The Manichean Paranoia Patch

Chances are you’ve never heard of Reuben Sturman but for a time he was one of the richest, most powerful men in America. What Rockefeller was to oil, Sturman was to porno magazines and erotic novels. What Carnegie was to the steel industry, Sturman was to snuff films and peeping shows. By the time he was busted for tax evasion in the 1980s, Reuben Sturman had a virtual monopoly on the porn industry both in American and in Europe and was pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

In fact, Sturman’s incarceration is one of the reasons that porn is as prevalent as it is; arresting Reuben Sturman had the same effect that trust-busting has on more recognizable monopolies. Profit margins went down and tens of thousands of people entered the business without having to give a portion of their proceeds to anyone else. The United States Government, in all its infinite wisdom, is partially to thank for what Eric Schlosser termed the “democratization of porn.”

This summer I finished the book Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Schlosser, who also wrote the higher profile Fast Food Nation. Reefer Madness traces the history and modern forms of the three biggest “illegitimate” forms of business in America: marijuana, illegal immigrants and their effect on the labor market, and the porn industry. FYI, I highly recommend this study. I found it to be a compelling and engaging mix of anecdotes and interviews, economics, and history.

The story of Reuben Sturman is the story of the rise of the porn industry as we know it today. Before Sturman, porn was considered much more taboo than it is today. Indeed, although sex was still used to sell products, the vivid and often shocking visual display we see in today’s advertisements, music videos, and mainstream movies would have been absolutely shocking fifty or even thirty years ago. Porn was in the same category that we put marijuana today: something immoral and in many cases, illegal.

Indeed, while I’m not going write much about the subject, I encourage you to Google Comstock Laws. I will throw down a brief explanation here to give you an idea of how much society’s perception about pornographic material has changed over time. “The Comstock Act (1873) is a United States federal law that made it illegal to send any ‘obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious’ materials through the mail… The Comstock Act not only targeted pornography as such, but also all contraceptive equipment and many educational documents such as descriptions of contraceptive methods and other reproductive health-related materials. The ban on contraceptives was declared unconstitutional by the courts in 1936.” The list of authors whose works were heavily censored or banned under this law includes: Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde, Ernst Hemingway, Eugene O’ Neil, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But let’s return to Mr. Sturman. Sturman started his future billion-dollar industry selling comic books out of the back of his car. However, due to his charisma and incredible drive, “by the late 1950’s his business had swelled to a major wholesale magazine company with affiliates in several American cities.”
Now, during this time in America’s history, sex was still very taboo. However, like Victorian England, America’s underground sex culture was shockingly vibrant. Our perception of 1950s America is dominated by I Love Lucy and other black and white (both literally and figuratively) shows which totally ignored the naughty streak that occurred behind closed doors. Apparently the drive-in movie industry often showed pornographic material to a receptive audience. Strangely this community experience was overlooked by the government and many prominent politicians could also be seen attending these events. Really bizarre!

This was also during the height of the “sex novel” which sold like hotcakes underneath counters and in the backs of bookstores all over the country. These books also had much higher profit margins than comic books, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Reuben Sturman.