Читать книгу The Changing Face of Sex - Wayne P. Anderson PhD - Страница 33

I think music is a major influence on behavior, both the words and the dances that go with it. Here, an earthquake in behavior change occurred. First came Elvis Presley whom the public had to be protected from on the Ed Sullivan show by filming him only from the waist up. Then the Beatles were followed by groups whose lyrics became ever more explicit.

In 1953 Playboy was born under the leadership of Hugh Heffner, who had the explicit goal of changing America’s sexual behavior. Between 1962 and 1965 he published a series of editorials he called the Playboy Philosophy, which he saw as a revolt against “narrow, prudish Puritanism.”

In it he predicted the sexual revolution that was just about to take place. Some of the philosophy was an attack on the religious attitudes that regarded women as objects or possessions and refused to recognize her sexual rights. In some ways I saw him as being in league with women’s liberation.

In one of my lectures I still cover the “battle of pubic hair.” The censors evidently watched the Playboy centerfold to prevent Heffner from showing too much, especially pubic hair. He went on a campaign to gradually show more and more. First by showing a black woman dancing across a stage in multiple shots, was there or wasn’t there? Then a woman on a bed with the shadow of a bedpost across her pubic area—again—was there or wasn’t there?

I remember getting copies of the philosophy that had been reprinted as separate documents and using them as stimulus materials in my graduate sex classes. They were not great literature or even particularly deep as thought pieces, but they were in tune with the changes that were taking place in society.

Other men’s magazines more explicit than Playboy entered the market. Bob Guccione began selling Penthouse in the U.S. in 1969. Penthouse was more explicit about sex and its pictures more detailed sexually. The magazine had a section that it claimed were letters from readers, but which appeared to me to have been written by someone with a copy of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis on his desk next to his typewriter. The letters introduced readers to many aberrations.

The rules about what it is acceptable to publish in a magazine were thrown out the window in 1974 by Larry Flynt in his Hustler magazine, which just a few years before would have been seen as hardcore porn. Interestingly I was not aware of my students, graduate or undergraduate, reading the magazine.