Interview with Dian Hanson

Dian Hanson has made a career of “probing the subtleties of male lust.” In 1976, she began to edit such successful fetish magazines as Juggs, Oui, Leg Show, and Outlaw Biker. Pornography, at that time, had just gone through one of its more awkward phases. Amid the psychedelia and taboo-busting of the sexual revolution, men’s magazines weren’t sure how far to go in depicting free love; an industry built on forbidden fantasy risked being outpaced by real life. Hanson is now the official “sexy editor” of Taschen Books.

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It does seem like there’s a remove from the magazines here and what you’re used to seeing as a representation of the movement. Do you feel like that’s common in pornography—that it exists at a remove from the culture?

Certainly it’s all inspired by the culture. But our sexuality is formed at an early age—four, five, six years old—and the guys who were looking at these magazines were guys from, say, the World War II generation. The things that were going to be triggers for them were no longer current by the late sixties. What you see are magazines made by other guys from that generation, sharing in a fantasy about the current time that doesn’t actually reflect the current time. It’s just like how we saw hippies in movies back in, say, the seventies—they didn’t look like hippies, they looked like Hollywood fantasies, idealized hippies, because they were concocted by fifty-year-old men dreaming, taking the Marilyn Monroe aesthetic and dressing it up in a fringe vest. By the time you’re actually expressing your sexuality, it’s already out of date. I can remember a man saying his sexuality came from lying on the floor watching TV westerns when he was a little boy, seeing women kidnapped and tied up and tied to the railroad tracks. By the time he grew up, it was the 1980s. Nothing like that was on television anymore. And yet this was still what aroused him. For pornography to hit his sweet spot, it had to be antiquated.

You cornered the market, especially in fetish pornography. And you’re one of the only female editors who’s famous for doing this.

There were always a lot of other women working in the business, and I knew all these women, but most of them didn’t have my enthusiasm for the subject matter, my curiosity for exploring human psychology and sexuality. A lot of them didn’t like men the way I did. I found that working at the magazines made me like men more. The more I communicated with them, the more letters I read, the more I understood the male mind and the male approach to sexuality—it made them more likeable. I saw how romantic men were. I saw that sex, for most men, was really a supreme expression of love, that they didn’t disconnect it as most people believed. Certainly most of the other women I knew in the business thought that all these men were just out for the sex and they didn’t care. Men were always falling in love with these women in the magazines, sending them gifts, projecting idealized personalities onto them. I came to see that men and women approach these things differently—women are much more pragmatic about sex and love than men are. Men are probably the more romantic of the two, and certainly more likely to be deeply wounded if a relationship ends. I would hear from men who had confessed to their wives some unusual sexual interest, who had been rejected and had never tried to date a woman again, had never dared to speak to a woman about what they were interested in. Most men approach women with a kind of combination of fear and awe.