Tag Archives: Sexual ethics and transformation

A weakening of the sexual double standard? On straight men and slutshaming

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Tracy Clark-Flory, who writes so ably about sex and relationships for Salon, has a post up tonight that asks a simple question: can a man be slut-shamed?

Tracy interviewed me and Jaclyn Friedman for the piece, an interesting juxtaposition given recent events in the feminist blogosphere. Had I known what he’s been up to, I would have suggested Tracy also talk to Michael Flood, the great Antipodean pro-feminist who left a nice comment on my Facebook page this evening and shared publicly the abstract of a forthcoming article on Australian men and slutshaming. Here it is, with bold emphasis mine:

Abstract: Sexual and gender relations are in a state of flux in Australia, with both growing gender equality and persistent inequalities, the pornographication of popular culture, and increasing assertions of female sexual agency (Flood 2008). The sexual double standard – the differential judgement and treatment of women’s and men’s sexual behaviour – and the policing of female sexual reputation long have been features of the sexual landscape. However, there is some evidence that these formations are shifting. While “slut” and related terms remain powerful disciplinary mechanisms for regulating women’s sexual behaviour, particularly among young women, such terms also are being subverted and reclaimed. This paper reports on the emergence of a new term in heterosexual sexual relations, the “male slut”. In qualitative interviews in Australia, some young men express a desire to avoid this version of male sexual reputation, one earned through excessive or inappropriate sexual activity. The term “male slut” signals a slight weakening of the sexual double standard and an increased policing of male sexual behaviour.

What Michael’s seeing in Australia I’m also seeing here in Los Angeles, as the cultural tide may be beginning to turn against a cavalier acceptance of male promiscuity. It would be absolutely wrong to claim that we’ve achieved “reputational parity”, where slut-shaming functions in equivalent ways for both men and women. But we’re closer than we were, both because of the acceptance of what Flood calls “increasing assertions of female sexual agency” and an evolving understanding among young guys that there’s more to being a man than sleeping with as many women as possible.

I’m eager to see Michael’s article when it appears. In the meantime, do read Tracy’s.

Should the libido mature?

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About five years ago, after I’d written a blogpost about my work as a youth group leader, I got an email from someone named Fiona. She asked:

Do you ever worry about being sexually attracted to your students or youth group kids? Don’t you ever think you might be tempted to cross the line? You write as if you are immune to temptation. Just because you don’t act on it doesn’t mean you don’t feel it!!

Do male youth leaders like you “behave” because you don’t have sexual desire for teens, or do you have sexual desire but just control it?

My answer was a simple one: no. No, I was never attracted to the kids in my youth group. No, it’s not about control; it’s about the genuine absence of desire.

One thing I’ve been blessed with: a consistent track record of being attracted to women my own age.  When I was 16, I thought about my fellow teens.  In my college years, I was attracted to other students.   Unlike some of my peers, when I was in college I had little interest in older women (honestly, I found them intimidating beyond words!)  I certainly lost interest in high school-aged girls not long after leaving Carmel High.

I think a case can be made that being peer-attracted throughout one’s life is developmentally healthy for everyone concerned. But it’s possible I’m universalizing (and worse, moralizing) from my own experience.

An anecdote:

When I was in college, I remember having a discussion with a male friend of mine.  "Sean" and I were talking about my friend’s father, who had recently left his mother for a younger woman. Sean was understandably disconsolate.  But one thing he said haunted me for a long time.  I’ll paraphrase:

Dad left mom for someone only a couple of years older than us. (We were 20 or so at this time).  I don’t find women my mom’s age sexy at all.  It seems my dad doesn’t either.  What if I get married, get to be my dad’s age, and find out I’m still attracted to girls in their early twenties?  What if my sex drive doesn’t mature along with the rest of me?

Boy, do I remember when Sean asked that question in bold!  I had no answer for him, beyond a feeble "Man, that would suck."  But it frightened me.  All around me I saw evidence of men in their forties and fifties who were strongly attracted to young women in their teens and early twenties.  It wasn’t just a media phenomenon; in my early years of taking women’s studies classes, I heard countless anecdotes from my female classmates about harassment at the hands of much older men.  It made me angry, it made me cynical, but it also terrified me.  Sean was right about me too: when I was 20, I didn’t find women twice my age to be at all sexually attractive.  What if I felt the same way when I too was 40?   For whatever reason, that fear nagged and nagged at me.

But I was lucky.  I found that my libido evolved along with the rest of me.  As I aged, my interest in my peers remained the same.  Gradually, girls in their teens lost their appeal.  Women in their 30s, and then older, began to become far more interesting.  By the time I was in my early 30s, this maturation in my own psyche was quite clear to me, even as I was going through a series of unsuccessful relationships.  My behavior was neither feminist nor gentlemanly, but even at my worst, it was always age-appropriate. Yes, I slept with some of my students early in my teaching career; almost all of them were within half a decade of my age, older than the traditional students. One was three years older. That doesn’t make my behavior any more defensible, but it does make it, perhaps, less overtly predatory.

Today, I can say that my wife’s beauty awes me.  With a body that bears the unmistakable marks of having given birth, she’s beautiful late in the fourth decade of her life, and I have every expectation that I will find her every bit as lovely in her eighth decade on this planet.

Once I began working with teenagers regularly at All Saints Church (some 12 years ago), I found that my emotional response to "my kids" was, not surprisingly, often intensely paternal.  I’ve wanted to be a father for a few years now, and the teenagers with whom I work today are easily old enough to be my biological children.  And while I adore these teens in the specific, I find that those protective, paternal feelings exist for all boys and girls of similar age.  While I can certainly acknowledge the aesthetic beauty/handsomeness of certain teens, juvenile loveliness strikes no chord in me.  This is not merely due to my very happy marriage, but also due to this strong internal sense that sexual desire is rightly directed towards one’s approximate peers.

When I was in my early teens, one of my first celebrity "crushes" was on Kristy McNichol. (Famous for "Little Darlings", but also for a favorite TV show few of you remember, "Family.") Then in high school and college it was on Jennifer Jason Leigh.  Now, if I were to admit to one at all, it would be (as I’ve posted before) on Mariska Hargitay.  All three are just slightly older than I am.   And while I admire Scarlett Johannsson as an actress, hearing her dubbed "the sexiest woman alive" made me laugh out loud with disbelief — not because she isn’t lovely, but because she seems so damned young to me.

I do not mean to suggest that someone who is 44 (as I am) shouldn’t be attracted to someone who is 34 or 54.  But those ages seem to me — and this may be my own peculiarity — the outer limits of acceptability.   Anything beyond ten years either direction seems, well, odd.  At the same time, I acknowledge that age-disparate relationships can work, as long as the younger partner is genuinely emotionally mature.  A relationship between a 35 year-old and a 15 year-old is immoral, criminal, and indefensible; a relationship between a 55 year-old and a 35 year-old is none of those things. 

Still, I admit that I am perplexed by those who find such disparities to be erotically or emotionally exciting.  For me, the truth is simple: since I hit puberty, I have never experienced sexual attraction to someone old enough to be my mother or young enough to be my daughter.  And I acknowledge that one reason why I am often so hard on men who do experience that attraction to much younger women is because I can’t empathize with it, not even for a moment.   I try and "get it", and I just can’t. 

It is possible that my experience that the objects of my desire age as I age is just a quirk of my personality.  It certainly hasn’t been the result of any conscious effort on my part (and my regular readers know I am quick to sing the praises of conscious effort!).  But I can’t help but think that "my way" is the fundamentally healthier way.  It just seems to me that a great deal of heartache and exploitation could be avoided if we could all just match our libidos to our approximate peer group.  Or am I wrong?

Sugar Daughters: why “Sugar Daddies” bother me more than johns

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I’ve got a short piece (a blog post rather than a more thoughtful column) at GMP today on the Sugar Daddy phenomenon: Buying ‘Sugar Daughters’: What’s Really Wrong With the Sugar Daddy Phenomenon. Riffing on this Amanda Fairbanks piece in the HuffPo, I note that I’ve known students who’ve sought out these “arrangements” with varied results. And I touch on why the Sugar Daddy phenomenon bothers me far more than traditional prostitution:

By blurring the lines between a genuine romance and prostitution, the sugar daddy relationship is more problematic than a traditional john/hooker encounter.

That pretense of intimacy is inherent in the term “sugar daddy” with its hint of the incestuous. While the term “john” (for a male client of a sex worker) suggests anonymity, “sugar daddy” reeks of emotional (as well as sexual) boundary violations. The implication is that the real fathers of these young women have failed to provide the right combination of emotional and financial support; the term reinforces the not-entirely inaccurate trope that younger women who seek older men have “daddy issues.” And it suggests that the older men who seek out “sugar babies” are looking for young women whom they can spoil and fuck, deliberately blurring the line between paternal indulgence and sexual objectification.

The real question is whether the term “sugar daddy” is an unfortunate misrepresentation of what’s going on, or an all-too-accurate description of something dark and especially ugly.

Read the whole thing.

See also this terrific Alternet piece from Sarah Seltzer.

Love, Venn Diagrams, and the Private/Secret Distinction

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It’s not as complicated as the title suggests.

In a reversal of how it usually works, I wrote a piece for the Frisky that then got picked up at the Good Men Project: What’s the Difference Between Privacy and Secrecy? (Here’s the identical piece, but with a different formatting and comments section, at GMP). Excerpt:

Guarding the other’s solitude is about allowing your partner the right to a private, not a secret life. It’s a recognition that even the most sexually exclusive relationship functions a bit like a Venn diagram, in which the largest portion is a shared intimacy, but in which each partner is left with something that is theirs alone. It means having the trust to expect the truth, but also the respect not to ask questions that invite dishonest responses.

I’ve never asked my wife how many people she slept with before me. I don’t know how often she masturbates, or what she thinks about when she does. I trust her to manage her private sexual life in such a way that it doesn’t rob our shared intimacy of passion and power. And I trust her to be faithful as she trusts me.

We don’t have the right to a hidden life that contradicts our public commitments. But we have the right to a private world – and a private sexuality – that is ours alone.

Read the whole thing.

Note: Obviously, this is not a distinction I invented, though it’s one that doesn’t get discussed often enough. My cousin Tom Bishop gets credit for reminding me to write about it, and Charlie Glickman gets the hat-tip for reminding me that Marty Klein does a nice job of distinguishing privacy and secrecy in his now out-of-print 1989 classic, Your Sexual Secrets.

Are you a controlling shrew if you don’t want your partner using porn?

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The now-infamous Newsweek report on men who buy sex has drawn the predictably tremendous response throughout the blogosphere. The best take-down of the report’s methodology and conclusions came from the always excellent Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon. I recommend reading the original Newsweek piece and Clark-Flory’s response together.

But the conversation soon switched to the great evergreen of pornography use. I wrote a short response for Good Men Project (which got picked up at Jezebel). In the comments section below the GMP version, I got into a friendly argument with the magazine’s managing editor, Aaron Gouveia — which begat a post of its own here: A Vehement Disagreement about Porn.

Leaving aside the issue of whether pornography is degrading or empowering, putting on a shelf the question of whether its use is compatible with feminism, pressing the pause button on the debate about whether it casual use will invariably turn compulsive, there’s a basic query that has come up again and again: what right, if any, does someone have to ask for a “porn-free” sexual relationship?

We all come into sexual relationships with our “stuff” — our physical libidos, our private histories, our most enduring fantasies, our painful memories. Our sexuality is shaped by a constellation of factors: biology, faith, experience, will, fantasy, and more. Our sexuality belongs to us; as the authors of The Ethical Slutso famously put it, “the fundamental sexual unit is one person.” That makes good sense.

But when we come into any kind of sexual relationship, as so many of us will do or would like to do , we have to balance our own desires with those of another. We don’t get to do whatever we want. To pick a stereotypical heterosexual dynamic, the fact that a dude wants to come on his girlfriend’s face doesn’t mean she has to let him do so. We’re responsible for naming our wants, and responsible for self-soothing when those wants aren’t reciprocated by a partner. And the basic rule is simple: my right not to have something done to me that I don’t want done trumps your right to do to me what you’d like to do. To say otherwise is to give tacit approval to rape. Continue reading →

Wrapping up Spermgate

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It’s been an interesting week, as the original story I wrote about a boy who might or might not be my biological child caused a minor kerfuffle in the blogosphere. My friend Katie sent me a text Monday night, saying “it’s spermgate!!!” I liked the term, and so I started using it, even though I risk ridicule for naming my own little scandal rather than waiting for someone else to do it.

Spermgate has been popular at Good Men Project and Jezebel; at this blog, I’ve had my best week of traffic since last fall. (When this became my most popular post ever.)

I’ve done two follow-ups to the original column, including one that was reprinted at Good Men Project. The best summary of the story comes from one of the few bloggers to write approvingly of how “Jill” and I handled the original situation. Zach at 8BitDad writes

Long story short (and apologies to Schwyzer for summarizing everything in a couple sentences), he met a gal, and the gal met someone else as well. She got pregnant somewhere along the way, and Schwyzer never really resolved whether the baby was his, or the other dude’s. The gal ended up getting engaged and married to the other guy – possibly because he was more stable and wanted to be a father, while Schwyzer partied and lived his single life. The gal had more kids with her husband, and they live a presumably happy life.

That’s about the size of it.

The reaction has been both gendered and generally hostile. Google my name and you’ll find the blogposts and stories out there; the one discussion I found that was worthwhile and balanced took place here. The rest have been nearly all godawful.

Nothing I’ve read this week has changed my feelings about what happened with Jill, Ted, and Alastair. This was a complicated ethical situation of the sort that eludes easy answers. I was absolutely in the wrong to have been as sexually reckless as I was. And given my recklessness, I don’t have any position from which to criticize my old friend Jill. I might have chosen differently had I been in her shoes, but that is a moot point. I was in no position to do much of anything constructive back in the mid-1990s when this story began; all these years later, the most destructive thing I could do would be to reinsert myself into the lives of this family I have every reason to believe is happy. In other words, while there might be some ambiguity about what the right thing to do was back in the day, there is no such uncertainty now. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it 10,000 times again: in every imaginable way that matters, Ted is Alastair’s father. There is no doubt of that whatsoever, even if (and it’s a huge if) Alastair was conceived with my sperm.

I wrote this snippet of autobiography to illustrate a complex moral and emotional dilemma, and I wrote it to make a point about fatherhood. I’m pleased that it’s fostered a lot of discussion, even if a lot of that discussion has been unconstructive and tinged with violent invective. I’m grateful to the friends who have been so supportive in person and in writing — and grateful to the friends who’ve trusted our relationship enough that they can feel comfortable publicly or privately criticizing my stance. I’ve been around along enough to know the distinction between a thoughtful challenge and mean-spirited invective. I’ve had lots of opportunity to be reminded this week of that distinction.

My friend Harmony sent me a quote last night, from the artist Madelon Vriesendorp: “If you’re hated by the right people, it’s a compliment.” When someone says something hateful to me, I often ask myself, “Who else — or what else — do they despise?” While it’s not always true that the enemy of one’s enemy is automatically a friend, there is something to be said for being lucky in one’s opponents. I am indeed fortunate in my enemies!

I stand by the position that confessional writing matters. It’s certainly not the only kind of writing I do, and it’s not the only kind of writing I enjoy reading. But it has its place in fostering discussion about how it is we can construct happier lives for ourselves. Reading the intensely personal stories of other writers has helped me understand my world and myself. Of course, too much of a focus on individual experience is unhelpful; endless navel-gazing isn’t constructive. But it is a serious mistake to refuse to place personal experience alongside reason as a vital tool for understanding how to live.

I’ll leave the comment sections open on the older spermgate posts, at least for a few more days. But I’m ready to move on to other discussions, and with a few exceptions, I’d imagine most of my readers are as well.

The Son Who May — or May Not — Be Mine

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My Good Men Project column runs one day early this week, and it’s turned out to be a controversial one: I May Have a Son, But I’ll Never Know for Sure. It’s a true story I tell, one I’ve not written about before. I had wanted to write a piece on the Casey Anthony trial, focusing on the anonymity of the father of little Caylee, but I thought better of stoking that fire.

Excerpt:

In a medium-sized city in the Midwest, there’s a boy who will turn 13 next month. He lives with his parents, who were wed three months before he was born. He is tall, with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. His name is Alastair*, and he may –- or may not -– be my son…

Fourteen autumns ago, I was casually dating a woman I’ll call Jill*. We had unprotected intercourse a handful of times in late October and early November. And just before Thanksgiving, Jill discovered she was pregnant.

She didn’t tell me until after New Year’s Day. While Jill and I had been in a “friends with benefits” arrangement, she’d also been growing more serious about another man, Ted.* She’d first slept with him for the first time two nights before she had last slept with me. It was that week that Jill got pregnant, and as she would later tell me, there was no way to know for sure which one of us was the father.

But there was no question which one of us was a better bet as a romantic partner. Jill had broken things off with me as soon as she and Ted had decided on an exclusive relationship (just before she found out she was pregnant.) Ted was several years older than I was, professionally and emotionally stable, and clearly falling in love with Jill. I was drinking, partying, with some time to go before I’d hit my rock bottom. Jill wanted to be a mom. Ted wanted to be a dad. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. In her mind, these facts settled it: the baby was Ted’s. Or it needed to be Ted’s…

At the Good Men Project and at Jezebel, where the piece was reposted this afternoon my choices — and the choices of a woman I slept with many years ago — are under intense debate. (The only thing I’m regretting at the moment is the pompous phrase “fourteen autumns ago”.) Not surprisingly, the GMP and Jezebel commenting communities don’t always agree.

Read the whole thing here or here.

When Harry Was Wrong: Desire and Non-Sexual Friendship

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We’re home from a brief trip up to Northern California for the Fourth of July festivities with family. A happy time for all, including for Heloise, who has decided she loves the family’s “safe and sane” fireworks.

My Tuesday column at Good Men Project went up this morning. It riffs on the famed exchange in When Harry Met Sally about the possibilities of male-female nonsexual friendship: Harry Was Wrong: Lust Doesn’t Have to Ruin a Platonic Friendship. Excerpt:

We assume that male sexual desire is so powerful that it overrides everything else, including friendship. One of our great myths about men is that lust invariably cancels out empathy. Call it the sexual equivalent of being unable to walk and chew gum at the same time: Harry, Sally, and too many of the rest of us were raised to believe that men can’t experience lust and practice non-sexual friendship simultaneously.

The truth is that men and women alike are capable of being platonic friends with someone to whom they are powerfully attracted. That’s true regardless of the reasons why someone can’t act on his or her desires. Perhaps it’s because the attraction is one-sided, or perhaps it’s because one or both of the friends are in monogamous relationships with other people. Sometimes the attraction is openly acknowledged, more often it’s something of which both are aware but about which there isn’t necessarily much need to speak.

There are a couple of keys to making a platonic friendship work despite the presence of sexual attraction. First off, it helps to demythologize sexual desire. Too many of us speak about attraction as if it were an irresistible and destructive force, like a tornado or a tsunami. If you’ve genuinely fallen in love with a buddy who considers you “just” a friend, that’s one thing. But if all that’s happened is that you find yourself sexually attracted to someone who isn’t attracted to you (or isn’t your significant other), it’s worth saying so what? We’re hardwired to be sexual creatures. But we’re also equipped with the ability to “override” those desires for a host of other reasons—including preserving friendship.

Read the whole thing.

If you like you can also read it at The Frisky.

Elsewhere, I’m interviewed — along with my old friend and foil Glenn Sacks — in this piece for Good Magazine on the marketing of a male contraceptive.

Heat doesn’t require beauty: on “bowflex boy”, monogamy, and desire

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A reader named Ryan wrote me last month in response to my reprint of this post on “bowflex boy”. I was writing to suggest that it’s possible to be drawn to an “ideal” without losing the capacity to be intensely aroused by one’s less-than-perfect partner. Ryan writes:

Your post on the Bowflex Boy touched on something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. For me, attraction to other women and years of using porn have made me wonder whether I really find my girlfriend to be beautiful. I keep seeing her flaws. Often, I find other women to be prettier. That scares me, and I end up feeling ashamed and guilty. Then I question whether my girlfriend and I should be together at all.

I’m convinced that we can have a ‘Bowflex Boy’ on our walls and have it not be a big deal. That doesn’t mean we don’t love our partners. I know I don’t need my partner to measure up to some unattainable ideal. But I’m still so troubled by the negative thoughts I have about her appearance. It’s gotten to the point of being toxic. I don’t — can’t feel okay — and when it inevitably comes out in conversations with my partner, it naturally hurts her very much.

So, you talk about how we can see an ideal like the Bowflex Boy and still desire our partners. I agree that can be the case, but I don’t know how to stop being afraid. I love and do my best to respect my girlfriend, and I absolutely believe she’s beautiful. I’m working on letting go of the fantasies I used to have about the ideal relationship. . But when those unbidden thoughts come, I still doubt and I still fear. Your thoughts?

In my post, I wrote of being a college boy with an average and not particularly impressive physique who found himself having sex one night with a friend, Debbie, who had a poster of a stunningly perfect man hanging right over her bed. In post-coital conversation, I had asked why she (we had never hooked up before) would want to be with me when she had this flawless vision to look at. From the original post, Debbie’s words:

“Hugo, I like looking at beautiful bodies. He’s a gorgeous guy. But the fact that I think it’s beautiful, even the fact that I am attracted to the image, doesn’t mean that that is the only kind of man I can be attracted to…I can appreciate perfection without expecting it, and I can really be just as attracted to a normal body as to a perfect one.”

I wasn’t insulted. I was relieved. And it occurred to me, of course, that that was how I thought about my partners as well. I liked looking at sculpted, idealized bodies — but that was hardly the limit of what I was attracted to. As in so many areas of life, it’s helpful to think in terms of a spectrum of people to whom we could be attracted. The media offers us images we may or may not find beautiful, but they tend to offer us only a narrow slice of that spectrum. What we can want and what we do want is broader than we’re told.

As anyone who has been in a monogamous relationship for any length of time will assure Ryan, there will always be other people who appear more attractive than one’s partner, no matter how beautiful one’s partner is. The longer we’re with someone, the more of their ordinariness we become privileged to see. We discover the stretch marks, we smell the sleep farts and morning breath, we see the adult acne. That gritty reality can’t compete with either the airbrushed images of pornography or the well-coiffed and smartly attired people with whom we interact publicly. Add in the quarrels and struggles and mundanities that are part and parcel of any enduring committed sexual relationship, and it’s little wonder that the sex appeal of one’s partner appears to diminish over time. Continue reading →

Hef gets engaged again: on Everlasting Novelty and Sexual Invisibility

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My friend Bill asked me to post about 84 year-old Hugh Hefner’s announcement this week that he’s engaged to be married again, this time to a former Playmate exactly sixty years his junior. Knowing my many problems with age-disparate relationships, he wondered if I had a comment about the perpetually be-robed octogenarian’s latest assay into wedlock.

Still on vacation in Placer County, I’ll keep this short. It’s easy to see Hef as a caricature, and a rather sad one to boot. But more than one young man has looked at this aging cultural icon and said to himself, “Damn, I’d like to be like him when I’m old.” Some find instruction in what others of us find ridiculous. It’s important to remember that.

The tragedy of Playboy is, as I’ve said before, that it focuses on “everlasting novelty.” (The phrase is my father’s, but the point was originally made by Barbara Ehrenreich in a book I highly recommend, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment .) Men wanting to look at beautiful women isn’t the problem — it’s the need to always see new beautiful women that is so troubling. Playboy wouldn’t have made money with one issue a year, after all. A new issue every four weeks guaranteed variety — or more accurately, encouraged a mindset that was only aroused by variety. It is Hefner who is widely credited (though it may be apocryphal) with the devastating line “Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you the man who’s tired of fucking her.” It is trendy to accept that fascination with everlasting novelty as rooted in our biology, but the weight of the evidence suggests that pornographers like Hef are more creators than reinforcers.

And of course, Playboy Playmates — like the most successful and celebrated of porn actresses — are overwhelmingly young, 18-24 at the time they break into the industry. With a tiny handful of exceptions, few work successfully in the business after 30. This focus on youth suggests that women over 25 have passed their “sell-by” date; Hef has done more than his share to contribute to the sexual invisibility of older women. (The occasional issue focusing on an over-40 hottie is the classic example of the exception proving the rule.) It’s little wonder, then, that Hef has spent six decades chasing women in their early twenties. He’s sold himself on his own narrow vision of what is and isn’t desirable, and as a consequence has become incapable of experiencing sexual interest in any woman past the age of his Playmates. It’s one thing for nineteen year-olds to be drawn sexually to their peers, another thing for their grandfathers to lust after the same barely post-pubescent women.

This isn’t about the porn wars; I recognize the potential for liberation in visual depictions of the erotic. This is about the Playboy ethos. (As Ehrenreich suggested and as I always tell my students, it’s better to write it as “Play, boy!”, driving home the point that the opposite of a “playboy” is a “working man” who accepts responsibility and is capable of constancy.) The Playboy ethos is almost puritanical in its distaste for bodies that deviate from a narrow standard, and contemptuous(as well as fearful) of the sexual potential of women over 25. Above all, the Playboy ethos insists on the necessity of endless variety. Familiarity breeds contempt and aging breeds disgust, or so Hef’s world view holds.

It would be pathetic if it didn’t resonate so loudly with so many. We can do better.