Purple Editor Olivier Zahm Is Very Anti-Porn

Bescruffed, smelling of musk, and in his trademark aviators at the Standard East, Olivier Zahm, the virile redacteur of Purple magazine, looks like Che Guevara rode his motorcycle to the center of the Earth and popped out on the Bowery half a century later. He’s foregone his typical leather jacket for a Comme des Garçons blazer over which he has his Lumex GX7 camera strapped. But at this party for the magazine he started — the one so laced with sexuality and more nipples and pudenda than you bargained for — the 50-year-old wants to make one thing clear, as “Time of the Season” by the Zombies plays: He’s anti-pornography. “Pornography is sex as commerce — or commerce as sex, I don’t know. And it’s a pure male objectification of woman.”

“And me, when I have naked woman in Purple — like, for example, this issue we have … what’s her name … Pamela Anderson — it’s a celebration of woman. It’s celebrating their beauty, sexuality, their honesty, their inner force. It’s the opposite of pornography, which is degrading women for your own male pleasure or supposed pleasure. I consider pornography as a shame for man. A man who looks at a porn movie is a stupid animal.” He continues. “It’s so stupid and boring. If I would be excited by pornography, I would maybe look. But it’s not exciting to me. It’s ethically wrong, because pornography is made only for men, and it’s using women as objects for men’s pleasure, okay? I have nothing to do with pornography. And I personally never looked at porn movies — in the seventies as a teenager, yes, as an initiation,” he said.  “Since then, I have developed my own taste and have enough of a sexual life, I don’t need that. I mean, if you put me in jail, maybe I would have to. Don’t put me in jail.”

For more pictures from his after-party, also hosted by Theory, click through our slideshow.