Reality checks on the popular film, The People Vs. Larry Flynt, have given focus to some of the more sordid sides of the famed publisher's ideas about satire. "Hustler's cartoons have portrayed little girls naked, sometimes blind, and available for sex," writes columnist Bob Herbert, "An example of Hustler humor is a cartoon of a doctor in a maternity ward holding up a stillborn girl and making a crude sexual reference."

Feminist journalist and activist Gloria Steinem repeatedly blasts showcased incidents in Flynt's publishing career that the "whitewashed" movie about him ignores. Black women, for example, are portrayed in Hustler with enormous lips and buttocks, and with grotesque vaginal areas infested with crabs and infectious venereal diseases.

Mutilation of women is, according to Ms. Steinem, a regular feature in Hustler. One photo, captioned "A simple cure for frigidity," shows a man driving a jackhammer into a naked woman's vagina. One Hustler photo essay shows a handcuffed woman being escorted from a Nazi-type cell. All hair from her body is shaved and, in the final frames, she is raped. Only the word "poof" is used--in the last frame-- to make a questionable point.

Bob Herbert believes the real Hustler story is not primarily about free speech rights, but about the publisher's "extreme and unrelentingly violent hatred of women, a hatred every bit as fanatical as the Klan's hatred of blacks and the Nazis hatred of Jews." If the film about Flynt had allowed that he did, in fact, hate women, but that such hatred--no matter how misguided-- still deserves the protection of first amendment, The People Vs. Larry Flynt would then have been more honest, more complex, and more intellectually satisfying, says Herbert. "It might have sparked a national discussion of what should be a very troubling issue--the extent to which the hatred of women is embedded in and tolerated by our society, and the damage it does to us all."