I and other members of Women Against Pornography were there to remind them. But as I stood outside the club, I was assaulted by a raging man who was intent on destroying my protest sign (which read: "Hustler Club for men who need child porn and abuse to get it up!").

    As my attacker, who looked to be in his 50s, charged into me, I held the sign in front of me for protection. After what seemed like a long physical struggle, three male bystanders managed to break my assailant's ferocious grip on me. My magnanimous rescuers then sent him on his way without asking me if I wanted him arrested.

    Many journalists, and -cameramen were, milling around, and although at least three newspapers quoted my views about Flynt and his club, none thought the attack on me worthy of mention.

    Imagine if, instead of an attack on a feminist protester, this had been an assault on a person of color who was demonstrating outside a racist organization. Is it conceivable that such an attack would have been totally ignored by the media?  Would the rescuers have released the assailants? Would the incident have been erased from public record? No way!

Yet after more than three decades of women's struggle against sexism and violence against women, this example of a violent sexist reaction to a woman protester is nothing more than ho-hum.

    EQUALLY ALARMING is the lack of local outrage over the blatant child-porn advertisement that was used to lure men to the opening of the Hustler Club. A full-page color photo of two naked young girls - cropped a few inches below their waists with their breasts mostly hidden by text appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the San Francisco Weekly. Although spokesmen for the club maintained that the girls - who looked no older than 14 were of legal age, the young women were obviously chosen to appeal to men who are turned on by underage girls. Flynt's relatively new porn publication, Barely Legal, is dedicated to appealing to such men.  For example, a title on the cover of the April issue of Barely Legal reads "Feed me! 'Man-eating moppet's (sic) never full." "Moppet" is a buzz word for a female child.  The partially nude cover girl, whose fingers cover what appear to be non-existent breasts, looks no older than 12.

    While the photographs in Barely Legal are legal, these materials - like the two young girls in the ad for the Hustler Club - qualify as child porn by my definition. It is well-documented that many pedophiles and non-pedophilic child molesters find such pictures sexually arousing and that many use them as stimulants prior to sexually abusing children.

    What many people don't know is that Flynt has been promoting child porn in Hustler magazine for decades. The infamous "Chester the Molester" cartoons that appeared in every issue for several years made a joke out of child sexual abuse, including violent sexual abuse, father-daughter incest and kidnapping children for purposes of abuse.  Another cartoon showed an adult man committing necrophilia with a baby.

    As a recent "Frontline" documentary ("American Porn," PBS, Feb. 7) made clear, many pornographers are eagerly producing increasingly extreme porn to attract the large numbers of "pornophiles" (the term I have coined for the mental pathology of regular porn viewers) who are turned on by cutting-edge materials. While Flynt disparaged some of these pornographers in the documentary, expressing anxiety that they may undermine his hard work to mainstream his characteristically raunchy, hard-core and blatantly misogynistic material, sexually explicit photographs of underage-looking women constitute his current choice of cutting-edge material.  He appears to believe that men are no longer sexually excited by women who look older than 17.

    The presence of many journalists at Flynt's Hustler Club press conference, the long line of men waiting to be admitted to the celebration party, and guests like Mayor Willie Brown, Francis Coppola and what The Examiner referred to as "other noted Bay Area icons" reveal how mainstream Flynt and the hard-core porn he produces have become in San Francisco.

    It is just a matter of time before Flynt's variety of child porn (sometimes called pseudo-child porn or simulated child porn) also becomes mainstream. And this means increasing rates of child sexual abuse.  Do any of our leaders in San Francisco care?

Diana E.H. Russell is an emeritus professor of sociology at Mills College, an author of 17 books about sexual violence and pornography and an expert on sexual violence against women and girls. She is currently working on a book about child pornography.