More skin or less....

[Brian Sorgatz]

Steve Sloca wrote:
>However, even airbrushed, those '70's pictorials were a lot
>more sensual--and thus true to Playboy's image--than are the "gotta go
>potty" or awkward-contorted- pose-to-hide-the-pubes photos of today's
>issues.  The modern practice of women shaving their pubic hair plus
>PEI's fear of the Religious Right has combined to give Playboy's
>photography a case of schizophrenia.

What you call schizophrenia, I call a reflection of the perennial human 
ambivalence towards sexuality and the sexual anatomy.  Lin Yutang said, "All 
women's dresses are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the 
admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress."  There is 
nothing wrong with this ambivalence; on the contrary, sex probably wouldn't 
be sexy without it.  Maxim is too cold and Hustler is too hot, but PLAYBOY 
is the porridge that's just right.

>I suspect that one reason some men, particularly those over 40, prefer
>the less explicit, less erotic poses is that in their fantasies, women
>are shy, fragile creatures, almost virginal in their sexual
>experience, i.e., women who need to be coddled, protected and "taken
>care of" by the strong, masculine fantasizer who dreams of becoming
>her master and guide in the bedroom.  That was an attitude that women
>were encouraged to cultivate for hundreds of years; and a belief set
>that men have held for many, many generations in what was a
>male-dominant culture.

That's not me!  I think you're leaping to false conclusions about the 
political implications of cheesecake.  There's nothing inherently fragile or 
submissive in a woman's ambivalence about showing her body.  Greek mythology 
illustrates this point well.  The virgin goddess Artemis was no wilting 
flower:  she guarded her modesty with a vengeance.  She would kill any 
mortal man who, even accidentally, saw her naked.  An image of strong 
womanhood, is it not?  I like to think that every woman has a little bit of 
Artemis in her, as well as a little bit of her opposite, the promiscuous 
Aphrodite.  The "Women of ..." pictorials demonstrate the endless tug-of-war 
between these goddesses by showing women at every point on the spectrum from 
fully clothed to seminude to totally nude.

Brian Sorgatz