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Crackers and Whackers:
The White Trashing of Porn
CONSTANCE PENLEY
White Trash Theory
* Before getting into my topic — porn's predilection for white trash looks
and tastes—I want to say something about the benefits to one's theoretical
formation that can accrue from growing up white trash. This brief comment
does not mark a digression from my topic because it was precisely my white
trash upbringing that gave me the conceptual tools to recognize this predi-
lection, as well as the language to describe and explain it. I cannot imagine
any better preparation for grasping the intricacies of contemporary theory
and cultural studies than negotiating a Florida cracker childhood and ado-
lescence. I understood the gist of structuralist binaries, semiosis, the lin-
guistic nature of the unconscious, the disciplinary micro-organization of
power, and the distinguishing operations of taste culture long before I left
the groves of central Florida for the groves of academe. At the University
of Florida in Gainesville, the University of California at Berkeley, and the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, I encountered the
ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis
Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and, somewhat later, Michel de
Certeau, and Pierre Bourdieu. In those ideas I immediately recognized the
home truths of white trash or, as Barthes would say, white trashnicity.
How does such theoretical precociousness emerge in cracker culture?
Consider, for example, the intense conceptual work involved in figurine out
the differential meanings of white trash—what it is because of what it is not
a regular down-home version of honey and ashes, the raw and the cooked
A Southern white child is required to learn that white trash folks are the
lowest of the low because socially and economically they have sunk so far
that they might as well be black. As such, they are seen to have lost all self-
respect. So it becomes particularly unseemly when they appear to shame-
lessly flaunt their trashiness, which, after all, is nothing but an aggressively
in-your-face reminder of stark class differences, a fierce fuck-you to anyone
trying to maintain a belief in an America whose only class demarcations run
along the seemingly obvious ones of race.
If you are white trash, then you must engage in the never-ending labor
of distinguishing yourself, of codifying your behavior so as to clearly sig-
nify a difference from blackness, which will, in spite of everything, express
some minuscule, if pathetic, measure of your culture's superiority, at least
to those above you who use the epithet white trash to emphasize just how
beyond the pale you are. This is hard going because the differences between
the everyday lives of poor blacks and poor whites in the rural South are few
and ephemeral. I am not denying the difference of race—and of how that
difference is lived—but am trying to point to the crushing weight, on all
those lives, of enduring poverty and the daily humiliations that come with it.
Even someone with as impeccable white trash credentials as my own can
recall only one "distinction": white people don't eat gopher, but blacks do
(gopher is crackerese for a variety of land turtle). Perhaps I remember the
socioanthropological distinction gopher/not gopher because it intersected
with so many other distinctions marked by race, gender, and economic class
which would, as I came to realize, both help and hinder me as I grew up and
out into the world.
I made money as a kid by catching the slow-moving gophers in the white-
owned groves and selling them for a quarter each to my teenage cousin
Ricky, already a reprobate but a shrewd entrepreneur. Ricky would turn
around and sell the gophers for fifty cents in East Town, the black neigh-
borhood where I, as a white girl, was not allowed to go. I progressed from
being grateful to my cousin for giving me the odd quarters to chafing at the
restrictions on my mobility and my own budding entrepreneurship. This
was especially so after Ricky had rounded up a crew of gopher catchers from
whose labor he was able to extract for himself at least as much as the mini-
mum wage Disney pays its workers now toiling on our old hunting grounds.
But crackers are not always content merely to learn the complex strata-
gems of maintaining the tenuous distinctions of white trash culture; they
sometimes go beyond that understanding to devise the critical method of
using white trash against white trash. The epithet white trash can be deployed
310 CONSTANCE PENLEY
in a similar way to the original usage of politically correct within left circles,
where a group would adopt the phrase to police its own excesses. My brother
and I had a favorite game, which was to try to figure out which side of the
family was the trashiest, our mother's Tennessee hillbilly clan or our father's
Florida cracker kin. The point of the game was not to come to a definitive
conclusion (we agreed it was pretty much a toss-up), but to try to selectively
detrash ourselves, to figure out just how trashy we were so as to monitor and
modify our thinking and behavior as much as possible. We vied to amass the
most self-humiliating family statistics by claiming for mom's or dad's side
the greatest number of cousins married to one another, uncles sent up the
river for stealing tv sets, junked cars on blocks in the front yard, converts to
Jehovah's Witnesses, or grandparents who uttered racist remarks with the
most vehemence and flagrancy. Why my brother and I came to want to en-
gage in this funny but painful detrashing project is a long story that must
wait for another day, but the fact that we created this game demonstrates
that white-trashness does not just involve the effort to make distinctions in
response to a label coercively imposed from above ("Hey, at least we don't
eat gopher!") but can also offer a prime source for developing the kinds of
skills needed to grasp the social and political dynamics of everyday life.
Growing up white trash, then, can give one the conceptual framework for
understanding the work of distinction and the methods of criticism. But the
real advantage lies in the way that upbringing helps a nascent theorist grasp
the idea of agency and resistance in an utterly disdained subculture whose
very definition presumes it to have no "culture" at all (Genovese 1972, 565). 1
The work of distinction in white trash can be deployed downward, across,
but also up, to challenge the assumed social and moral superiority of the
middle and professional classes.
White Trash Practice
Considering the ways that white trash can be deployed up as a form of popu-
list cultural criticism brings me to pornography. We already have several
good discussions of the class nature and class politics of pornography, al-
though the research on earlier periods is more extensive than that on the
products of today's commercial industry. The contributors to Lynn Hunt's
The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-
1800 (1993) give a wealth of examples of the way pornography was used
during that period to challenge absolutist political authority and church
doctrine, variously linked as it was to freethinking, heresy, science, and
CRACKERS AND WHACKERS 311
the smoke-filled rooms where men would gather for clandestine screenings.
In a recent sympathetic evaluation of Linda Williams's Hard Core: Power,
Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" the (yes, I'll say it) seminal book on
pornographic film, Peter Lehman worries that she misses some crucial as-
pects of porn by overestimating the importance of narrative structure and
neglecting the role of "fleeting moments of humor in porn" (Lehman 1995,
3). 3 His argument about the relatively greater importance of "fragmentary
pleasures" over narrative resolution proves persuasive, but his assessment
that there occur only "fleeting" moments of humor in porn falls short. Stag
films are full of humor, and the narrative, which, as Lehman notes, is often
more vignette than fully developed story, is itself structured like a joke. And
here we are talking about really bad jokes, ranging from terrible puns to
every form of dirty joke—farmer's daughter, traveling salesman, and Aggie
jokes. Of course, not all of the sexually explicit films of this period exhibited
the bawdy, farcical character of the stags. The short peep show loops con-
sisted of earnestly direct views of sexual action with little setup and no story.
But the majority of the few hundred American stag films made for collective
male viewing depended on this popular brand of humor. This holds espe-
cially true for the pre-World War II films made on the edges of the enter-
tainment world, thus sharing the qualities of both burlesque and silent film
comedy. 4
Given the enormous success of the feminist antiporn movement—and
their strange bedfellows, the religious right—in shaping the current prevail-
ing idea of porn as nothing but the degradation of women and the prurient
documentation of the most horrific forms of violence waged against women,
it may prove difficult to recognize that the tone of pornography—when one
actually looks at it—is closer to Hee Haw than Nazi death camp fantasies.
Also difficult to recognize, because it so goes against the contemporary typi-
fication of porn as something done to women, is that the joke is usually on
the man. And if the man is the butt of the joke, this also contradicts Freud's
description of the mechanism of the smut joke, in which any woman present
at the telling of the joke will inevitably be its butt.
On the Beach (a. k. a. Getting His Goat) is a classic stag film from 1923 that
illustrates both the kind of humor and the level of commentary on mascu-
linity found in the typical stag film of the era. The narrative follows that of
a practical joke played on a hapless man. The man (Creighton Hale, better
known as the professor in D. W. Griffith's Way Down East [1920]) is day-
dreaming while leaning on a fence at the beach. He accosts three playful,
flirtatious women who come walking by and agree to have sex with him,
314 CONSTANCE PENLEY
but only through a hole in the fence. The punning alternate title of the film
tells you what's coming next: what the man believes is "the best girl I've ever
had" is a goat the women back up to the hole in the fence. The women take
all his money, which he happily gives, and dance laughing down the beach.
At some unspecified time later, the three women are again walking along
the beach. On spying the erstwhile daydreamer, one tucks a pillow under
her dress to simulate pregnancy, and the women again extract money from
the bewildered man, once more "getting his goat. " The women in the film
are not portrayed as motivated by some intrinsic female evil but rather by a
kind of charming mischievousness, and the man is shown deserving what
he gets because of his sexual and social ignorance. "Watch your step. There's
one born every minute, " says the final intertitle in a cautionary address to
the male audience not to be fools to their own desires.
One can trace the low-level humor of many stag films back to the bawdy
songs and dirty jokes that inspired them. If Linda Williams's breakthrough
was to get us to think of pornographic film as film, that is, as a genre that
can be compared to other popular genres like the western, the science fic-
tion film, the gangster film, or the musical (porn's closest kin, she says) and
studied with the same analytical tools we take to the study of other films,
the next logical step, it seems, would be to consider pornographic film as
popular culture. We would then be able to ask what traits pornographic film
shares with the production and consumption of a whole range of popular
forms.
Reading through Ed Cray's The Erotic Muse: American Bawdy Songs (1992)
makes one aware, for example, of the similarity between the lyrics of the
dirty song tradition and the plots of stag films. Anticlericalism is big, of
course, in both bawdy songs and porn films, as it is in the endlessly recy-
clable joke, "Did you hear the one about the priest and the rabbi.... " Cray
tells us that songs about licentious ecclesiasticals proved so popular that
English obscenity law evolved from court actions to suppress them. 5 In the
several versions of the bawdy song "The Monk of Great Renown, " the monk
engages in rape, anal intercourse, and necrophilia. The somewhat tamer stag
films that I have seen prefer to attack the hypocrisy of the clerical class by
having the priests and the nuns get it on in all sorts of combinations. Most
of the anticlerical films were imports from France or other heavily Catholic
countries, except for the American classic The Nun's Story (1949-52). Begin-
ning in the fifties, stag films, especially in the United States, shifted from at-
tacking the priesthood to mocking the mores of the new professional classes,
which they depicted as exploiting professional power for sexual purposes in
CRACKERS AND WHACKERS 315
films such as The Casting Couch (1924), The Dentist (1947-48), Doctor Penis
(1948-52), and Divorce Attorney (1966-67).
Surprisingly (although why should it be?), stag films also share with
bawdy songs an emphasis on female agency, with the woman both initiat-
ing sex and setting the terms for the sexual encounter. In "The Tinker, " and
related bawdy songs, the housewife cajoles the workingman into having sex
first with her and then all the other women in the house, but she turns on
the tinker when he decides to screw the butler too. In one stag film from
the late teens or early twenties (provenance and title uncertain), two women
undress, drink wine, and fondle each other. One says to the other, "I brought
Jacques, " and straps on a dildo. A few moments later, an intertitle tells us
that the hairdresser is at the door. One woman fellates the hairdresser while
he works on the other woman's hair; they then pull him into a three-way. In
another film of the same period, two women are out mushroom hunting in
the woods and come across a penis poking through the underbrush. They
examine the penis with a magnifying glass before deciding that they have
discovered a new species of mushroom. An intertitle tells us that "the mush-
room was enjoyed in all kinds of sauces, " and we then see the two women,
and the naked man revealed to be attached to the penis, in various combi-
nations. In Goodyear, from the forties, a man and a woman are sitting on a
couch when the woman pulls a condom out of her bag and demonstrates
its use to the man. After a blow job, intercourse, and another blow job, the
woman flips the man's limp penis from side to side, shaking her head with
disappointment. In The Wet Dream, from the Horny Film Corporation (also
from the late forties or early fifties), the woman in the man's dream will not
let him get on top after she's been on top of him. He finally does manage to
get on top, but only after she has put a French tickler on him, presumably
for her pleasure. This film also ends with the woman's disappointment with
the man's now completely limp penis. In one of the best-known stag films
of all times, Smart Aleck (1951) with Candy Barr, she refuses to go down on
the man, especially when he starts to force her. She gets up in disgust and
calls a female friend who does want to have oral sex with the man. While
that's going on, Barr gets back into the scene to get the man to go down on
her. Here, as in "The Tinker, " the woman orchestrates the sexual activity.
The theme of the penis run amok makes for another important trait
shared by the bawdy song and the stag film. Such penises appear, for ex-
ample, in meldings of the bawdy ballad and the sea shanty, where you get
descriptions like, "With his long fol-the-riddle-do right down to his knee"
(Cray 1992, 35), or, "Hanging down, swinging free.... With a yard and a
316 CONSTANCE PENLEY
half of foreskin hanging down below his knee" (36). The tinker rides to the
lady's house "with his balls slung o'er his shoulder and his penis by his side"
(31), but he gets in trouble by fucking the butler when he is supposed to be
fucking all the ladies and, in another variant, fucks the devil. Wayward and
wandering giant organs abound in everything from fraternity songs, "Do
Your Balls Hang Low?, " to cowboy and Vietnam-era lyrics about efforts to
exert some control over the penis, such as, "Gonna Tie My Pecker to My
Leg" (336-37, 192-93).
Animated films of the stag era, unconstrained by physical reality, man-
aged to depict the amok penis better than live-action films. Buried Treasure
(ca. 1928-33) features Everready Hardon. Poor Everready's penis runs off
on its own, gets bent and has to be pounded back into shape, goes after a
woman but accidentally fucks a man, and runs into the business end of a
cactus, among other, often painful, mishaps. In The Further Adventures of
Super Screw (also ca. 1928-33) the hero's penis is so big that he must drag it
along on the ground, where it gets bit by a dog and then run over by a bus.
While his penis is in a sling at the hospital, a nurse decides to cut his gar-
gantuan member down to size. After they have ribald sex, he goes into the
lab and starts screwing a chimp who impales him on its own giant penis.
After returning to the operating room to get his penis restored to its original
dimension, he finds an ape to screw. Since the producers and consumers of
these films were unquestionably male, the ubiquity of this theme of male
humiliation demands accounting for in some way.
Laura Kipnis points out that in Hustler, much as we have seen in the
films, jokes, and songs noted above, sex emerges as an arena of humiliation
for men, not as one of domination and power over women: "The fantasy
life here is animated by cultural disempowerment in relation to a sexual
caste system and a social class system" (1992, 383). Rather than offering
the compensatory fantasy found in the more upscale Penthouse and Playboy,
where the purchase of pricey consumer goods will ensure willing women
and studly men, Hustler puts into question a male fantasy that represents
power, money, and prestige as essential to sexual success; "the magazine
works to disparage and counter identification with these sorts of class at-
tributes on every front" (383). Hustler puts the male body at risk, Kipnis says,
which helps to account for its focus on castration humor and ads addressed
to male anxieties and inadequacies, such as advertisements for products
promising to extend and enlarge penises. Hustler and other deliberately
trashy magazines (my favorite is Outlaw Biker)6 are the print progeny of stag
films and related forms of smutty folklore.
CRACKERS AND WHACKERS 317
Ed Cray underestimates the centrality of bawdy humor to the porn film
when he contrasts what he sees as the lack of prurience in folk balladry to
the dearth of humor in pornography. Although he recognizes that folk bal-
ladry can easily veer toward the pornographic, and does so often, he is not
as ready to acknowledge that pornographic titillation can incorporate bawdi-
ness; "pornography is rarely humorous, " he says (1992, xxviii). But ribald hu-
mor seems equally important to the two forms and, moreover, bawdy songs
often prove much wilder sexually than porn films. Only the animated films
can play with the kind of hyperbolically exaggerated body parts and wildly
impossible sexual positions that are a staple of the bawdy song. It would be
more accurate to say that both popular forms are fundamentally based in a
kind of humor that features attacks on religion (and, later, the professional
classes), middle-class ideas about sexuality, trickster women with a hearty
appetite for sex, and foolish men with their penises all in a twist—when
those penises work at all.
It is illuminating to see which forms or figures from popular culture
stag films cite to reinforce these themes. The soundtrack added to The Cast-
ing Couch is a recording of Mae West's riff on the importance of education,
where she gives a man a lesson in mathematics: "Addition is when you take
one thing and put it with another to get two. Two and two is four and five
will get you ten if you know how to work it. " Subtraction is when "a man
has a hundred dollars and you leave him two. " Another film of the same era,
The Bachelor Dream, ends with a shot of Mad Magazine's mascot Alfred E.
Neuman.
While it is true that stag films borrowed heavily from the oral culture of
joke telling, it is also important to note that the films, in the way male audi-
ences consumed them, themselves became part of oral culture. The Ameri-
can Legionnaires, Shriners, and Kappa Sigs counted on the films' humor
to help them manage a relation to the sex on screen and to each other, a
kind of "comic relief" regulating the viewing's guilt and discomfort. No film
exists without its audience, but this holds especially true for the stag film
because the back talk and verbal display the film sparks form an integral
part of the film experience. Hard to Imagine, Thomas Waugh's 1996 history
of gay male photography and film, briefly suggests that such humor may
have appealed to gay men in the audiences as well, even though it has long
been recognized that the linguistic antics surrounding the films tradition-
ally functioned to shore up the homosocial heterosexuality of the audiences
against any hint that a bunch of men looking at penises together were gay
(319-20). Waugh thinks it would be a reach to claim that stag film humor
318 CONSTANCE PENLEY
reflects a gay camp sensibility, but he does believe that "the stag film's coy
mixing of levels of cultural affectation with sexual innuendo and vulgarity
would not have fallen on deaf gay ears" (320). If Waugh found few gay male
films among the stag films he researched, he still thinks it possible that gay
pleasures were nonetheless to be found in both the straight stag films and
the oral culture that embedded them.
Although porn is usually conceptualized and debated as a stigmatized
"other, " completely beyond the moral and cultural pale, its desires, concerns,
and uses do not differ that markedly from those found in other popular
forms throughout U. S. history. Here, I took the example of bawdy songs,
but those other forms include the dirty jokes told everywhere, everyday in
offices, on playgrounds, and now in faxes and on the Internet. Folklorists
like Alan Dundes and Gershon Legman tell us that smutty joke telling is the
warp and woof of American working life, a kind of humor that constitutes a
major form of symbolic communication expressing and forming our chang-
ing ideas and anxieties about a number of issues, but especially sexuality
and the relations between the sexes. 7 Other closely related popular forms are
America's Funniest Home Videos, Mad Magazine, and wwf wrestling, which,
like porn, is a physical contact sport requiring a similar suspension of dis-
belief.
When my course on pornographic film was protested by the local anti-
porn group (based in local churches) and Pat Robertson in a 700 Club spe-
cial on godlessness in public schools, it became clear that my critics most
feared that studying pornography as film or popular culture would normal-
ize it. That's why Pat Robertson called my course "a new low in humanist
excess, " right after making the wonderfully curious statement that "a femi-
nist teaching pornography is like Scopes teaching evolution. "8 And if the
antiporn people followed the culture wars, they would also know that an-
other danger lurked for them beyond the threat of normalization: the risk
that scholars who take popular culture seriously might start asking of porn
what they ask of all other forms of popular culture. These questions would
include: "What is the nature of the widespread appeal?" "To what pleasures
and ideas do these films speak?" "What desires and anxieties do the films
express about identity, sexuality, and community, about what kind of world
we want to live in?" "What kind of moral, social, and political counterculture
do the producers and consumers of porn constitute?"9 If the study of porn
as film and popular culture reframes its subject as a relatively normal and
socially significant instance of culture, this goes a long way toward disarm-
ing those who depend on its typification as sexual violence to crack down on
CRACKERS AND WHACKERS 319
moral and political dissidence. But enough of cracking down; let's get back
to the issue of cracking up.
The bawdy humor, at the expense of the man, tends to drop out of porn
films only during the so-called golden age of 1970s big-budget, theatri-
cally released, feature-length narrative films like Behind the Green Door (dir.
Mitchell Bros., 1972), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (dir. Radley Metz-
ger, 1975), The Resurrection of Eve (dir. Mitchell Bros., 1973), and The Story
of Joanna (dir. Gerard Damiano, 1975). In an era in which the makers of
adult films were trying to respond at once to the sexual revolution, women's
lib, and the possibility of expanding their demographics beyond the rain-
coat brigade and fraternal lodge members, the narratives began to center,
albeit very anxiously, around the woman and her sexual odyssey. While there
are some eruptions of egregious punning and willfully vulgar humor in
these "quality" films meant for the heterosexual dating crowd (for example,
Linda's friend in Deep Throat [dir. Gerard Damiano, 1972] who asks the man
performing cunnilingus on her while she leans back and puffs away on a
cigarette, "Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?"), they are far more "taste-
ful, " even pseudoaristocratic, in their demeanor and depicted milieu than
the great majority of films from the earlier stag era. But the stag films, which
Linda Williams characterizes as lacking in narrative and more misogynistic
in their "primitive" display of genitals and sexual activities than the golden-
age pornos, may not come out as misogynistic as Williams says if we can
recognize them more as strong popular joke structures than weak film nar-
ratives.
What I have observed is that as porn films "progressed" as film, tech-
nically and narratively, and began to focus on the woman and her subjec-
tivity, they became more socially conservative, losing the bawdy populist
humor that so often centered around the follies and foibles of masculinity.
And while it is true that stag films usually just peter out, so to speak, with-
out any narrative closure, such closure may not prove so desirable. Most
of the golden-age pornos have closure, all right: like Hollywood films, they
end in marriage or some other semisanctioned kind of coupling, while the
stag films are content to celebrate sex itself without channeling it into the
only socially acceptable form of sexual expression—heterosexual, monoga-
mous marriage. It may also be that insofar as the golden-age films focus on
women's sexuality and subjectivity, the pat solution of the marriage ending
may have constituted an attempt to resolve the anxieties those films inad-
vertently raised in the course of a narrative about women's new sexual and
social freedoms.
320 CONSTANCE PENLEY
Fortunately, in the eighties and nineties, porn films got trashy again as
producers threw off the "quality" trappings of the golden era to start manu-
facturing product for the rapidly expanding vcr market. Suddenly, many
more people, women included, could consume porn, and many more people
could produce it, even those who lacked money, technical training, or a sense
of cinema aesthetics. Sure, there will always be pretentious auteurs in porn,
as everywhere else, such as Andrew Blake and Zalman King, but during
those two decades, amateur filmmaking ruled. So popular, in fact, were ama-
teur films that the professional adult film companies started making fake
amateur films, "pro-am, " in which recognizable professionals, even stars,
would play ordinary folks clowning around the house with their camcorder.
As porn became deliciously trashy again, it coincided with a new female
media deployment of white trash sensibilities against the class and sexual
status quo not seen since the goddesses of burlesque reigned. Roseanne,
Madonna, Courtney Love, Brett Butler, and Tonya Harding would certainly
make the list, but it should be extended to include some significant male
talent.
Howard Stern and Mike Judge (the creator of Beavis and Butthead) would
have to rank among the most ingenious such deployers, with Saturday Night
Live's Wayne and Garth in the running, but not really, because their raffish-
ness is shot through with too much redeeming sweetness. All of these white
trash theorists and practitioners understand the politically strategic value of
making a spectacle of masculinity. Jeff ("You're a Redneck If... ") Foxworthy,
offers, by comparison, just a soft celebration of hick manhood.
When James Garner called Howard Stern "the epitome of trailer trash, "
Stern responded, in his typically scatological fashion, "I can't believe this
guy wants a war with me. He should be busy worrying if he's gonna have
a solid bowel movement. " We know, of course, from Stern's now two best-
selling memoirs that neither his parents nor his own Long Island suburban
family live in a trailer. His nontrash origin goes to show that you do not
have to be white trash to use white trash sensibilities as a weapon of cul-
tural war, although the fact that white trash's rocket scientist, Roseanne,
grew up so solidly trashy reinforces the argument that early training counts.
In a real shocker, feminist artist and critic Barbara Kruger came out as a
Howard Stern fan and defender, on the cover of Esquire no less, claiming
that his "sharp, extemporaneous brand of performance art, his unrelenting
penchant for 'truth'-telling, serves as a kind of leveler: a listening experi-
ence that cuts through the crap, through the deluded pretensions of fame,
through the inflated rhetoric of prominence.... Zigzagging between self-
CRACKERS AND WHACKERS 321
degradation and megalomania, political clarity and dangerous stereotyping,
temper tantrums and ridiculously humble ingratiation, he is both painfully
unsettling and crazily funny" (1992, 95).
One feminist friend, who has long admired both Kruger's art and her
critical writing, expressed dismay and disappointment that Kruger could de-
fend such a sexist, racist homophobe. Is this postfeminism ad absurdum,
she wondered. A couple of weeks after the shock of seeing Kruger's Esquire
article, my friend called to tell me that she had been up late the night before
and channel-zapped into something called "The Lesbian Dating Game. " As
she marveled at the funniest, most nonjudgmental representation of lesbi-
ans she had ever seen on television or in the movies, she was chastened to
realize that she was watching—and loving—the Howard Stern Show.
Laura Kipnis argues that Hustler publisher Larry Flynt's obscenity trials
did more to ensure First Amendment protection for American artists than
any of the trials prosecuting much more culturally legitimate works of art
and literature. In the same vein, Howard Stern's trashiness does more to
counter the angry white men of America's airwaves (and elsewhere) than
any liberal commentator because he targets precisely that masculinity that
perceives itself to be under attack from all sides, a masculinity no longer
sure of its God-given privilege and sense of entitlement so long taken for
granted in law, government, and religion. Stern puts his body on display—
phobic, farting, flailing—a male body lashing out at all the feared others—
women with beauty, smarts, and power; strong, sexually confident blacks;
those men with the kinds of superior qualities that attract women but who
willfully choose to be gay. He also makes it clear that he wants more than
anything to he those others and to be with them. Feeding his hysteria, then,
is his not having a clue how to pull that off. Who, after all, wants a skinny,
neurotic (if not psychotic) white guy "hung like a pimple"? This angry white
man gives us a brilliant daily demonstration of what that anger is all about.
Rush Limbaugh and his ilk dress up their anger in the trappings of a (male)
rationality and knowledge. Howard Stern needs all the trailer-trashness he
can muster to cut through the false decorum of that unexamined fury.
Beavis and Butthead, too, have never lived in a trailer, but they did burn
down a trailer park. And the shabby den in which they watch tv makes
Roseanne's house look like an Ethan Allen showroom. All of the pundits and
parents who worry about kids mimicking these two delinquents have either
never watched the show or have no idea of the way kids watch tv. Instead
of simply modeling themselves after Beavis and Butthead, kids use these
cartoon lumpen to teach themselves a very important social fact: that the
322 CONSTANCE PENLEY
only people who get to be that stupid and live are white guys, and they just
barely do. A sure sign that Beavis and Butthead detractors do not know the
show itself is that they never mention the role of Daria (called "Diarrhea, "
of course, by Beavis and Butthead). Daria is the smart, hardworking little
girl who knows that she cannot afford stupidity and is more often than not
the audience for the boys when they are variously humiliated by their out-
of-control bodies or their sudden recognition of the limits of their stupidity.
Although the use of gross, dumb humor has undergone heavy censor-
ing in the television version of Beavis and Butthead, the two boys' trashiness
still thrives in the album and comic book format. In The Beavis and Butthead
Experience (1993) they get to play air guitar with Nirvana, sing along with
Cher, and party on the Anthrax tour bus. The point of their greatest abjec-
tion comes when a member of Anthrax shows Beavis and Butthead some
girly photos and Beavis runs off to the bathroom with them, where it be-
comes apparent to Butthead and the band members that Beavis does not
know the difference between shitting and coming. The more you get to know
of Beavis and Butthead, by the way, the more you realize that Butthead has a
few more iq points than Beavis, of both the intellectual and emotional kind.
The relatively (only relatively) greater awareness of Butthead means that he
is often able to offer a critical perspective on their polymorphously perverse
antics, to a lesser extent than Daria, of course, because he is, after all, a full
participant in them.
For example, in the second issue of the Beavis and Butthead comic book
the two young chicken-chokers decide that it would be cool (that is, not
suck—see Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu) to sneak into the morgue of a funeral
home. The following dialogue ensues:
Butthead: Whoa! Huh-Huh-Huh Look at all th' stiffs? They're...
Beavis:... naked! Heh-Heh-Heh. Yeah... there's one stiff on that slab
... and one in my pants. Heh-Heh.
Butthead: Uhhh... I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you, Beavis...
Huh-Huh. These are all naked guys!
Beavis: Oh... Heh-Heh. Yeah, I forgot! Heh-Heh.
Beavis's sexual orientation is only one of many things he cannot quite
keep track of, and Butthead is always there, not to straighten him out, but
to remind him of the price to pay if he fails to achieve standard issue mas-
culinity, as if Butthead stood a chance himself. If Howard Stern takes on
the psychopathology of angry white men, Mike Judge addresses the panicky
arrogance of these horny, pale adolescents as they try to figure out what, as
CRACKERS AND WHACKERS 323
white guys, they are entitled to, even though they know (or Mike Judge and
we know) that they have zip going for them other than what used to be the
automatically privileged white guy status. Where Beavis and Butthead fail,
is that they do not even know how to work the one advantage they sort of
have. They also remain incapable of noticing when Judge throws in their
path a way out, a possible ally, but Beavis and Butthead fans do not.
The first story, "Dental Hygiene Dilemma (Fart I), " March 1994, of the
first Beavis and Butthead comic starts off with an extended homage to femi-
nist performance artist and nea Four member Karen Finley. The two boys
pull up their bikes to a small store called Finley's Maxi-Mart which seems to
sell only yams, recalling the yams that the artist stuffed up her vagina in one
of her many performances on the powerful desires of women and the social
and psychical wounds inflicted on their bodies. Beavis and Butthead cheat
an elderly man, a customer at Finley's Maxi-Mart, out of his money and
his yams. "Diarrhea" walks by (perfect timing) and chides the boys for their
cruelty while explaining the idea of karma to them, trying to get them to
understand that their stupid actions will have consequences for them later.
Mike Judge would have been even more appreciative of Finley's strate-
gies for attacking the sexual and social status quo had he known then the
details of the second censorship scandal she would be involved in. In early
1996, Crown Publishers cancelled its contract to publish Finley's decidedly
Beavis and Butthead-like parody of domestic tastemaker Martha Stewart's
Living when they found it just too gross with its tips on coffin building, rude
phone calls, and cuisine that mixes Oreos, Ring Dings, and beer. For Valen-
tine's Day, Martha Stewart recommends choosing chocolate with care, since
taste varies considerably: "Choose Valrhona chocolate from France or Calle-
baut from Belgium. " Finley, of course, is almost as well known for smear-
ing chocolate on her nude body as for the yam insertion trick. Crown, also
Martha Stewart's publisher, decided that graciousness and grossness do not
mix.
Jesse Helms is more right than he knows when he calls Karen Finley's
work "pornographic" because so much of the sensibility of her performances
and writing, like that of Howard Stem and Mike Judge, arose from the porn
world's now decades-long use of trashy, militantly stupid, class-iconoclastic,
below-the-belt humor. But I have no interest here in demonstrating pom's
trickle-up influence on art and media, even if it proves illustrative to chart
just how large that influence is. 10 Rather, I want to show that the male popu-
lar culture that is pornography constitutes a vital source of countercultural
324 CONSTANCE PENLEY
ideas about sexuality and sexual roles, whether or not the more legitimized
areas of culture pick up those ideas.
One of contemporary pom's most brilliant organic intellectuals has to be
Buttman, John Stagliano, the white trash Woody Allen, who has made a score
of films documenting his travels and travails as he goes around the world
(and Southern California) seeking the perfect shot of a woman's perfect ass.
Buttman gets mugged, evicted, bankrupted, rejected, and ridiculed—all in
his single-minded quest for perfection. Licking ass, caressing ass, ogling ass,
and only occasionally fucking ass, if the woman insists, Buttman does for
anal fetishism what Woody Allen does for neurosis—and it's not always a
pretty picture. In thrall to his obsession, things get even worse when he does
not stay true to his own fetishistic commitments. In Buttman's Revenge (dir.
John Stagliano, 1992), the erstwhile ass worshiper falls on hard times after
foolishly trying to branch out by making a disastrous "tit film. " No longer
a star, he is rejected by his business associates and friends, and he ends up
living on the street, although the others later relent and help him with his
comeback by surprising him with Nina Hartley, celebrated for having the
most beautiful ass in the business. As in so many stag films, the man, this
time Buttman, is the butt of the joke.
In her 1983 The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich constructs a history
of male rebellion against the status quo from the cold war era through the
seventies, and men's production and consumption of porn deserves a place
in that history. The gray flannel rebels, the Playboys, the beats, the hippies—
they all tried to conceive of less restrictive versions of masculinity, ones not
subject to the alienation of the corporate world, alimony-hungry wives, de-
pendent children, monogamy, or mortgages. Ehrenreich appreciates the im-
pulse fueling much of this masculine refusal, but she faults all of the various
strategies for either disregarding or blaming the woman. When we put porn
into this history, we find a male popular culture that, by contrast, neither dis-
regards nor blames the woman in its attempt to renegotiate the sexual and
social status quo, a male popular culture that devotes itself—to a surprising
degree—to examining the hearts of men. What's in the hearts of men ac-
cording to porn? A Utopian desire for a world where women are not socially
required to say and believe that they do not like sex as much as men do. A
Utopian desire whose necessary critical edge, sharpened by trash tastes and
ideas, is more often than not turned against the man rather than the woman.
How else to explain that John Wayne Bohhitt: Uncut (dir. Ron Jeremy,
1994) is practically a feminist chef d'oeuvre? The year 1995 proved a glorious
CRACKERS AND WHACKERS 325
year for the white-trashing of porn, to which much credit must first be given
to Tonya Harding. The porn industry could not resist recreating Tonya's
story again and again, including circulating the wedding night videos that
her ex-husband put up for sale to the highest bidder. Of the several porn
takeoffs of the scandal on ice, the best has to be Tanya Hardon, which revels
in "Tanya's" trashiness over and against "Nancy Cardigan's" pseudo-upper-
classness. Tanya and her husband Jeff shove empty beer cans off the kitchen
counter to fuck while planning how to wreck Nancy's skating career with a
blow to the knee. Although one could point out how reminiscent this scene
is of Roman Polanski's brilliant rendering of the eroticism inherent in the
Macbeths' roll in the marital bed as they plot the killing of the king, that
wouldn't be the point, now, would it? Tanya Hardon celebrates Harding's
white trash verve over Kerrigan's refined pathos ("Why me, why me?"), but
also the whole genre's love of white trash sensibilities to deflate upper-class
pretensions and male vainglory. In the best scene in the film, which has
fairly high production values for an adult film—there are even insert shots
of a skating rink—Tanya has stolen Nancy's boyfriend and is sharing him
with another skater in the rink's dressing room, when Nancy walks in on the
threesome. Aghast yet riveted, she blurts out, "Why not me, why not me?"
but Tanya is so mean she will not let her join in. Jeff, of course, is dead meat
by this time, having hooked up with the Beavis and Butthead of henchmen
to carry out the knee-whacking operation.
Former porn star Ron Jeremy's direction of John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut
provides viewers with the epitome of how white trash can be deployed to
criticize male attitudes and behavior. Given the chance to tell "his own story, "
the on-camera Bobbitt does not realize that the film is telling a story about
his story, and it is not flattering. The deeply dim ex-marine, called Forrest
Stump by Esquire, narrates and reenacts the night his wife, Lorena, cut off
his penis and doctors labored for nine and a half hours to reattach it. The
ever-so-slightly fictionalized aftermath of the surgery shows women every-
where, from Bobbitt's hospital nurses to the porn stars he meets because of
his new celebrityhood, avidly pursuing sex with him to find out if "it really
works. " It sort of does.
Early on in the video, we see Bobbitt and his buddies at a nude dance club,
drinking beers and ogling the performers. When he arrives home, late and
drunk, and falls into bed, Lorena (played by Veronica Brazil) is already asleep
after a hard day's work at the nail parlor. He climbs on top of his sleepy wife
who rouses only to complain about the late hour and his drunkenness and
to tell him clearly that she does not want to have sex with him. He pays no at-
326 CONSTANCE PENLEY
tention to her refusal, screws her for a few seconds and then, just as Lorena
is starting to wake up and get into it, falls off and passes out. The unhappy
and sexually frustrated Lorena muses to herself for a while before leaving
the bed to get a knife. Standing over her unconscious husband, she tries re-
peatedly to wake him, to get him to respond to her needs, before she resorts
to cutting off his penis in despair at his insensitivity and inattentiveness.
(Because contemporary porn will not show even a hint of violence, we get
no special effects of the penis being cut off but only, hilariously, a shot of
her hand clutching the severed penis and the steering wheel as she flees the
house in her car. )
Although the film offers a sometimes disparaging portrait of Lorena—
for example, showing her stealing money from her boss at the nail parlor—
the film's sympathies lie with the wife whose husband thinks marital rape
is how a man has sex with his wife. The more we see of John on screen,
the more we hear his attacks on Lorena and his rationalizing of the faults in
their marriage, the deeper a hole he digs for himself. Julie Brown's 1995 hbo
spoof of Lenora Babbitt was, by contrast, much less sympathetic to a Lorena it
portrayed as entirely unreasonable in her demands for mutual sexual satis-
faction. So, too, Brown's companion spoof of Tonya Hardly exhibited little of
the affection for the skater's trashiness found in Tanya Hardon. In both hbo
stories, it is the women who get their comeuppance, not the men. It is also
noteworthy that Julie Brown's version, the supposedly more progressive,
even avant-garde rendering of these characters and events, offers a racial
stereotyping of Lorena—Carmen Miranda with a blade—much more bla-
tant than anything found in the porn version.
Radical sex writer Susie Bright says she cannot believe John Wayne Bob-
bitt permits the screening of this video because it demonstrates for all the
world to see that "this man does not know how to give head to save his life, "
and indeed he doesn't. 11 Nor is he good at much else. In one unscripted
scene in the film, where two women labor mightily to get John hard—with-
out much success—and he seems to be tentatively trying out cunnilingus,
Ron Jeremy walks into the scene and begins expertly giving head to two
other women he has brought onto the set. Lore has it that Bobbitt did not
know the director was going to put himself into the movie; he certainly did
not know Jeremy's plans for shamelessly upstaging him, the supposed hero
of this video. Next, and in pointed contrast to Bobbitt's scarce tumescence
(his two fluffers are clearly flagging at this point), Jeremy whips out his own
much larger and fully functioning penis, which he applies immediately, and
again expertly, to the female talent. Jeremy may have lost his porn star looks,
CRACKERS AND WHACKERS 327
staying behind the camera these days for good reason, but here he reappears
on screen to make a pedagogical point, to remind us that porn's expertise,
what it promises to teach us, is good sexual technique.
What's the moral of John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut for men? If you don't
learn better sexual technique and start being more sensitive to your part-
ner's needs, you're going to get yours cut off too, and, what's more, you'd
deserve it! Who would have thought that the porn industry would give us
the nineties version of Valerie Solanas's scum Manifesto, brilliantly dissemi-
nated in the form of a tacky, low-budget (by Hollywood standards) video sold
and rented to millions of men? That tackiness also takes aim at Hollywood.
The center of commercial adult film production is North Hollywood and
Northridge, making those two shabby cities the tinny side of Tinseltown.
The adult industry so loves producing knockoffs of Hollywood films that it
is impossible to keep track of all of them. The knockoffs cannot be intended
simply to ride the coattails of popular Hollywood films because most con-
sumers know that the porn version seldom has much to do with the themes,
characters, and events found in the original film. What is more likely, as
Cindy Patton says of films such as Beverly Hills Cocks, Edward Penishands,
and both gay and heterosexual versions of Top Gun (Big Guns) is that they
are meant as "an erotic and humorous critique of the mass media's role in
invoking but never delivering sex. " (1996). I would add the gay male film
The Sperminator to her list because of the way it rewrites The Terminator to
expose the closeted homoeroticism of so much Hollywood film (Kyle Reese
and John Conner get together to "sperminate" the Sperminator. ) In the new
videos, Patton says, types of sex are rarely presented as taboo in themselves,
only as representationally taboo—what Hollywood or television is unwill-
ing to show. With Hollywood under attack by the family-values crowd and
liberals and conservatives alike clamoring to V-chip to death television's cre-
ativity (the industry having immediately caved in), porn and its white trash
kin seem our best allies in a cultural wars insurgency that makes camp in
that territory beyond the pale.
Notes
1 In Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene D. Genovese (1972) ar-
gues that white trash folks have no culture of their own because it is entirely
borrowed from poor blacks. He, too, as I did, claims that the everyday lives of
poor blacks and poor whites are very similar, and were so even during the period
of slavery. But he credits those similarities to a massive poor white appropriation
328 CONSTANCE PENLEY
of black culture, seeing in white trash culture a degraded form of black food,
religion, and language. He even says that white trash folks lacked the desire for
literacy and education so strong in black culture. Genovese would not, then, buy
my argument, admittedly a slightly tongue-in-cheek one, that growing up white
trash offers one of the best possible preparations for a theoretical and political
engagement with the world. To do so, he would first have to acknowledge the
productively creative hybridity of white trash culture in its exchange with black
culture, as well as the corresponding capacity for white trash social agency, both
of which he disavows in his book. Genovese does, however, have a fascinating
and persuasive account of the origins of white trash as an epithet. He believes
black slaves derived the term, but their hostility toward poor whites was fostered
by wealthy landowners wanting to prevent any interracial unity that might be
turned against a system oppressing both blacks and whites. Like the epithet fag
hag, then, it is meant to drive a wedge between natural allies.
2 I have taught the course on pornographic film since 1993 in the Department
of Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I would not have
been able to put together a historical survey of the genre without the help of the
Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, which
provided many of the films and much-needed historical information on pro-
ducers, venues, and collateral industries such as magazine publishing and sex
toy manufacturing.
3 Thanks very much to Linda Williams and the students in her fall 1995 "Pornog-
raphies On/Scene" class at uc-Irving, where I first tried out the arguments in
this essay that I had been developing with the students in my class at uc-Santa
Barbara.
4 The figures on the number of stag films are understandably not as reliable as one
would want. At this point, I am relying on the fact that the few researchers work-
ing on the stag film all use approximately the same figures, which are based on
Kyrou (1964) and Di Lauro and Rabkin (1976). Di Lauro and Rabkin base their
figures on their own viewings in Europe and America, Kyrou, the Kinsey collec-
tion, Scandinavian catalogs from the sixties and early seventies, and the catalog
listings of a private collector who did not want his identity revealed. Thomas
Waugh says these figures match what he has found thus far: "The corpus of the
stag film seems to include about two thousand films made prior to the hard-
core theatrical explosion of 1970, of which three quarters were made after 1960.
Of the group made prior to World War II, which is the present focus, I have
found documentation for only about 180, about 100 American, 50 French, plus
a sprinkling of Latin American, Spanish, and Austrian works" (1996, 309).
5 Ed Cray does not neglect women's talent for bawdiness. He collects, for example,
the songs known among sorority women as the rasty nasty, with lyrics celebrat-
ing the women's nastiness and shiftiness, such as "We are the Dirty Bitches"
(1992, 351-52). For further evidence of this talent, he refers the reader to Green
(1977).
CRACKERS AND WHACKERS 329
6 Thanks to Deborah Stucker for her analytical insights on Outlaw Biker and its
role in the creation of a lumpen or working-class sexual and social counterdis-
course for women and men.
7 Beyond Dundes and Legman (1975), see also Hill (1993), which has a good dis-
cussion of class bias in joke theory in chapter 7, "At Witz End. " He shows Freud's
(failed) attempt to separate the high-minded "Witz" from the lowly "Komik. "
8 The special on godlessness in public schools was broadcast in April 1993.
9 For a discussion of pornography as a moral counterculture, see Abramson and
Pinkerton (1995), especially chapter 7, "Porn: Tempest on a Soapbox. "
10 For porn's influence on contemporary art see Frecerro (1993), on Madonna and
2 Live Crew; Elizabeth Brown, "Overview of Contemporary Artists Interacting
with Pornography, " a lecture for the Sex Angles Conference, at the University of
California-Santa Barbara, on March 8, 1996; and Williams (1993).
11 Susie Bright made this comment in "Deep Inside Dirty Pictures: The Changing
of the Guard in the Pornographic Film Industry and American Erotic Spectator-
ship, " a lecture she gave at a conference entitled "Censorship and Silencing: The
Case of Pornography" at the University of California-Santa Barbara, on Novem-
ber 5, 1994.
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