Art and Porn: An Interview with Editor Dian Hanson

By Liz Langley, AlterNet. Posted August 5, 2008.

When you get your hands on something called The Big Penis Book, a 384-page hardcover featuring 400 artfully photographed, supersized phalluses, you have certain expectations. You expect that it will be a great book but not one that you will actually read. You expect that there are friends you'll have to forbid from taking it into the bathroom with them. You expect it to be hot.

You do not expect one of its most intriguing features to be the woman who put it together.

Dian Hanson is the editor whose rich, informative prose and unusual background as a porn publisher nearly upstaged The Big Penis Book for me (it was, by the way, better than I expected).

"I always loved pornography," Hanson says in the documentary Crumb, (1994) about cartoonist R. Crumb, who Hanson once dated. "I took my birthday money when I turned 18 and went to the adult bookstore and bought pornography."

At the time the film was shot she was the editor of Leg Show, a men's fetish magazine concentrating on great gams and the men who love them. She has also been at the helm of Juggs, which featured super DDDuper large-breasted women and founded Big Butt magazine, in which she'd planned to showcase girls with small waists and disproportionately large cabooses (cabeese?), but which has since focused on bigger women. I never saw any of these during Hanson's tenure but I did use Big Butt magazine as an all-purpose punch line for years never imagining that I'd be so curious about its originator.

In a phone interview from her LA office, we discussed the relationship between art and porn, new censorship issues rearing up in the porn industry, the health of the actors, and her experience as a woman working in porn. (we don't talk about how I can get a life like hers; that is between me and my fairy godmother).

Hanson was a respiratory therapist when a chance opportunity came to her in 1976 to go to New York City and help launch a porn magazine. The combination of a natural aesthetic, an intense interest in sexuality and the will to please her readers was an excellent combination for an editor of porn.

"I wanted to make (the readers) happy," she says. "I didn't want to change their views on things ... what I really wanted was something that would absolutely and precisely meet their needs. It's a very commercial instinct that I have." Reading their letters was as if "I were looking inside their minds," which is really the greatest intimacy of all.

"We're simple creatures. Everything we're attracted to (we're attracted to) in the same way, bright colors and the flow of shapes," she says, when I ask her about an interview (Folio magazine, 1996) where she compared food photography to porn, both being about appetite, sensuousness and desire. That flowing, fluid sensuality is usually thought of as feminine, but Hanson been working on another book, The Complete Tom of Finland, that has made her see that roundness in men as well.

"His men were considered the ultimate in masculinity ... but they're absolutely feminine in that they're composed of rounded shapes. Their buttocks are round as melons," she says. "We're attracted to round, buoyant things, be it a hamburger or a breast."

In November 2001, Hanson came to Taschen, a company known for their hip, elegant books. The UK Guardian described them with: "Only at the house of Taschen would homoerotica sit side by side with horticulture, Fetish Girls next to French Impressionism."

Hanson worried that at Taschen she "was going to somehow have to change my aesthetic and learn to look at pictures and see something that was arty and different than pornography." Then she realized she was hired because she already had the ability to showcase sexuality in a certain way. "It's the same thing ... you're looking for curves. Everything sexually appealing has curves," she says, including the penis. "It's not a spike. It's not the Washington Monument."

The Big Penis Book seems destined to be another huge winner (Sorry. There is no way around the puns).

"It was even more fun than I thought it was going to be," Hanson says when I ask her if it was the funnest project ever.

"All my career in magazines was working with female imagery, and I always enjoyed it ... but I am heterosexual and so when I started working on (The Big Penis Book) I really discovered what male photographers and editors had known all along and that is there are just going to be some images that grab you, that get you, in a way that is not simply aesthetic," Hanson laughs. "It helped to keep me going when I had to, say ... look at 300,000 images that were all in negative form from one man's archive."

300,000. Negatives. From one source.

No. She never got dicked out.

"It's my nature to be maddeningly thorough," she says. "It would have been easy at the beginning of the third day ... to say "Oh, I've probably got enough." However "there may be that wonderful one, that perfect one, that best one that I'm going to miss."

Her tenacity seems to have paid off. When she brought "the book" (as it's now known in my circle) to the Taschen American sales conference, "the women just fell on it like beasts and actually tore it up from grabbing it back and forth from each other." The straight men, she says, were in the corner saying 'I didn't think you girls liked that sort of thing! Every woman I ever met said she didn't care!' she laughs, "and I'd think 'Relax guys, it's not like they demand it. They're just interested."

See more stories tagged with: porn, censorship, art, dian hanson

Liz Langley is a freelance writer in Orlando, FL.

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