Inevitably, there are those who decry Hanson as a traitor to the subversive spirit of pornography. Al Goldstein, the very loud and very fat man who edits Screw, becomes apoplectic at the mention of her name. Goldstein has spent as many years being a reprobate as Hanson has spent not being one. "When was the last time she was busted?" he asks, touting his own nineteen arrests. "I fight for free expression. You ask me about someone who wants to keep quiet? That's like asking Martin Luther King about blacks who want to pass as white. Dian Hanson is gutless, a coward. I tolerate her like a mosquito bite on the ass!"

It's true that Hanson has little desire to spend her life in court. The magazines she edits are technically soft-core, which means they stop short of depicting actual penetration. Under federal law (namely, 18 U.S. Code, Section 2257), a hard-core-porn operation must cross-reference all models with explicit releases and every name the model has ever used in her life. It's like chasing mice through a thicket. To fail in these record-keeping duties, under the law, can bring a five-year prison term, even if the model in question is 70 years old. Hanson, as a purveyor of soft-core, is legally exempt from these inventories, but she does them anyway.

Dian Hanson's direction of a photo shoot is the purest expression of her work. All her skills -- her quiet command, her knowledge of exactly what poses will provide Leg Show readers with quality masturbation -- are called into play. On a breezy Tuesday, she packs a few bags with clothes she has bought for Tammy Lee, a longtime favorite with her readers.

Walking to the studio, Hanson gushes about cookbooks she has purchased over the weekend. "You should see The Poultry Bible or some of my German books!" she says. "They're lit much the same way we light a shoot -- the same contrivances. Everything is well oiled. Everything's full and round, meticulously arranged to stimulate the appetite."

"Dian Hanson," says her former lover R. Crumb, "is like an Albert Schweitzer to pathetic foot-suckers, and she's pretty good-hearted about it."

The studio, run by a Swedish photographer named Anneli Adolfsson, is a vast room in Chelsea. Nine giant shades keep out the piercing sunlight; a German boxer dog is sleeping in a cage. Nearby is a closet filled with legal boxes marked antique lingerie and, true to Leg Show fetishism, gas masks.

Beneath the chipped white ceiling, Tammy Lee is standing nude as Hanson "de-malls" her flame-red hair. It needs to be de-malled: This is a glamour shoot and must elicit images of old Hollywood, not the shopping center where Dian Hanson finds fabulous deals on Manolos and Betsey Johnsons.

Tammy Lee, a "featured entertainer" who performs in San Francisco, Miami, and other strip-friendly cities, has earned combat pay from Leg Show. In past issues, she has exposed herself on the streets of New York and London. On a more puzzling assignment, she was taken to a meatpacking plant and photographed among cattle parts. There was so much suet on the floors that, to avoid slipping on her stiletto heels, she had to be carried out to the meat hooks, where she bravely swung around until Hanson and Adolfsson got the pictures they needed. "We shot her near a hanging tree of gluteus muscles," recalls Hanson, who never resists the chance to be medically specific. "It was a beautiful layout."

A porn photo shoot is itself a slightly medical, or at least clinical, event. It's five or six hours -- fifteen on a tough day -- of asking a model to move her elbow three inches to the left, or arch her back, or swivel her left buttock just slightly toward the lens. Every few minutes, Hanson reminds Tammy Lee to "Barbie the foot": her slang for making the perfect S-shape that drives Leg Show readers to private distraction.

As an extra favor to those who lust after Tammy's curvy feet, Hanson has brought a pair of custom-made English shoes she's been saving for the occasion. She rightly calls them "the torture shoes." They look like matching cliffs. The heels are a ludicrous six and a half inches high, with an angle of descent of 45 degrees. "Tammy's woman enough to wear these," Hanson says, in the calming voice of a respiratory therapist. "We love our Tammy!"

Eventually, her lips rocketing into hypergloss, Tammy is trapped in a wilderness of straps, nylon, and silk. From the looks of her, she might explode if just one of the hooks or clips gives way. "Men are entranced by the complication of lingerie," Hanson says, buttoning Tammy's gold bustier. "The fact that women need pounds of elastic and tressing fascinates them, because all they wear is a shred of cotton underneath their clothes. And it's a very male urge, an aggressive and sexual one, to want to fight through layers to get to the female."