Feminist Nikki Craft created this site to highlight the racism, sexism and human rights abuses endemic to the adult industry, and to challenge Leftists to include pornography in their critique of commercialism and corporate greed. Hustling the Left says liberals should not be taken in by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt’s self-presentation as a persecuted dissident.
As Craft demonstrates in the numerous Hustler cartoons she reproduces on her site, the magazine mocks child abuse (often by depicting the child as sexually precocious and seducing the adult), and promotes racism and violence against women. Hustler invites readers to identify with Nazis, wife-beaters, incestuous fathers and kidnappers of children (the famous “Chester the Molester” cartoons). The Left would show no mercy to any other corporation that made money by trafficking in racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic images. Why does the porn industry get a free pass?
Meanwhile, the absence of an effective political challenge to pornography has allowed its values of sexual exploitation, degradation, violence and commodification of the body to spill over into mainstream films and television. The Left’s critique of corporate-owned media is incomplete, says Craft, because of a refusal to challenge the source of its exploitative aesthetic, namely the porn industry.