Nudity Content Must Be Over 18

Dian Hanson

Interview by Peter Landau

New York City art-book publisher Taschen has produced a series of coffee-table volumes that threaten to snap the legs off of the sturdiest living-room furnishings. The first two volumes of the hardback six-volume collection Dian Hanson’s: The History of Men’s Magazines, out now, are the opening salvo in the definitive pictorial story of stroke books.

There is no better person to take the reigns of this comprehensive account of masturbatory fodder than Dian Hanson, who gave the world Puritan magazine, one of the filthiest slap mags ever to defile a newsstand. The tall, beautiful, and whip-smart blonde also helmed two of history’s greatest fetish titles, Leg Show and Juggs.

Mainstream audiences may best remember Hanson from the documentary Crumb, as one of cartoonist Robert Crumb’s powerful girlfriends. But there is so much more to know and love about Hanson, too much for one interview. In part one, Hanson explains the genesis of her bold project, the difference between breast men and leg men, and why the ’70s remain the peak of pornography for her. Next week, prepare to get more personal with the great lady.

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Did you question your sanity when you took on the ambitious project of chronicling the history of men’s magazines?
I really had no choice in the beginning because I was working for Benedikt [Taschen, publisher]. He came in and said, “This is what I want you to do.” He has a way of always making everything sound possible and easy. So I was writing it down, going okay, okay, thinking, “Oh, yeah, this will be great.” Then he walked out of the room and I was taken with a fit of the shakes: “Oh my God, how am I going to do this?”

I do have a twenty-five-year history in men’s magazines. It seemed as if it shouldn’t be so difficult. The fact was I was not a collector. I had relics, things that I acquired in the course, things that were sent to me, but I was not a collector and I didn’t know any true collectors. I especially didn’t know how to get hold of the stuff from the other parts of the world. Even now I’m afraid that there’s too much American stuff in it, because the American stuff is easier to get. That was the real challenge, getting [materials] not just from Europe, but South America, Japan, Turkey, places I didn’t even know made men’s magazines.

It seemed like an impossible task, but how big is the world these days. It’s all there. If it exists it’s going to be there and there’ll be a way to get to it. I started with my good old friend eBay, bought probably fifteen hundred magazines on eBay, most of them in the first three months.

When did you start collecting the contents of your exhaustive six-volume history?
It was a project that he had in mind for a long time and didn’t find anyone else crazy enough to want to take it on. It was in January of 2002.

You got this together in roughly two years?
I got it all together in one year. We’ve been refining it since then, but basically I got it all together in one year and wrote what was originally two volumes, then three volumes, and then six volumes in a year and a half. Hey, I worked in porn. There is nothing that will teach you to write faster than having three monthly magazine deadlines.

As a veteran of the business for over a quarter century, were you surprised by any of your findings?
It surprised me that they made men’s magazines in Turkey [laughs]. Certainly, I was surprised all along the way. Now I’ve come so far down the road that it’s hard to remember my surprise sometimes. It surprised me how far back the magazines went. Benedikt himself thought the magazines started around 1940. I think a lot of Americans believe it all started in 1953 with Playboy. And they’ll say wondrously, “You mean, there were magazines before Playboy?”

Come on, the government was subsidizing magazines before World War II for the troops. There was a huge pin-up effort to keep the boys happy, keep the boys from straying out into the brothels of Paris as they did in World War I. [Men’s magazines] really go back to before 1900. We started at 1900 just because it was a good solid place to start. But in Paris they were making programs for the cabarets even before 1900 that were in the form of magazines.

Every since Gutenberg and the invention of movable type men have been ogling naked ladies in magazines?
Magazines are a new-ish invention. I have pages of newspapers from 1609 from England and Germany. They were making newspapers, but most of them were single sheets.

Your history doesn’t include tabloids, say like Screw?
Because of [Screw founder] Al Goldstein’s fascinating character, I wanted to have him profiled--I stretched. He made for a short period, between 1976 and 1977, National Screw, which was a magazine. We can profile Al Goldstein and show a couple copies of Screw the newspaper by writing about National Screw, which was a fascinating magazine, completely forgotten, not collectable in any way. But say [Nobel Prize-winning cartoonist] Art Spiegelman, you want to see what he was up to in 1976, go look at National Screw.

You’ve included magazines covering topics as diverse as humor, true crime, scandal, and fetish. What were the criteria toward including material drawn in your wide net?
I come from a pornographer’s stance, so as a pornographer I know that the real base, when you get down to the bottom, is did men regularly use it for masturbatory pleasure. That was where I was going. You have to stop at a certain point, though. You have to assume that men were using it for masturbation and there was somebody on the staff making the thing that knew that this was going on, that this was the intention.

Therefore, the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue I even thought about putting in there, guys were jerking off to it--but they were jerking off to the Sears catalogue too. Once you start putting in catalogues aimed at women that men are using, that was outside the net. Because I knew Mr. Frederick back in the late ’70s, I’m going to say he didn’t intend it. He really was rather high-minded with his designs. He thought he was saving the American family by making housewives sexy.

But detective magazines were a tricky one. I was familiar with them from the forensic side of it. When I lived with [artist] Joe Coleman I bought him as a gift a subscription to Forensic magazine and became familiar with Park Dietz in there, who was always the prosecution’s witness in forensic cases. He’s the most famous forensic psychiatrist. He had written about detective magazines as porno for sadists. There is no more perfect pornography for sadists, and he campaigned to have them suppressed in the 1980s. Going from that and having some knowledge of sadist behavior and knowing what’s found in the homes of sadists, you find detective magazines. This is something they were regularly masturbating to. If we allow that sadists do have sex lives, this is going to be far more interesting to them as masturbatory material, and certainly was through the ’70s, than any of the men’s magazines out there. They were the most questionable inclusion, but the covers are so nice! I couldn’t resist collecting the covers.

For a lot of it, I have to go on my feeling when I see it. I worked for a long time in the business. I came from the hippie esthetic, where we were really there for the sex. We weren’t just businessmen. I didn’t get into porn because I thought I was going to get rich. I got into it because I like sex and I wanted to have fun. So when I look at something I can tell whether it has sexual intentions.

You were the final word on what got in and what got cut?
Ultimately, Benedikt [had the final word]. Benedikt has mixed the ’70s with the detective magazines because it’s too offensive to him. He likes to see people having a good time. So we had the earlier detective magazines that were all glamour and strong, dominate women, which were masturbatory fodder of a completely different kind. You know, the lure of the bad woman with her cigarette and her spiked heels.

Right, but not the later ones where some guy is choking a woman.
Exactly. He went for the ones where the reader’s fantasy was a submissive fantasy. A fantasy of being with a strong sexual woman that would use him to satiate her evil needs, but not the post-feminist ones where the men were getting back at those bitches for getting uppity.

Did you lock horns with Taschen about what to include and exclude?
I argued with him sometimes, but I trust Benedikt. He and I generally have the same esthetic with this. We’re both big fans of the ’70s material. We both like explicit material, we like material that’s somewhat vulgar, but exuberantly vulgar--neither one of us likes to see people getting hurt. When I look at the detective material I get that queasy feeling from it, but I’ll say, “I can justify it.” Benedikt goes by his feelings. He gets the queasy feeling, he says, “Get it out of there.”

Has your research shown a change over the years in what visuals turn men on?
Absolutely, but not in every country, say France, they kept the same visual esthetic pretty much front to back. The very first images, they were reasonably slim women with smallish, high-ish, firm-ish breasts and that’s where they are today. They started there; they stayed there. Latin-American countries, kind of the same thing, the butts and thighs got a little bigger with time, but still very similar bodies, always a slightly fuller figure.

The countries that were actively involved in World War II, Germany, the U.S., England, they all came out with the same alteration in the body type. Somehow the French escaped it. I can’t tell you what the Russians liked because the Russians just weren’t making any porn magazines. The U.S., England, and Germany before the war had the same sort of body type, which was influenced by France.

France was a major influence around the world, not just fashion and food, but erotic interests. They were the major producers of erotic magazines before the war, and everyone went for that same body type, young, high-breasted, and symmetrical.

After the war, the U.S., England, and Germany all came out with a desire for a very voluptuous figure. What was popular right after the war became more exaggerated into the ’50s and ’60s. All three countries began making magazines with breast emphasis in the ’50s.

Why do you think that is?
Hey, I love to be armchair psychologist, and I believe I always know the reason for everything [laughs], but you don’t want to state it as fact. I can state it as opinion that people were terribly traumatized by the war and they needed mommy. They needed something warm and comforting. As the editor of Juggs magazine for fifteen years I read an awful lot of letters by these guys. And also as the editor of Leg Show and Tight, which dealt with a youthful appearance, I can say completely different men, completely different types of letters, almost no crossover on the audience. Each one was aghast at the tastes of the other ones.

There’s something very lovable about the big-breast lover. They tend to be open, outgoing, physical, accepting of the flaws of women, happy with the functioning female body. They like the body that gets pregnant. They like the body that gives birth. They like the body that lactates. There wasn’t the picky demand for perfection. They tended to be more rural men. They tended to live in the red states rather than the blue states. They were often slightly less educated. They were the kind of guys who in their personal ads would say, “Fats welcomed! All ages okay!” They loved mom.

Elmer Batters, king of the leg photographers, believed that men who liked big breasts had nurturing mothers. He didn’t go with the idea that they weren’t breastfed. His idea was that they had nurturing mothers who picked them up and cuddled them and comforted them when they were little boys, therefore the breasts became a source of comfort because that’s where they were held. So they concentrated on that, the upper body. Certainly I knew from doing breast magazines that the breast guys did tend to like oral sex and everything about the upper body and not like all that ickiness below the waist. I am working on The Big Book of Breasts now [laughs].

What’s your favorite men’s magazine era?
My nature is that whatever I’m working on at the moment I get obsessed with and that’s what makes it out well, of course. I’m able to take on these serial obsessions. But now that I have done the first two volumes, I’ve done the second two volumes, and I’m in the middle of the design process of the final two volumes, which are the ’70s, I can say ’70s is probably my favorite. It’s pretty before that, it’s esthetically pleasing; you had fabulous artwork and great cover designs. You had people putting in so much effort. I came up in the ’70s, and just like any porn lover, it’s that first stuff I saw, [the stuff] that took my porn virginity, which really gets me still. I love the playfulness, the experimentation of the ’70s. And, of course, when I look at the ’70s stuff I’m awash with nostalgia was well. I can remember when I got in the business in 1976. I love the adult bookstore magazines, the really raunchy dirty ones that were at first just experimenting with pushing the limits. But also the newsstand stuff, to go back and remember these people, to open up a Hustler from 1976, to open up a Cheri magazine and see all my old friends and see the things that shocked and delighted us at the time. It’s pulling on the old heartstrings here.

Volumes One and Two take the story only as far as the end of the 1950s. Do the other four volumes continue chronologically or do they take some perverted detours?
No, it’s pretty much chronological, though you can’t be strictly chronological because that’s not how the world moves along. It’s not 1957 things looked like this and 1958 things looked like this. Everything was moved along really by legal cases. The second volume ends with 1957 because there was a landmark legal case then that opened up the world for a proliferation of more explicit magazines, if you can call showing bare breasts openly explicit. The second two volumes are both on the ’60s because it’s not as if, okay 1958 to 1965 everything was one way and then 1965 to 1970 was a different way.

What you had emerging in the ’60s was over-the-counter and under-the-counter. When the laws loosened up a little we got a whole new group of men’s magazines that were not making it onto the newsstand, that were not following Playboy, not lifestyle magazines. So I divided the volumes as this: what was sold openly and what was sold clandestinely. As you move into the ’60s and into the ’70s you’ll find that there was more sold clandestinely, so that volume six will be the biggest of all, if we’re allowed to make it bigger. It’ll also be the most difficult to place [laughs]. In there we have things like Surrender to the Beaver and Warm Wet War Whore, Famous Anus, showing that pornographers never lacked for a sense of humor.

No fanzines?
Well, we do have what were the fanzines of the ’70s, and that’s the reader-written pornography. There’s Love and Hate and Ooh and Finger, produced by hippies but coming from a seminal publication called Suck that was made around 1971, 1972. There were only eight issues. It was out of Holland. The idea was it was going to be real sex, whatever the readers provided, photographs, texts, drawings, whatever they made they would put in there because the people should be heard. We should not dictate what the people want. And also as a sociological experiment to see what the people were doing. What the people did want.

Germaine Greer famously posed with her legs locked behind her neck, which they ran full page. We reproduce that. She then quit after that [laughs].

Just like she recently did on Celebrity Big Brother.
The final issue of course ran the picture again and her letter of resignation and all the reader responses. Things like: “Germaine Greer is arse--I must fuck it!” That magazine was like Johnny Appleseed. Followers cropped up, or appreciators, and Suck went around helping these people who made these magazines out of their homes. They generally called themselves families, so there was the Love Family that made Love and there was the Finger Family in California.

Like hippie communes?
Similar, at the core of each was a husband and wife. The Love Family had a couple of kids and other people who drifted in and out like [porn star and performance artist] Annie Sprinkles and Long Jean Silver, the amputee porn star. I was somewhat involved with these people, so I wrote the profile because it all kind of ended ugly. Perfect freedom is not really perfect.

Part Two of this interview will run on February 17, 2005.