Larry Flynt Was My Fleece (or How a Book about Sex Turned Me Into a Christian)

by JR Daeschner

In the end, it was the lies that got to me.

I was in Pompeii, you see, researching what I hoped would be my next big book, a History of Sex that would venture between the past and present, revealing the origins of our notions about love and romance.

Besides the obvious reasons, I'd picked Pompeii because of one little-known fact: the Roman ghost town is the site of the first known reference to the word 'Christian,' dating from around the time that the Apostle Paul visited nearby.

Even more intriguingly, the house that contained the 'CHRISTIANOS' graffiti stands across from Pompeii's brothel (and may have been a whorehouse itself).

But what struck me most was an offhand remark by Pompeii's chief archeologist as he tried to explain the exponential growth of an obscure Semitic sect just a few decades after Rome had crucified its leader like a criminal:

"No religion had ever spread so rapidly in such a capillary manner before."

And that got me wondering why.

Having been raised a Christian, I'd turned my back on the faith partly because I believed the lie that Christianity was anathema to knowledge--I thought that the more you learned about the "real world," the less faith you inevitably had.

As I began to discover, though, that wasn't necessarily true.

If anything, I came to realize that Christians have nothing to fear from learning--while the secular world has a lot to lose from an unbiased look at our past.

I soon learned, for instance, that it was Christ and his followers who gifted the concept of redemption to Western culture--the revolutionary promise that even a prostitute could be redeemed (as opposed to the once-a-whore, always-a-whore ethos of the ancient world).

And it was the early Christians who fought to stop Roman infanticide (making the modern Church's stance on abortion remarkably consistent), while it was Christ's gender-neutral character that enabled women to identify with Him and call themselves Christians--or 'little Christs.'

Contrast Jesus with Mohammed--a celibate pacifist versus a warmonger with a harem--and you can see why feminism took root in traditionally Christian societies.

Whereas polygamy inherently devalues women, it was Paul--the supposed source of Christian "misogyny"--who officially broke with Jewish custom and made marriage one-to-one, mandating that each Christian leader have only one wife and (contrary to Roman practice) actually be faithful to her.

In other words, it's very likely that the only reason Western women dare to demand monogamy from men now is because of centuries of Christianization.

Yet somehow the world continues to slander Christianity as "sex-negative"--and misogynistic to boot.

FREUD'S FRAUD

The cognoscenti will tell you that Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is largely disregarded now, while blithely overlooking his pervasive impact on pop culture and the wreckage it's caused.

For instance, thanks to Freud's declaration that all children want to have sex with their parents (the Oedipus complex), many of his followers dismissed actual cases of sex abuse as wishful fantasies.

And it was one of Freud's disciples, Wilhelm Reich, who helped inspire the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies, a period that most documentaries depict as an eminently groovy time to be alive.

But have you ever heard them mention its seedy side?

At a time when erstwhile "perversions"--homosexuality, sadomasochism, etcetera--were being declared perfectly normal, many "revolutionaries" argued that pedophilia was just another avenue for sexploration.

After all, who was to say that consensual sex with children was wrong? Or, as a Dutch magazine for gays put it in 1969, "Why Not Go To Bed With Your Son?"

Modern "pedophile activists" still regard those as the good old days. In the Netherlands, I interviewed the co-founder of an ultra-fringe political party trying to legalize pedophilia.

Who did he blame for putting an end to the child-sex movement? An alliance between an all-but-extinct branch of feminism (they wouldn't have called pole dancing "empowering") and--you guessed it--devout Christians.

That was a truth I heard repeatedly, be it from a dodgy Russian biznesman in Venice or an American pimp in Prague: Christianity acts as a check on decadence.

And time and again, I came across Westerners who were having to relearn history's lessons the hard way.

In Amsterdam, I met a former prostitute turned politician who led a crackdown that shut much of the Red-Light District.

"If you're a Christian organization, people don't want to hear (your views on prostitution) because you're Christian," she told me. "But it's new when a politician from the leftwing says it's not good!'

As for pornography, I interviewed one of the makers of the "Max Hardcore" franchise in LA, a man who's filmed some of the worst violence against women outside of warzones.

"With the sex business, you gotta keep ratcheting up," he said. "It's kinda like violence in movies. You gotta keep ratcheting up. People get inured at a certain point—it's gotta be more, greater, nastier. Filthier."

Funnily enough, that's just what porn's (Christian) opponents say.

JUST ANOTHER CASUALTY

Meanwhile, the media routinely hail Hustler founder Larry Flynt as a hero of the First Amendment, a martyr to free speech.

But did you know he once claimed to be a born-again Christian--and that during his conversion, he had a premonition of himself in a wheelchair?

I asked him about it at his headquarters in Beverly Hills. He admitted that if he had closed Hustler after his conversion--rather than continue defending it in court--he might never have been shot, and he wouldn't be paralyzed today.

Up close and in person, rather than a hero, Flynt looks like just another casualty of porn, a man who's made millions but lost everything that counts, including his "soulmate" and much of his family.

All of this eventually resonated with me.

Lie after lie, I kept coming back to the faith whose truths had been proven over centuries: rules and values that built Western civilization, not because God is a god of arbitrary demands, but because "God so loved the world."

Sure, I also experienced some personal and professional disasters (it's surprising how low some of us have to go before finally surrendering).

But ultimately once I realized the truth, the inevitable question became--what do you do with it? Or "who do you say that I am?"

Some may question my decision to publish The History of Sex.

Well, all I can say is I prayed about it. A lot. And Larry Flynt was my fleece (but that's another story…)

For those of you who struggle to reconcile faith with the "real world" (particularly sex), take it from someone who's had to learn the hard way: the Truth really will set you free.

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Defend Buttman? You're Not a Liberal, You're a Libertarian

From the archive: 2010

The trial of 'Buttman' in our nation's capital shows just how confused many self-styled liberals are about porn.

For those without sphincter fixations, John Stagliano is the porn mogul who's arguably done more than anyone to popularize anal sex among heterosexuals.

Toward the end of the last century, Stagliano spotted, well, a gap in the market and cast himself as Buttman, a sniggerworthy alter ego who not only sodomized women but also pioneered forms of exploitation that are now routine in the porn repertoire. 

The success of his Evil Angel outfit--and the fact that society tolerated it--inspired established porn players to follow in his fetishistic footsteps, creating what has become, quite literally, a 'race to the bottom.'

As one of Stagliano's porn allies in LA told me while I was researching The History of Sex: 'Back in the early Nineties, (anal sex) wasn't rare, but it was like a step up from normal porn. Now it's kind of almost normal, because with the sex business, you gotta keep ratcheting up.'

'It's kinda like violence in movies. People get inured at a certain point—it's gotta be more, greater, nastier. Filthier.'

Buttman is HIV positive -- as is his porn star wife
(thankfully, their nine-year-old daughter is negative)

In the People v. Buttman case, Stagliano faced up to 32 years in prison on obscenity charges, but the judge threw out the case on technicalities. 

Bizarrely, throughout the proceedings, many so-called liberals parroted the same clichés used in Stagliano's defense: consenting adults… their own privacy… First Amendment… freedom of speech… yadda, yadda, yadda.

But if you think there's anything liberal about supporting or tolerating porn, chances are 1) you don't know how hardcore it's become or 2) you have a vested interest in the industry.

Stagliano, for instance, is renowned for pioneering 'asshole milkshakes' and 'ATMs' ('ass-to-mouths'), in which women are not only subjected to anal sex but induced to swallow the ejaculate, thereby tasting their own feces.

And if you can tolerate that, here's a sample of the dialogue from Milk Nymphos, an Evil Angel video that was played to the court, as cited by a local paper.

'One of the female performers repeatedly refers to her male co-star as a "nigger," declaring, for example, "Come on, you nigger, fuck me in the ass," and imploring the other female performer to "look in his eyes when you suck his nigger cock."'

True liberalism holds that we're all in this together: that what I do has an impact on my fellow human beings, and if I see someone being exploited or treated unjustly, it's my duty to do everything in my power to help them.

That's why so many of the early liberals--not least Nonconformist women--fought to regulate porn and prostitution.

Libertarianism is almost the exact opposite, a kind of rabid conservatism that's perverted the American Dream.

Libertarians like Stagliano believe they should be free to make a buck any way they see fit unless the law can stop them.

In their twist on history, they'd have us believe that George Washington and his boys were eating their boots at Valley Forge so that centuries later, Buttman & Co. could get rich by degrading women for money.

Sure enough, one of Stagliano's media defenders was a research fellow at the DC-based Cato Institute, a group with the lofty-sounding ideals of promoting 'individual liberty, free markets and peace'.

In reality, it's a libertarian thinktank that thought nothing of taking Buttman's money.

If you want to proclaim the Buttman trial as a victory for free speech, then go ahead: that's your right.

But please: don't call yourself a liberal.

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