Sperm Count: Goodbye to Eden

"The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch

Will mankind be condemned to an existence of loving sex? Is that the next rung on the evolutionary ladder. Taking a Darwinian survival of the fittest point of view, it would seem that those men and women who fit the guidelines of the affirmative consent statutes recently passed in both California and New York will find that their genes are naturally selective, while those who aren’t turned on to reciprocity in sex and prefer S&M, B&D, humiliation and a thousand other paraphilias, and have read the Story of O and Return to the Chateau so many times that they can reiterate the hot passages in their sleep not to speak of The 120 Days of Sodom (which was the basis for Pasolini’s masterpiece of degradation Salo) and jerk off to the scene in Eyes Wide Shut where Nicole Kidman is sitting on the toilet, will find that their brand of barbaric Animal House sexuality, with its worn copies of Adam, Sir, Hustler and Club International is shunted to the side. There's a even a mathematical formula for altruism famously offered by the evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton which has added one more nail to the coffin of sexual inequity with its labyrinth of delicious Catholic shame, documented so amply in the recent blockbuster hit Spotlight. Gone are the days when it was as Mel Brooks elegantly said “good to be the king” or better yet an archbishop! There are no more bunnies wearing tails and as of its March issue Playboy will do away with nudity and before long neither girls nor guys will cover their whoosy whatsis with fig leaves. Yes a certain innocence seems like it’s creeping into the bedroom, like a slow metastasizing cancer, but don’t worry. Once a pickle no more a cucumber. There'll never be another Eden.

Sperm Count: The Decline and Fall of the Playboy Nude

A mixture of sadness and relief has greeted the coming demise of the Playboy nude. A virtual institution of the male imagination, the nude will disappear from Playboy starting with the March issue. Needless to say barbershops will never be the same, but experts in workplace economics predict that the time of the average American male’s haircut will be cut by approximately 5 minutes, due to the fact that barbers will no longer have to stop while their customers turn centerfolds upside down and sideways. Figuring that the average barber cuts the hair of approximately 20 customers per day (2 per hour for a l0 hour day) that will save approximately 100 minutes, which will mean that the revenue of the average barber will increase by three haircuts a day. If the average barber works approximately 250 days per year that comes to 750 more haircuts, at approximately $25 per haircut equals an increased profit of $18,750. Not chump change. The increased income will undoubtedly have broad ramifications for the American economy, as the demand for goods and services will be increased by the thousands of barbers with more disposable income. What else can we say about the demise of the Playboy nude? It’s not just a matter of economics, but unrequited love. If you’re a male you may remember falling for a particular bunny. You ripped out her pictorial spread and placed it on your wall, but that was never enough. You brought the glossy pages of the magazine to your face and even into bed at night, hoping to close the distance, as the gazing at your Eurydice only doomed her to disappear back into the Underworld of Playboy Enterprises.

Pornosophy: The New York Times Magazine Then and Now

Young men growing up in the ‘60s read The New York Times Magazine for the lingerie ads. It was their initiation into the secret world of the other, the female, whose divine mysteries might already have been revealed to them in Irving Klaw’s photography which was the subject of the 2005 film, The Notorious Bettie Page. By the early’70s in order to compete with Penthouse, Playboy, in a stage of history Hugh Hefner termed the "pubic wars," would show the full monty. What is the equivalent experience for the pubescent male today? He attends a metaphoric striptease show in which there is neither strip nor tease. By the age of 5 most young men and women will have had their first experience of hardcore porn. They will have seen penetrated orifices before they even know what they portend. What would have been science fiction to a 50’s and 60’s adolescent is almost jaded now—much the way that the everyday application of the principles of quantum physics (say in quantum computing) is taken for granted today. It’s a little like going to one of those extravagant buffets at a Bar Mitzvah or wedding parlor in which you can’t remember any of the food with all the varying stations devoted to sushi, barbecue, delicatessen, French and Italian cuisines and firstly not knowing what to eat and then after not remembering it. Further, there's no such thing as lingerie, in the classic sense of the word. Many women practice a kind of minimalism that leaves nothing to the imagination.  In the 50’s and 60’s the young man who stealthily extracted the The New York Times from the thick Sunday paper which lay outside the door, surreptitiously beelining for the bathroom, was content with very little, maybe just a bra, panties or stray garter. But the visual memory was as indelible as the olfactory recollection of Proust’s madeleine. Less was definitely more. The female body was full of pregnant signs and signifiers which have all but disappeared today, with nudity itself losing its potency, as a sanctuary for the transgressive sensibility.

Hair! Again

In the famous musical of the same name, hair was looked at as sign of rebellion. Hair was both a symbol and sign of freedom. It’s always astonishing how times change and how the sensibility of a culture is reflected to by a host of new manners and mores. Now hair is looked at far less benignly than it was the 60’s, especially in relation to femininity, with natural women, who populated Woodstock and the cast of films like John Sayles' Return of the Secaucus 7, and sported hair on their legs, underarms and pudendae looked at as an anomalies--and Brazilian waxing all the rage. Really it’s the difference between women and children. In the 60’s pornography was rife with flamboyant displays of pubic hair and with the advent of full frontal nudity in Playboy and Penthouse, centerfolds really had something to show. Now their counterparts, the starlets of internet porn, literally have nothing to reveal, below the belt at least. Today’s pornography is basically a not so veiled form of pedophilia, as is the sexuality being marketed by the fashion industry. But a revolution is in the making (“Is Dyeing Armpit Hair a Harbinger of the Future?" The Screaming Pope, 7/20/15). Like the l905 uprising in Russia it may be the harbinger of things to come. Women around the country are beginning to grow underarm hair and a recent Times piece, “Woman Who Dye Their (Armpit) Hair,” 7/14/15, reported the phenomenon of  “pit-ins.” In Aristophanes Lysistrata the women of Greece refuse to have sex until the men stop waging war. Men should support this sea change in the values of our sterile kiddie porn oriented culture, by refusing to have sex with Barbie Doll clones who shave their genitals.

A. O. Scott’s “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow"

Jose Ortega y Gasset

In a recent Times Arts and Leisure piece, “The Squeeze on the Middle Brow” (NYT, 8/1/14). A.O. Scott takes aim at both Virginia Woolf and Dwight Macdonald who decried middlebrow culture. Macdonald’s Partisan Review essay "Mass Cult and Midcult,” in particular, is a classic primer on the vagaries of a watered down culture. Ortega y Gasset took another view of the same issue in his essay “The Dehumanization of Art," in which he basically saw difficult modernist paintings as a bulwark against the juggernaut of mass culture. Anyone who has ever been in a gallery when a tell it like it is viewer claims that his infant could have pulled off the Jackson Pollock understands the crushing effect the demand for accessibility can have on artistic endeavor. But Scott’s piece sees the conflict between high and middlebrow in light of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the breakaway bestseller which describes the increasing economic disparity between the economic elite and the middle classes. And Scott’s view is almost a wistful one in which a once empowered middle class brought both the high and the low to the middle. Scott writes, “High culture became more accessible, popular culture became more ambitious, until the distinction between them vanished altogether. Some of the mixing looks silly or vulgar in retrospect: stiff Hollywood adaptations or comic book versions of great novels; earnest television broadcast about social problems; magazines that sandwiched serious fiction in between photographs of naked women. But much of it was glorious.” David Lean’s Great Expectations, PBS's Brideshead Revisited; CBS's acclaimed documentary about migrant farmworkers, “Harvest of Shame” and magazines like Playboy, The Evergreen Review and Eros  all are examples of the positive side of middlebrow culture that Scott alludes to. A side issue has always been the dichotomy between political and esthetic avant gardism which became particularly noticeable in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution when Mayakovsky and other vanguard writers, artists and composers began to run afoul of the party line. However, Scott’s jeremiad makes sense in the rarified world of an increasingly powerful elite defined entirely by wealth. The aristocratic patrons like Peggy Guggenheim who once supported innovation have been replaced by a new class whose crushing materialism places little value on anything whose quiddity is not validated by the marketplace--and who fuel the demand for diamond studded skulls by Damien Hirst.