magazines she edits, but these are difficult to notice. The eye more naturally falls to, say, the freeze-dried pig or the Polaroid of the three-foot man with someone's scrawled Post-it note reading "Do we need a dwarf?"

Everything Hanson has seen in 23 years of writing and editing porn has led her to one ineluctable truth: that sexual aberration does not exist. Paradoxically, aberration is the norm. The illusion of a comfortable sexual order, of a mainstream of behavior that rules the secret world of lust, did not survive the century. And if porn is even a glimpse of American sexuality, Hanson is its Margaret Mead.