Parting Glances
For whatever reason of erotic senescence or jaded performance acumen – emphasis on syllable three – I've been giving online erotica a clinical look. (Yeah, sure, Mary.)
Porn's our 21st century version of the carnival sideshow; or, as it was known in earlier decades, the freak show. Indeed, it's amazing the creative things that enterprising exhibitionists can do with cucumbers, cumquats, road cones. But not necessarily in that order.
I'm sure there's a golden opportunity dawning, with no end of willing participants – who do come in all shapes, sizes, proclivities – to inaugurate a 2020 Sexual Olympics, provided Rebiblicans, who at bottom are really strange bed fellows, don't mandate videotaping in the Oval Office.
(By the way: it's almost requisite for presidential candidates to talk about their religious beliefs. One would think that the same should apply to sexual proclivities, now that Bill Clinton set a precedence during his final year in office. "Mitt, have you ever deviated from the plural wives missionary position. If so, how? On shore or off? Tax free or otherwise?)
I've lived long enough to be amazed at the sexual revolution that's taken place since Kinsey's 1948 sex study bombshell, a revolution in film, print media, Broadway musicals, TV talk shows, and, much more importantly, the internet – with an estimate range of 20,000 to 7 million x-rated sites. It blows one's mind. Frequently.
When I was a kid my folks were hush hush. Sex wasn't discussed at school, church, publicly. (I do remember, however, going through our neighborhood with other engaging seven-year-olds shouting fuck! fuck! fuck! We didn't know what fuck meant, other than it bugged grownups big time.)
I must have been about eight or nine when I saw my first "dirty picture," courtesy of a twelve-year-old friend. I found the naked guy intriguing. His partner, incidental. Go figure.
In middle school I peeped at my first Tijuana Bible ("illustrated comic booklets, the kind men like"). Secretly shared for a hot minute. If caught I risked expulsion and an embarrassing parental visitation. Who knows? Maybe jail.
A recent anthology, "The Best of Sexology: the Illustrated Magazine of Sex Science" (Running Press) brought back other memories. Founded in 1933, it was America's first sex magazine. As a preteen I found a copy of it hidden under the cushion of our living room chair.
The bazaar pictures in that 25-cent monthly were slightly horrific to me: "elephantiasis of the testicles." Big balls or not, I flipped through it every chance I could get my sticky fingers on it. Early on I was confused. Do my folks actually do that? No way!
The Running Press anthology includes: Extra Breasts in Women, Priapism, Pregnant Men, When Midgets Marry, Twin Beds or Single, Humans With Tails, Why Do Men Do It? (cross dress), Sex Desire for Shoes, Odor Fetishist, GI Paratrooper War Hero Returns a Woman, Homosexual Chickens.
Quote from the homo chickens commentary: "The lowest ranking cock may be psychologically castrated, in the sense that he may refrain completely from any sexual behavior as a result of social suppression." Come to think of it, maybe these unplucked fowls were really ex-gays.
Sorta capons for Jesus. No cock-a-doodle-do. No heavenly St. Peter, too.
