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.

82. Today's Sex and Yesterday's Poetry

This post was first submitted to the Ohio University student newspaper in response to their sex column.

Editor, The Post:

Your BedPost column (23 September) about how couples, or maybe threesomes or foursomes, can enjoy sex while the woman is menstruating made me think of the enjoyment of sex in the literature I used to teach, Renaissance poetry. Here's John Donne addressing his mistress "On Going to Bed":

License my roving hands, and let them go,
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America! my new-found-land...

She's a new continent. Oh the wonder of it. Here's Thomas Lodge's idea of the feelings of a responding woman:

Love in my bosom like a bee

Doth suck his sweet:

Now with his wings he plays with me

Now with his feet.

"Love" is Eros, more familiarly Cupid. His best spokesman is Robert Herrick. If he gave advice in a column he'd tell you what to concentrate on:

Have ye beheld (with much delight)
A red rose peeping through a white?
Or else a cherry, double graced,
Within a lily centre placed?
Or ever marked the pretty beam
A strawberry shows half-drowned in cream?
Or seen rich rubies blushing through
A pure smooth pearl and orient too?
So like to this, nay all the rest,
Is each neat niplet of her breast.

And there were others. Their note was joy and the requirement in hitting it was imagination. So many of them hit it so well that England was called "a nest of singing birds." Joy! Joy! Joy!

Come away, come sweet love,

The golden morning breaks.

All the earth, all the air

Of love and pleasure speaks

The advice common to both your contributors ("throw down a towel" to protect the sheets) comes from Cosmopolitan Magazine.. That magazine, with Playboy, has spoken so matter-of-factly and so long of such things that you might think its tradition — that of sex science, going back to Alfred Kinsey — is the only one. The Renaissance love poets remind us that it's not.

It's possible that the Cosmopolitan tradition will crowd the Renaissance (to which some add Romantic) tradition of lovemaking so far out of our consciousness that it will never — despite the efforts of every literature teacher I know — make its way back into popular culture. What I have seen, or think I have seen, among Americans, or at least college-age Americans, since Kinsey's time makes me think so: a progressive coarsening of the erotic imagination.

Is that so bad? How will you be able to tell? If sex science has flattened your imagination, if it makes no difference to you that Eros has become an orgasm manager, you won't. You'll throw down your towels with no idea of what you're missing.