Synopses & Reviews
Smut has become the new secondhand smoke: It confronts you against your will whereyou least want to encounter it, and it's impossible to protect your children from it. Nothing made this clearer than the Janet Jackson episode during the Super Bowl when millions of kids were exposed to an image that used to be restricted to consenting adults. But that's nothing compared with the sexuality that now saturates morning radio shows, prime-time sitcoms, pop music lyrics, billboards, and store windows. "Just change the channel" doesnt work anymore.
Enough, says Penthouse and Maxim writer Gil Reavill, the concerned father of a middle school daughter. As a liberal, Reavill always believed that Americans have a First Amendment right to read and view sexually explicit material, and he saw nothing wrong with contributing to publications like Screw. But he now argues that unlike magazines and videos viewed in private and by consent smut in the public square has simply gone too far.
Reavill takes the reader inside the sex entertainment industry, recalling his own experiences as a young man from the Midwest seduced by a job at an X-rated magazine in New York City. With witty and fascinating stories, he shows how his colleagues rebelled against a stifling culture by pushing the envelope. Little did they realize that words and images considered porn in the 1980s are now on the public airwaves around the clock.
Many Americans instinctively defend smut because censorship strikes them as unacceptable. But Reavill argues that we have to balance the rights of those who want to buy smut with the rights of those who want to avoid it. His book will spark a long-overdue debate about where we draw the lines in pop culture.
Review
"Inventiveness of personal responsibility is not Reavill's strong suit, but his concern for our visual and aural everyday has merit. Sex, as he states, should be the glittering sand on the beach, not the stuff kicked in our faces by thugs." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Easy reading and realistic thinking on a perpetually vexing public-affairs topic." Booklist
Review
"Indeed Smut would just be a boilerplate conservative rant about sex and porn and declining cultural values, but for one intriguing twist: Reavill, in addition to being a concerned father and ostensible sex industry insider, is also card-carrying member of the ACLU with libertarian-leaning beliefs. He thinks the media should be shaped by mass tastes, not government regulation; and he doesn't condemn the existence of porn but merely argues that offensive material should be shuffled away from plain view..." Hope Glassberg, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopsis
A Penthouse and Maxim writer rethinks the limit of free speech in a sex-saturated media culture.
About the Author
Gil Reavill is the coauthor of Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem and Save Girls Lives. He writes about true crime for Maxim and has a cultural review column in Penthouse.