A Small Town in New England ...
ACROSS the nation there may be 5,000 McDonald's restaurants and 20,000 "adult bookstores" or porn specialty shops, but in the area close by Dartmouth there is only one McDonald's and there are no porn shops. The absence of stores devoted exclusively to pornography, however, doesn't mean sexually explicit and titillating materials are hard to come by. Indeed, so-called soft and medium-core pornographic magazines, books, and movies are much easier to obtain in the Upper Valley than a Big Mac.
While he doesn't carry "that stuff," meaning the hard-core pornography typically found in "adult bookstores," Robert Bartles '64 of Verham News, the area's major magazine distributor* does carry a wide variety of what Bartles calls "men's sophisticate" magazines.' They range from Playboy, Penthousq, and Hustler to the typically more explicit and daring Gent, Beaver, and Stag, and the contents run the gamut from soft-core to what some would call borderline hard-core; in Bartles' opinion, "they all stay on the [soft] side of the line, though the line is always moving."
Despite the differences among them, what these magazines all have in common is their "high ticket" (they generally sell for between $2 and $3 per issue) and their growing acceptance among the buying public. Over the past five years, Bartles says, there has been a marked increase in the overall number of "men's sophisticate, high ticket" publications, and the total sales in this portion of the market in New Hampshire and Vermont has increased by 25 per cent or more. "The price is fairly high, but that doesn't seem to dampen the demand," Bartles says. "There's no longer a stigma attached to magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler, and peo- ple don't hesitate to pay $2.95 or more for one of the special editions."
Overall, Bartles says he carries between 400 and 500 monthly magazine titles, and of these he estimates 50 to 60 fall in the "men's sophisticate, high ticket" category.
The Dartmouth Bookstore used to carry Playboy and Penthouse, but dropped Penthouse because, says manager David Cioffi, "we thought it was gross." Depending on how many students are enrolled per term, the bookstore sells between 125 and 175 copies of Playboy per month. At the request of some female students who apparently felt it was unfair to sell Playboy and not Playgirl, the Dartmouth Bookstore started stocking Playgirl last year. Playgirl sales, however, are slight, only in the neighborhood of ten copies per month; this may have something to do with the fact that nationally the bulk upwards of 70 per cent of Playgirl purchasers are not women but homosexual men.
Two of the "variety" stores in Hanover have large selections, among them Man ToMan, Cavalier, Dude, Gent, Beaver, Eros,Gentleman's Companion, and Torrid Lov-ing. While it's generally true, as Bartles points out, that there's been an increased awareness among store owners of the need to place such magazines out of the reach of children, one of these stores still keeps its lineup on the bottom shelves.
What Hanover lacks in the way of pornographic magazines, stores in other near- by towns provide. In effect, a fairly wide range of pornographic magazines and books can be found in the majority of Upper Valley stores that sell publications.
As for porn movies, the Upper Valley does not have any indoor theater catering exclusively to audiences whose tastes run toward X ratings. It does, however, have a drive-in the Midway Drive-in in Ascutney, Vermont that specializes in movies like Sweater Girls and The MissNude America Contest ("completely un- censored," claims the ad). At the Valley Cinema, across the street from McDonald's in West Lebanon, X-rated movies are shown every Friday and Saturday night at 11:00.
Perhaps the hottest items in the pornography industry today are hard-core videotapes for home viewing. As most of these are sold via mail, there is really no way to determine whether the videotape craze has caught on yet in the Dartmouth- Upper Valley area. But Video X, the por novideo industry's answer to TV Guide, is for sale here, and that may mean some area people do watch porn tapes at home. The brainchild of Larry Flynt, the "born- again" publisher of Hustler, Video X contains reviews of, ordering forms for, and photographs taken from today's hard-core videotapes. The September 1980 issue features reviews of Pleasure Masters,Femmes de Sade, Little Angels in Pain, and Domination Blue, as well as numerous color photographs of women in bondage.
Since, like videotapes, many of the "men's sophisticate, high ticket" magazines are sold via mail, there is just no accurate way to gauge how popular they may be at a place like Dartmouth. But as copies of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler can usually be found in many students' rooms, it's probably safe to assume that at least some Dartmouth students are subscribers. It is also safe to assume that porn movies are not unknown to today's students; during my years at Dartmouth, for example, there was at least one copy of Deep Throat being shown privately on campus. Finally, it's a sure bet that the pornography industry is not ignoring campuses in its efforts to entice ever more customers. When I worked for the Dartmouth Environmental Studies Program in 1976 and 1977, for instance, I would frequently find in the mail graphically illustrated promotional flyers and ordering blanks for various low-budget porn movies. Oddly but somehow appropriately, these were all addressed to a "Mr. Env. Stud."
