Meet Larry Flynt

Larry Flynt is an American publisher most notably known for producing Hustler, a pornographic entertainment magazine. He came to the Union last week and I went to see him. The man is in a wheelchair. A golden plated wheelchair. I must say, I was expecting a much more interesting person given his background (!) but by the end I was quite disappointed. Anyway, two things are worth mentioning.

1. He spoke about freedom of speech as being a fundamental right in a democratic society, protecting not the speech that you like, but the speech that you don’t like. True! However, the question is how far can you go, and what sort of things can you hide behind this freedom? One can say that pornography is almost an accepted form of entertainment, but as it was pointed out by many of the people there, Hustler goes beyond these limits. The magazine has been criticised for treating with humour some very serious and disturbing issues like rape, child molestation and incest. This can be very painful for those who’ve experienced such traumas, but even more, it’s sending completely the wrong message. No matter how you put it, gang-rape is not entertainment. It is a crime! Many questions were asked, most of them to do with ethical issues, but very few answers were given. At the end, as if trying to pull out an ace to make up for the poor performance, Larry Flynt came up with one of his supposedly funny (and famous, as I later found out) lines: “From my experience I can tell you there are two types of people who oppose pornography: Those who don’t know what they’re talking about and those who don’t know what they’re missing.” Silence…
2. About 150 people came to this talk, most of them students. In a secular multicultural place like Oxford, it can be sometimes challenging to talk about common moral values. People with different backgrounds often have conflicting views on many ethical topics. But Larry Flynt’s talk and the discussion that followed made me see that the same people can still set an absolute reference when it comes to some subjects. Like the subject of this debate. There was a remarkable convergence of ideas from the public that in the end seemed to be saying the same thing: Yes, we can talk about moral relativism and push the limits quite far, but some values are universal and hard to change, even by Larry Flynt.