A Playboy's Work

The Odds & Bits Series : I

I never had a subscription to Playboy magazine … used to pick it up at the check-out counter on occasion. I recall the way the photos relied on a special arrangement of lighting … to convey just the right view and ambiance. But it also conveyed an attitude on the part of the models … and certainly the publisher. It was bold … natural … and it represented … the fact that … sexuality … like anything else … needed a public sponsor.

 

There's a legend in the East about Crab Island … a foreboding place of life … in which everyone … appeared very guarded about their emotions … particularly … their sexual attitudes. The island would succumb to flooding periodically … on account the strange tides in the area … and cause a general sense of ache and unease with the islanders. It produced extraordinary behaviors … unusual even … but kept mute on the cause of it. 

 

Hugh Hefner … the publisher of Playboy magazine … drained such a place as Crab Island … and constructed a way for people to talk about sex and bring it into cognition  … in our social practices. It is as much an act of Herakles … who diverted the waters of the Aegean into the old unkept stables of the Greeks.

 

At his mansion in Beverly Hills … he used to carry out all manner of entertainment … and to found new ways of expressing … the sensational experience of sex. As much as an orgasm experience … would take our minds away … from its normal moorings … Hefner … produced the kind of jetset and public lifestyle … that took away our hesitations about open sexual expression … even when we weren't sure we wanted to.

 

That caused many people to scurry … and find a way to speak of the many … rising sensations in themselves … and most if not all … soon found a way … to do that. It reached the daily concerns of the ordinary working man … who found in the encounter … a greater physical orientation … to his actions … out in the open … with muscles flexed … thighs bulging … and in effective performance of his work and duties. It brought our bodies out into the open ken of  public view.

 

Hefner is reported to have done his work mostly in bed … where in his silk pajamas … he would make the kind of executive decisions … that ran his … $200 mil. empire. I wonder what his shareholders might have said … about his lifestyle … or his idea of corporate governance … in the way that he mixed that … with an attitude … rich in sexual liberties … and extravagant expectations of marriage.

 

To the ordinary man … in the home … with wife and kids … he would have represented the mythical God of erotism … who didn't sink into the hole of debauchery and decadent  despair. He managed himself expertly on the issues … dealing with excesses … that the ordinary man would have cringed … in terrified psychotic defenses. He met the great sexual imperative head on … and managed the bull of misanthropy. 

 

In such a view of possibilities … we come to understand sex … in the way in which we come to engage it and deal with it. Its us … it is not on its own account … the uncontrollable demonic impulse … of philandery.