Flynt event lacked broader discussion about society

TO THE EDITOR:

As a journalism student concerned with free speech issues, I was extremely disappointed with the Larry Flynt speaking engagement. Rather than the multifaceted dialogue I had hoped for, Flynt consistently avoided any discussion of pornography’s connection to our society’s culture of widespread violence against women.

The moderators of the discussion were overtly biased toward the speaker, facilitating what basically became a free-speech love fest (despite the hypocritical censorship of an attendee after he expressed a dissenting opinion). They did not attempt to sustain any broader discussion of the significant societal consequences of pornography.

Flynt, whose pornographic content has included depictions of violence and rape, among others, used the mantra of “free speech” as a tool to avoid the actual questions: What does it mean to live in a society that accepts the degradation of women and children as normal sexual “fantasy”? What are the psychological and social effects of men’s repeated use of increasingly violent images to orgasm?

This question is not a legal one. Flynt can clearly publish whatever he wants under the law, but the bottom line is that we as a society are at fault if we don’t consciously and actively reject it — and, at the very least, discuss it.


Leah Josephson
Junior
Journalism, French