filed under Interview | trackback link
Dian Hanson
Interview by Peter Landau
Last week, readers were treated to Dian Hanson, pornographer extraordinaire and mastermind behind Taschen’s six-volume History of Men’s Magazines. Her exhaustive research lit heretofore-dark corners of the global slap mag’s evolution, and we’re all richer for her hard work.
But this definitive account is merely the latest expression of Hanson’s ever-curious mind. This second-part interview questions how she garnered a quarter century working as a pornographer, debates the good and evil inherent in the industry, and looks at what’s next for America’s porn laureate.
*
When did you first become interested in pornographic materials?
I think it was in the womb [laughs]. I turned around and went, “Oh my God, look, it’s pussy!” I was just fascinated with the human body from an early age. My father attempted to be a home nudist. He was sort of foiled by my mother, who wouldn’t go along with it. He was fond of wandering naked throughout the house, so we saw that. I had a brother and sister and we were all bathed together. We were plunked into a bathtub once a week and left there for an hour or so. We certainly got interested at that point in examining the differences. It was always there.
My brother discovered my father’s porn stash when he was about ten, I guess, and I was eleven. From that point on we were able to track it as it was moved around the house. We’d go in there and look and my father would see that we looked and he’d move it somewhere else, we’d find it, we’d go look again and see what was added and subtracted. My father, later, not at that point, moved up to head of a Christian mystic cult that they belonged to. The books of their religion sort of combined sex with the religion, a stodgy, boring sex, but we knew it was there. We knew that they were into sex magic.
How’d you get into the business? I understand your first job was for the infamous Puritan magazine.
Indeed. I was living in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I grew up in Seattle but married a man from Mississippi of all things and, being a hippie and not realizing that all of the world was the West Coast, I allowed him to take me to Mississippi and that was a nightmare that I escaped from and went up to Pennsylvania because my parents were living there. I met a guy in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who did advertising for a man with a string of adult bookstores. Hustler was new on the stands and was from a guy he could relate to, somebody who made his money from strip clubs. He wanted someone to make him a magazine like Hustler, and the only one he knew who claimed to have any publishing experience was the guy who did his advertising, so he asked him to make the magazine. Since I was going out with the guy we began making the magazine.
I was only there for the first two issues, which took two years to make. The guy I was going out with, I won’t even honor him by giving his name. He was a foul human being. But it introduced me to the world of it. We overworked those early pages over and over endlessly. I left just before our publisher was murdered in Florida and everything sort of changed after that. By then we moved to New York and I went to work with Peter Wolf, who’s really my true mentor in the business. He started High Society, Cheri magazine. Together we did Partner magazine, we did Oui for a little while after it was sold from Playboy to mobsters in New York.
For fifteen years you charted the course of two of the most popular niche publications, Leg Show and Juggs. What’s the secret to your success?
Liking the material. My nauseating people-pleasing desires, so that I was always attempting to make the readers happy by getting it just right for them. The fact that I was not filled with self-loathing for assisting men to masturbate, which troubles most of the men in the business [laughs]. Anytime I would hire a man to do writing I’d have a problem with the material that he wrote. He’d have the girls getting sort of harsh and vicious and I’d say, “Come on, the guys aren’t going to be able to jerk off.” One finally blurted out, “I don’t want to help heterosexual men masturbate.”
Can pornography exist without guilt woven into the material?
We’re always going to like something that makes sex better. It’s our nature. We like to look at food magazines if we like to eat food. If I go to a newsstand I want to look at the food magazines the same way another guy will look through three or four sex magazines to see if there’s something that really whets my appetite and I may have to take it home.
It’s completely natural for us as psychologically evolved people to want to intensify our pleasures. Hell, my cat licks his own dick [laughs]. If he sees other cats on TV he’s riveted because it’s given him some kind of stimulation.
Why’d you leave the magazine world for the art-book life at Taschen?
Remember those guys who I told you about that I worked for at Oui magazine? My publisher, George Mavedy, died and we struggled along. He was a great man.
For whatever failings he might have had being human, he was the most wonderful of publishers. He had a big heart, big appetite for life. He had a good sense of humor. He had the philosophy that creative people knew best. He was an art collector. So when you came in there to do a magazine for him, his deal was you will have absolute control over the contents of your magazine, but you’ll also bear all blame if your magazine does poorly. I never experienced an environment like that.
Coming in and having fifteen years to do exactly what I wanted and to discover that exactly what I wanted would make those publications successful. It remade me as a human being. It gave me confidence. It made me happy [laughs]. And when George died incompetents came in, and then those incompetents brought in people who I had to work for at Oui magazine to run the magazines, I knew it was time to leave.
I looked around the business, certainly I had job offers within the business, but the men’s magazine’s business is in serious decline. There was no place I could go where I’d be able to make a high-quality product.
What’s next after you complete this magnum opus on men’s magazines?
The Big Book of Breasts. We’re always working on multiple projects here, so even while I have been doing The History of Men’s Magazines I’ve been working on a giant book on Vanessa Del Rio, the most deserving of porn actresses, that will come with a two-hour DVD, best of her films and also lengthy segments of original interviews and following her around in public and things like that.
I’m doing a book on detective magazines. We’re not doing the ’70s, sadly, but as I said, Benedikt doesn’t like to see bad things happen to women. He’s German. He brings a different esthetic to it. He grew up with his pornographic influence being Private, the Swedish hardcore magazine, and in Private the women are always grinning. They got a dick in every hole, but they’re happy and it’s presented as that: women enjoying sex. That’s what he likes to see.
You have posed for Helmut Newton and your editorial page in Leg Show, but while suggestive, you’ve never totally exposed yourself. Why so modest?
Because I’m really not exhibitionistic, I’d rather direct.
When I first came to New York, the same boyfriend I had at Puritan wanted me to be a fashion model. I was tall and thin and young, so that would seem a possibility. He got me to attempt this when we moved to New York. It was six months of hell. Six months of misery. Not eating, having to go around to these photographers who would tell me what was wrong with me, why I was ugly and would never make it. They might help me if I gave them a blowjob or something. It was all so hard on my ego, so sleazy, so underhanded and demanding.
At the end of six months I said, “That’s it. I’m not going to do it.” I went to the last photographer who said, “Look, why do you really want to be a fashion model? Do you just want money and nice clothes? Why don’t you just become a hooker? I can help you. I have a friend who’s got a whorehouse. You know, Lauren Hutton was a hooker, you could be a hooker. That could help you.” I was like, “No!” I went home and ate like a quart of ice cream and said I’m just going to work in porn.
Are you saying the fashion industry is more degrading to women than pornography?
The fashion industry drove me into porn. At least in the porn industry it was all upfront. I never had a publisher try to fuck me. I never went in for a job in the porn industry and have them say, “Oh, I’ll give you the job if you fuck me.” They might have wanted it, they may have been interested in it, but they showed their interest by, you know, the traditional methods: trying to impress me or trying to please me. Not just coldly saying if you entertain my friends in the Hamptons this weekend maybe I can get you some work.
You would disagree then with the definition of pornography as being made up of men who hate women and women who hate men?
Certainly there are parts of the business that cater to men who hate women, and there are certainly women in the business who hate men. But you get back what you put into it. There are men who specifically make pornography that is misogynistic and so, of course, the consumers of that pornography are misogynistic.
I tried not to make misogynistic pornography and I’ve saved hundreds of letters, the more interesting letters, I almost never got misogynistic letters. What you get are these embarrassingly vulnerable sincere letters from men who want to marry the girls, want to date the girls. How many letters have I read that start: “This letter isn’t like the other letters you receive. I respect the girls. I love the girls. I think they’re goddesses.” Please.
Doing pornography taught me to like men. When I got into pornography I was like 23, 24 years old, and a woman that age is at the point when she is most of interest to me. Particularly coming to New York, I was harassed by men on the street; I was touched by men on the subway. I would say, “Oh, men are pigs,” the way I hear women talking. When I started working in pornography I was introduced to a completely different world of men. The shy introverted men, who are often the consumers of pornography. The married men who are faithful to their wives but use pornography as a little, mild, tame escape. I think one of the reasons I am so positively inclined towards men today is because of my years working in pornography.
Just by being nice to the readers you get this huge outpouring of appreciation and men writing in with their problems. I had a man call me the day of his wife’s funeral to cry on the phone because I helped him--through a few letters I’d written back and forth--reveal his foot fetish to his wife and get her to understand it and play along with him. When he called me he said, “You’re the only one who can really understand what she meant to me, because she wasn’t just a wife and mother, she was the only woman who accepted me as I am. What will I ever do? I’m going to enter the ministry because I don’t ever want another woman.
Then a year later he wrote me and said, “I hope you’ll be happy to hear this, but I met a woman in the ministry and I’m opening up to her and I think we’re going to be happy together.”
I learned really from my mentor Peter Wolf, because he was into doing these audience-participation magazines, the idea that these guys are like us. They are us. We are the consumers and they can be the makers and without them we’d be nothing, so you draw them in and you make it a party that they’re part of. You have very loyal readers if you treat them this way.
I was very masturbation-positive, which none of the magazines were doing at that point. None of them would admit that this is what the magazines are for. They believed this was a shameful secret that the men didn’t want mentioned. And so many readers contacted me over the years and said, “I always felt so ashamed of what I did because it was never mentioned. I thought I was the only one buying the magazine for this reason. I thought the other guys really were playboys with lots of girls. I’m just a married guy with three kids. I buy the magazine and sneak out in the garage and whack off.” I did my job [laughs].
What do you think of the sex business moving online and Internet sex sites, like Mr. Skin?
Now that I’m not dependent on being part of the magazine industry for my livelihood I can get over my hostility towards the Internet. I love the Internet as much as anyone. I’m just happy to watch the evolution.
Maybe after six volumes of men’s magazines you’re sick of men’s magazines.
Never!
Is there a future for men’s magazines?
I see them going into a very dark age, but we thought turntables were going to disappear too. We thought vinyl was going to be gone. At the same time that the newsstand magazines are in such wretched decline, the old magazines, as collectables, have never been more collectable or desired because it is something in the past. If you go on eBay the adult section is enormous. You always have at least six hundred offerings of vintage magazines. The prices are going up and up on the magazines.
The magazines themselves are not going to die out. When it gets down to the point where there really are no good magazines there and the novelty wears off on the rest there’s going to be people who are going to want the retro-appeal of something they can hold in their hands. This is the thing that the Internet does not give us. It does not give us sensual, tactual communication with our pornography. Sure, you can buy good paper and print your shit out on good paper . . .
Nobody does that.
Well, I do know people who do [laughs]. They print it out and keep it in little folders and binders and in essence they’re making themselves magazines. But most of the quality of the images isn’t great. People aren’t working in high-resolution digital because it takes too long to load. All of it is disposable. There were always men who bought their sex magazines, looked at them, and threw them in an empty field because otherwise how would young men learn about men’s magazines? At the same time, every time an old man dies someone finds a big box of his horded, beloved sex magazines in the attic. The Internet is not meeting our hording needs. As technology moves on, only something as simple and crude as paper and a real graven image is going to allow us that kind of collector’s joy. I think that we will see magazines creeping back.
| 
