Filth

When I was very young, that is to say when my Mom was still alive, the biggest sin you could commit in our house was to look at pictures of naked women. After she died, which happened when I was 10, and we were packed off to live with Aunt Rageholic, she was the same way. To women of their generation it was the most horrible thing in the world for young men to look upon the naked female form. And I'm not sure why that was.

I remember my brother Charlie came home one Friday afternoon while we still lived in Detroit with a copy of National Lampoon. The second he laid it down I grabbed it and looked through it. I remember being fascinated by the pictures of topless women in it. They sparked my imagination and the women looked a hell of a lot better than the topless women in National Geographic. I was happy as a lark knowing that my big brother bought a magazine that had topless women in it. Our mother however was less than pleased. As soon as she saw it she went ballistic and made Charlie take the magazine back. He was pretty steamed and I was oh so sad because those pretty topless women were leaving and I didn't know when any of them would be back. Mom sternly warned us all after the incident that it was not good to look at things like that. I disagreed wholeheartedly with her but being 10 years old I thought it prudent to keep my opinion to myself.

Aunt Rageholic felt the same way. Whenever anyone of us got caught possessing any type of magazine that contained pictures of nude women she'd scream her head off at us and she'd either use the belt on us or she'd get Uncle Adultery to give us a whipping for looking at what she described as 'filth.' Of course banning something was the quickest way to get teen aged boys to delve further into the thing that was banned and so we began smuggling in and hiding such skin mags as Playboy,

Penthouse, Oui, and others. Back then, the mid to late '70's most all the mainstream mags were almost chaste in their pictorials and I remember being almost disappointed they did not show more. I looked at those magazines as learning tools to learn about women because I was way too shy to ever get any where with a girl at that age.

I think my mom and my crazy aunt must have thought that looking at women's naked boobies was going to turn us into sexual deviants. Or maybe they didn't want any onanism on their watches.

I recently bought some vintage Playboy magazines and I've been scanning some of the photos, the ads, and the cartoons and illustrations. They are wonderful pop culture time capsules and I was surprised by the lack of nudity in most of them. In most cases, especially in the ones from the 1960's, about the only nudity is in the centerfold photo itself and maybe one other pictorial. There's lots of shots like this: But there's not a female pubic hair to be found in most all of the photos.

I loved the cartoons of Erich Sokol and Eldon Dedini because both men drew curvy shapely women who looked like the women I saw around me. I also loved the Vargas girl illustrations: In most cases the Vargas girls made up for the lack of nude females in Playboy and some months they were hotter than the gal who was the centerfold model.

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Playboy, Penthouse, and others have changed a lot since those innocent days of the 1960's and early '70's, they have become more coarse to be sure. And they've cheapened themselves too in order to compete with the world of hardcore porn, which is a losing battle if you ask me. But even as the magazines have changed some things have not. My crazy aunt is still nutty when it comes to anything to do with sex. She tried reading my novel but she put it down after she found out it has lesbian characters in it. One of my cousins told me she said that it was full of 'filth' and therefore it was not worth reading. But for me to get a comment from a crazy old woman like that, one who thinks the output of Tennessee Williams is 'sordid,' it's high praise indeed.