Smut: A Sex-Industry Insider (and Concerned Father) Says Enough is Enough

From Publishers Weekly
Reavill says that he wrote this book because the ways that we can access smut have multiplied "staggeringly, exponentially, absurdly." People who don't like it are "getting it shoved in their faces." And he admits he wants his middle school-aged daughter to grow up in a world that's "less trashy" than the one he believes we're living in now. In this made-for-the-choir work, the men's magazine insider (Reavill writes for Maxim and Penthouse) offers a highly personal account of what he finds wrong with explicit advertisements, children's television, the video game rating system and other popular culture mediums. "I am a staunch believer in the First Amendment," he insists, "but there is a whole boatload of things to say about balance and moderation." In generally restrained prose, Reavill explains what is currently being done to censor public indecency and what he believes needs to be done. Among his recommendations: use filtering devices for television and the Internet, implement an "acceptable use" policy for your family's Internet use and insist on "voluntary G-rated display policies" for local signage companies and newsstands. Reavill writes from an unusual perspective, which should bring attention to a book that may have otherwise been dismissed by many.

From Booklist
With stints at Screw, Penthouse, and Maxim on his resume, Reavill's claim to be a sex-industry insider is as serious as his fatherly concern about children's exposure to behavior most adults find at least gauche. The problem with smut, he says, is that it is too readily available. It prevails in all media, and it is virtually impossible to listen to radio, watch TV, or log onto the Internet without being accosted by everything from Howard Stern and lewd sitcom badinage to gangsta-rapper snuff lyrics and mousetrap hard-core Web sites (once a misspelling or deceptive link gets you into one of these, exiting is nearly impossible). Still, censorship is out of the question for First Amendment absolutist Reavill, who says that adults who want smut should be able to get it. What, however, ever happened to discretion, and can it be restored? Reavill is longer on private and familial than on public and legal measures for fighting intrusive, omnipresent porn. Easy reading and realistic thinking on a perpetually vexing public-affairs topic. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
Smut has become the new secondhand smoke: It confronts you against your will where you 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" doesn’t 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.

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.


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The author waves a yellow flag of warning at smut's bullying ubiquity in American popular culture, from the compromised position of being a cog in its wheel. Porn is as it ever was, writes Reavill, the hellspawn of men in their 20s, "such tortured and bizarre anti-exemplars of the human race almost to deserve their own subspecies." The problem is, he suggests, that while smut was once patrolled ground, these days it is the unavoidable secondhand smoke blown in our faces by television, radio and advertising. The writer knows whereof he speaks: He cut his writing teeth at Screw magazine and continues to contribute to Maxim and Penthouse. He is not calling for any abridgement of the First Amendment, but rather yearning for a sense of neighborliness, decorum and decency. Some freedom from free expression, as it were-as Groucho Marx once said to a woman with nine children, Reavill recalls, "I like my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth every once and a while." The author makes some valid points regarding advertising, pop-ups on the Internet, and magazine covers, where hypersexualization is truly unavoidable. He stumbles, though, when it comes to TV, phone sex, books and fashion, areas in which his concern as a parent has more sway than he admits. Who is to say that he can't offer alternatives: games, sports, movies of his choosing, music that isn't laced with sex (though the alternative is usually invectives), reading a book out loud? If Reavill leaves his daughter's recreational options up to the mainstream, he shouldn't complain. And when he tenders correctives such as "insist on voluntary G-rated display policies," all his good civil liberties intentions come unglued. Inventiveness ofpersonal 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.


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