New at Reason

Jacob Sullum reviews the history of the girlie magazine.

Comments

virginia33ciablackop | April 28, 2007, 8:38am | #

Google
9/11 was an inside job
virginia school shooting government black op?

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2007/160407blackop.htm

It is well documented that disturbing questions remain over the incident at Columbine. It is clear that authorities had prior knowledge of what was going to happen. Observers were in the area hours before the shooting took place. Articles from the Associated Press stated that ballistics from Columbine show that six of the thirteen victims were possibly shot and killed by Jefferson County SWAT.

9/11 was an inside job
this was a psy op - to induce fear and panic
OKC 9/11 amish school killings katrina vt shootings - NO ONE WILL STOP THEM - WAKE UP AMERICA!!

What the..? | April 28, 2007, 8:46am | #

I think I'll come back later....

Taktix® | April 28, 2007, 9:06am | #

Anyone who thinks that following a woman's leg, from ankle upward, leads to Hell is in serious need of smacking.

Also, I vote "Yes" on deleting the spam message above, if it is put to a vote.

Guy Montag | April 28, 2007, 9:19am | #

And here I thought someone would be mentioning the widening prostitution scandal involving Randall Tobias.

Guessing Mr. Weigal is all over that one.

I second the motion from the distinguished commentor from kyleconspiracy.blogspot.con

thoreau | April 28, 2007, 9:23am | #

Is it just me, or does Jacob Sullum get all the best assignments? Drugs, porn, guns. Kerry Howley gets some interesting assignments too, but mostly it's Jacob Sullum who gets the fun stuff.

We all like to allege that Ron Bailey and Katherine Mangu-Ward are the corrupt ones, but it seems to me that if anybody at Reason is bribing the boss it's Jacob Sullum, because Jacob gets all the best assignments!

Maybe Jacob is sharing his best weed with Nick Gillespie.

:)

(Just messing around, of course. I don't mean any of this seriously.)

jp | April 28, 2007, 9:35am | #

From the article: Hanson, former editor of the niche porn magazines Juggs and Leg Show, ...

Isn't that kind of a stretch? I think Juggs and Leg Show are really just girlie mags. No intercourse or BJs in there.

Mad Max | April 28, 2007, 10:07am | #

What people fail to realize is that *Playboy* was a CIA "black op." It's so obvious - what better way to distract the sheeple from the depredations of the military-industrial complex?

Larry Flynt tried to move in on Playboy's territory - that's why the CIA, with help from the Trilateralists and the Bilderbergers - tried to kill him.

At least half of the girlie mags in this country are CIA operations.

Wake up, people!

Viking Rabbit | April 28, 2007, 10:14am | #

So, Dr.T: Jacob doesn't share? And his assignments aren't good?

hmmm. :)

[keed keed]

and to think the playboy mansion is (was) right around the corner...

...now where did I put my puffy bunny tail...

Chancellor | April 28, 2007, 10:17am | #

Man, I loved this article when I read it in the Print Edition: Its like seeing an old friend again!

Guy Montag | April 28, 2007, 10:42am | #

Man, I loved this article when I read it in the Print Edition: Its like seeing an old friend again!

They still have a print edition? I have not seen an ad, disguised as a story, for that in a while ;)

Sorry, I am distracted by Laura Schwartz. I made the mistake of listening to her without looking at her and crushed my fantasy.

Perhaps a follow-on piece about life-like machine-generated erotica? Even machine-like human-generated erotica?

D.A. Ridgely | April 28, 2007, 10:55am | #

Is it just me, or does Jacob Sullum get all the best assignments? Drugs, porn, guns. Kerry Howley gets some interesting assignments too, but mostly it's Jacob Sullum who gets the fun stuff.

Worse yet, thoreau, all that, um, erotica Mr. Sullum acquired for the article constitute research expenses for tax purposes. I tell you, I gotta get in on this writing racket.

My naturally curly hair | April 28, 2007, 11:01am | #

“a sequence in which a gorgeous brunette in a tight uniform toyed with an unconscious blond”

Boys are blond, girls are blonde. Just, of course, sayin'.

Karen | April 28, 2007, 11:03am | #

For the first time in my life, I think I might actually be interested in a book by someone who was an editor of a "niche porn" magazine. Did anyone else wonder what could possibly be disturbing about beehive hairdos?

Guy Montag | April 28, 2007, 11:20am | #

Did anyone else wonder what could possibly be disturbing about beehive hairdos?

Yes, I found that odd. I do find those hairdoos unattractive and the few times I have seen them "in the wild" I always thought the women wearing them would look better with a different hairstyle.

That style does seem to be used stereotypically by quite a few folks in the visual arts, now to the point of annoyance.

What Kind Of Girl Do You Think We Are? | April 28, 2007, 11:50am | #

Needs more celery

(google: "Art Frahm")

edna | April 28, 2007, 2:04pm | #

re beehives, if you grew up in baltimore or you're a fan of the early john waters flicks, you'll know immediately why they're disturbing.

Timon19 | April 28, 2007, 2:08pm | #

Goddammit! That one Rosie blog post has attracted the Truther spammers.

But not to worry. They'll come in their single digits (excluding a half-dozen sockpuppets each), spew a bunch of crap, post links as if they're definitive proof and leave in a week or two, never really directly answering any engineering-based responses.

Mad Max | April 28, 2007, 4:36pm | #

Here's a theory about why 9/11 conspiracy theories seem so popular:

“The world of the conspiracy theorist is Manichean: either you are intelligent, well-informed, and honest, and *therefore* question all authority and received opinion; or you accept what popular opinion or an authority says and *therefore* must be stupid, dishonest, and ignorant. There is no third option.

“Crude as this dichotomy is, anyone familiar with the intellectual and cultural history of the last several hundred years might hear in it at least an echo of the rhetoric of the Enlightenment, and of much of the philosophical and political thought that has followed in its wake. . . .

“. . . [T]he standard Enlightenment narrative has had a powerful influence on the way modern people understand the relationship between authority, tradition, and common sense on the one hand, and science and rationality on the other. We tend reflexively to assume that the popular or received wisdom, especially if associated with some ‘official’ source or long-standing institution, is always ripe for challenge, and also that if some independent thinker or writer takes an unconventional position, however extreme or counterintuitive, then there simply must be something right in it, or least worth listening to. ‘Innovator’ and ‘iconoclast’ are among our favorite terms of approbation, and "questioning authority" and ‘thinking outside the box’ are applauded even by many self-described conservatives. By contrast, ‘unoriginal’ and ‘conventional’ are treated as if they were synonyms for ‘unintelligent’ and ‘unthinking.’”

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092006B

Ron Hardin | April 28, 2007, 6:10pm | #

Blond(e) is English's only inflected adjective, but it gets it from French.

What's erotic has never changed, actually. The male is driven to figure out what it is that attracts him to the female, generally by looking. That it's just some neuron firing does not occur to him. He has to investigate ; yet nothing he investigates results in a signification, nothing comes to light, no matter how much light is available. Something is always hidden.

Where that line is put doesn't matter. In the extreme, man is defeated by what Camille Paglia calls the architectural chaos of the female genitals.

As she nicely put it, the man in the porn store (old essay, there were still porn stores) staring at a money shot is look not for gratification but for an answer to a question.

The woman's secret is that nothing is hidden. There is hiding, but of nothing, only as a reflex of the male's desire to find something out.

What the hidden corresponds to, incidently, is the child, and its unknowableness is the unknowableness of the future that the child is.

In a book on Picasso's obsession with the model, chiefly in his late porn period, Karen L. Kleinfelder (_The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze_) says the the obsession suddenly stopped one day, when Picasso was in his 80s. She felt it was because he had come to terms with his mortality. That's because she's a woman. What happened is that that neuron finally stopped firing, leaving nothing that needed explaining any longer.

Where fashion says you have to draw the line as to what can be shown doesn't matter. Something always cannot be shown, even if you try to show everything. That's how it works.

eugene | April 28, 2007, 6:23pm | #

Ron Hardin, yours is the most intersting comment so far. It makes me ask, why is it that women feel apparently less need to question by visual stimulation what they find attractive? Also there is gay pornography; are gay men who look at images of men asking the same question as straight men who look at images of women?

Ray G | April 28, 2007, 6:57pm | #

Men are driven by lust, and not much else. Thus, just seeing body parts will often suffice.

Women need to "feel" pretty or beautiful. They are wired for emotional need. This translates into how they view men. Simply looking at "detached" body parts doesn't cut it.

Hence, we have innumerable girly-bars for the guys to view body parts, but we have far, far fewer man-bars where women can do likewise.

Ron Hardin | April 28, 2007, 7:02pm | #

If it seems interesting, ``my'' ideas are extracted from long-ago-read

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six (Seven, depending on edition) Plays of Shakespeare, Introduction
Jacques Derrida, Spurs (skip the (guest) introduction)
Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, appendices ``Phenomenology of Eros,'' and ``Fecundity''

Interestingly, Cavell, Derrida and Paglia all can't stand each other.

If it doesn't seem interesting, don't bother.

Trent Lott | April 28, 2007, 10:37pm | #

I heard on WMPR the other night that "Mister Charlie" set up the VTECH shootings to distract from the serious issues of race in our society raised by the Imus affair. White Western Civilisation set up the War on Terror to pit Blacks against each other in Ethiopia and Somalia.
Mugabe is on the outs with the White Man now that he is finally helping the people in Zimbabwe.

It is all about keepin' the brothers down.

Guy Montag | April 29, 2007, 2:23am | #

re beehives, if you grew up in baltimore or you're a fan of the early john waters flicks, you'll know immediately why they're disturbing.

baltimore is disturbing all by itself without combining it with "hon day"

Quiet_Desperation | April 29, 2007, 4:15am | #

Re: the brunette in the thumbnail image

Where can I see the rest of that picture?

grumpy realist | April 29, 2007, 12:22pm | #

Oh great, now I have an idea for a beehive-hairdo meets Alien meets Stepford Wives indy horror movie.

After all, you don't know WHAT could be living in there....

dhex | April 29, 2007, 5:28pm | #

"Hence, we have innumerable girly-bars for the guys to view body parts, but we have far, far fewer man-bars where women can do likewise."

as a counterpoint, i would mention that having read several ethnographies of strip club patrons, there's a nearly universal emergence of a sense of intimacy with regulars not related to "oh man she likes me" delusions or some kind of misogyny. believe it or not, the same theme pops up again and again - i want to talk to women face to face without any real pressure (or expectations), to be able to look at them without being yelled at and this is the one legal way to do so.

personally i think it's super fucking weird and strip clubs freak me the fuck out, but it's still fascinating to read about.

biologist | April 29, 2007, 7:18pm | #

The first time I encountered the word penthouse was in the context of Guccione’s skin magazine. To this day the word seems erotically charged, even when I’m punching buttons in an elevator.

remind me never to ride in an elevator with Jacob

jkii | April 29, 2007, 8:15pm | #

I watched that episode of Wild West Technology about sex and drugs last night, again.

The show has a bit on 19th century 3-D porn taken with two cameras mounted a couple of inches apart, to match the distance between the eyes. The customer would look through a specifically designed viewer to make the 3-D image reappear. It could be operated with one hand only. Where's the 3D porn now ?

IIRC, Penthouse letters, in the early 70s, included tales of male homosexuallity.

dhex,

Strip Clubs are businesses and the way they work is that the 'dancers', for lack of a better term, pay the owner for the venue - a few hundred bucks a day. Each dancer has to figure out how to get her ante back and make some money for herself. Not one of these dancers is going to talk to someone for very long without getting paid. There is real pressure. The guys who claim there is no pressure are delusional.

CS Lewis | April 29, 2007, 11:55pm | #

You can get a large audience together for a
strip-tease act-that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose
you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a
covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let
every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton
chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something
had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had
grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about
the state of the sex instinct among us?
One critic said that if he found a country in which such striptease
acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that
country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the
strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual
starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that
similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible
explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step
would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or
little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that
a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the
hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one. In the same way,
before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the strip-tease, we
should have to look for evidence that there is in fact more sexual
abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the strip-tease
were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence. Contraceptives have made
sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it
than ever before, and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and
even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times. Nor is the hypothesis
of "starvation" the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual
appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may
think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the
famished, like titillations.

KenD | April 30, 2007, 12:30am | #

We do have food porn. Go watch the Food Network, or Saturday afternoon on many PBS stations -- Show after show featuring gorgeous, mouthwatering dishes beyond most of the audience's ability to prepare, or perhaps afford.

I don't think it's a matter of "growing by indulgence". I doubt that most of the guys I've seen in strip clubs or adult video stores are all that sexually active... at least with real women. I do think their sex lives are disappointing in some sense, either in terms of simple availability, indulgence of a particular fetish, or simple desire for novelty.

gutta percha | April 30, 2007, 10:33am | #

An excellent movie from last year: The Notorious Bettie Page. It deals with the art-photography culture mentioned in this article.

Toady | April 30, 2007, 4:01pm | #

There was a former co-worker of mine who was 'into' watching porn and visiting associated shops. He was a married guy with two kids. His wife didn't have too much of a problem with his hobby, btw.

Pepe | May 1, 2007, 2:10am | #

Without any real data to back this up, I would guess that most strip club regulars are middle-aged men, often married, who go there simply because they still like to look at random 20-something pussy and this is the only way it's going to happen.

The rest of the customers are usually partiers, be it bachelor parties, businessman blowing off steam at the end of the week, or what have you. It's not something they are going to do all the time but every once in awhile somebody makes the suggestion. Strip clubs are a good common denominator when a group of men are trying to find something to do. The times in my life that I've gone to strip clubs have mostly been when I found myself on a business trip or some similar circumstance in which I was away from home and socializing with guys I didn't know that well. Take men away from their wives and girlfriends and usual hangouts and somebody is going to suggest getting drunk, going to a strip club, or both.

A for porn, I'd say pretty much all men look at porn semi-regularly. In the old days when you had to go through the embarrassment of a porn shop or the little swinging doors at the back of the video store, it may have been more limited to the fringes of society, but today the internet has democratized perversion.