Until the current Flynt media-hype, few Americans had ever seen the Flynt flagship publication in which he vents his barbaric brand of graphic violence-and-sex. Who is the man who now "terrorizes" Congress? I have really seen Flynt and his sadistic imagery and fantasy having been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, to direct a two-year content analysis of Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler (1953-1984).¹

Our study documented each issue of Hustler averaging 14.1 children and pseudo-children alongside 47 images of crime and violence; 52 percent of child photos were sexually explicit and most cartooned children were sexually violated. Flynt regularly presents a volatile co-mingling of images of sex, violence, scatological degradation, fear and horror. Seen routinely are blood-dripping-mutilated hands, arms, heads, breasts and penises, often gutted, decapitated, castrated and satanically murdered and cannibalized, racist and occult images dominate the "magazine."

December 1978, Hustler published photographs of naked children as young as three-years of age in sex scenes alongside an article, "Children, Sex and Society," advocating an end to age of consent, calling for acceptance of adult-child sex, and legalization of incest. Hustler is not for those challenged by human compassion. For example, in:

• February 1975 in an article entitled "Adolescent Fantasy" an uncle is photographed sexually with his niece;
• October 1976 a naked girl scout is photographed soliciting sex in August 1981, a nude young girl, photographed with her dollies, saying to the viewer; "You would be surprised what a 'little girl can do. ..."
• Recurrent cartoon and composite photo themes picturing blood-soaked castration are seen in the reality of child rape and mutilation. In October 26, 1990 a nine-year-old boy in Norman, Oklahoma was raped, his penis cut off and eye gouged out causing Hustler to be removed from local stores -- where a current Hustler depicted a young boy similarly tortured.
• Flynt's "Chester the Molester" cartoon character in March 1977, lay in wait under a playground slide for a child to sexually assault. In October 1977 the kidnapping and torturing three girls about 4-years old is depicted; while in February 1979, a car, with "Just Married" is shown driving away, with blood-drenched, aborted babies tied to the bumper.

So much for fantasy! The May 1984 Hustler cartoon of a father sexually abusing his daughter helped convict Hustler editorial cartoon director, Dwaine Tinsely, in real life, of felony child sexual abuse of his own daughter in 1989. He gave her birth control pills at age thirteen, drugged her and sexually abused her until age eighteen, when she became a suicidal drug addict. Tinsley alone had contributed 145 Hustler cartoons of violent child kidnapping and rape. The FBI Uniform Crime Rate from 1972-1991 found a 128% increase in reported rapes,2 with both offenders and victims increasingly younger. The Reader's Digest commented on the troubling FBI data, saying, "It could be concluded that some force impelling toward sex crime has been operating on younger males in the United States."

In reality, the abusive Hustler cartoons commonly exhibit the coarse "humor" which defines the present White House scandal. To this trained eye, the predatory "force impelling" the president toward a powerless White House intern is reminiscent of Hustler's ongoing themes of deceit, manipulation, degradation and fantasy.

1. The peer-approved study required researchers to examine each page of every magazine (126) from Hustler's 1974 inception to 1984 which, in 1983, reached over four million consumers, numerically on a par with Psychology Today readership.
2. See Emilie Buchwald, et al., Transforming A Rape Culture, (1993) Milkweed, Minneapolis, MN., p. 7. and Judith Reisman, "SoftPorn" Plays Hardball (1991). Huntington House, Lafayette, LA., (1991) p. 15.