313. No More Naked Ladies in the Center of Playboy.

The day of the Playboy centerfold is over, according to the  current Economist (10/24-30/15).   And English professors required to teach our civilization's most difficult, and eventually most intense, erotic poetry  are probably emitting a great sigh of relief. 

I remember the poetry of the late 16th and early 17th centuries as being so hard for sophomores that sometimes the only thing that would keep a class — or the males in a class — going were the glimpses of coming ecstasy provided by the poet.  The "snowy limbs" of Spenser's damsels wrestling in a pool, revealing more and more but seen "through a veil" of water and foam, until one, gasp, "her two lily paps aloft displayed."  Glimpses.   What good are they when the kid can pull a magazine out of his back pocket and wham, get the full view?

Hugh Hefner worked against everything we were trying to do with Renaissance love poetry.  Our age, led by scientists like Alfred Kinsey and pop psychologists like Dr. Crane, was flattening and coarsening the erotic imagination more every day.  It didn't have to be so, we thought.  Let these young people follow Herrick all the way through a frolic, or Marvell through an invitation, or Donne through a seduction, and they'd never read Playboy (or Cosmopolitan) again.  Love as orgasm management?  Ugh!

The eighty-three-year-old Hefner was treated by the Economist with the respect it (and most of America) accords all money makers, but I would guess that that's not entirely the respect he saw coming into his reach.   From The Playboy Forum, and the talk he encouraged about the "Playboy philosophy," and the serious prose he solicited (even an article by a U.S. senator!) to put alongside his pictures, and the beam on his face when pundits credited him with "a major part" in the sexual revolution, I got the idea that what most pleased him was respect as a liberator, a breaker of bonds, an usherer into sophistication from naiveté, into light from darkness.

The darkness, as with most 20th-century liberation movements, was 19th-century mores, in this case Victorian prudery, a dog beaten to a pulp in the twenties but lying there handy the rest of the century. 

The light is somebody's daughter displaying her pudenda as to a gynecologist, with, being in a centerfold, the whole male world invited in.

As for "sophistication," you can go no further with that word than to what the freshman pledge sees looking ahead a year.  The Playboy "philosophy" is fraternity sophomore hedonism. 

Ah, but seriousness?  Yes you can find it, in articles by James Baldwin and Vladimir Nabokov.  And certainly in that article by the senator.  Unspotted political philosophy — unless you count the semen stains.