Playboy is 97% dumb (it does deploy the subjunctive properly), and plastic postliterate women are as sexy as [extremely unsexy things]. I happened across this item, below, don't ask me how. Playboy Advisor has for decades dispensed wisdom to men and (some times) women. Even if the rest of the magazine is weird crap that panders to pleasurebot fetishists, Playboy Advisor is worth reading. The following wisdom applies aptly to me (except for the spread my seed part. not interested in spreading seed). I read it and thought, Well grow up you little punk. Then I thought: Oh. That's I, the serial dater. Yeah fool.


Yeah fool.

I own a copy of Playboy. It's from May 1968, the month I was born. A buddy got it for me for my birthday some years back. The picture on the front shows a woman who looks like somebody's mom. Like she could be baking cookies. Playboy Advisor then had much the same savoir faire as it has today. Maybe slightly more refined then. Some of the text is touching, like the advice for a young man whose best friend slept with the woman he (the young man) loved. Another fellow, a junior in college, asks whether he should wear a corsage to a formal or a semiformal, and should he send his girl a complimentary note a few days after the date? Incredibly sweet. Can you imagine a frat boy doing so much? There's a letter from a woman, a divorced mother of two (scandalous in '68), who asks advice about dating without subjecting her young children to the idea that she is anything other than a sexless and devoted mom. Playboy Advisor recognizes -- encourages -- both her sexual freedom and the considerate care of her children.

In a heartbreaking letter a woman asks -- asks Playboy Magazine! -- advice about what to do when she has already had two stillbirths, is pregnant again but the doctors predict the baby will die or have defects, and her husband is threatening to leave her to find a woman who can bear healthy children. Playboy Advisor returns a thoughtful and wise answer and finishes with, "If your husband is determined to abandon you in spite of everything, there is only the small consolation that if his love for you is so limited, you are better off without him."

There's a fascinating interview with Masters and Johnson in that issue. It's a good issue.

When last was Playboy sexy? When they had natural women. Ample, thin, firm, droopy, no matter, but real. Some of those women used to be readers too. Centerfold data included Favorite Book. I can't think when that was. They don't make that kind of Playboy anymore.

Notes:

1. When I was five, maybe six, we lived in Memphis on Avalon St and I found in a closet a big stack of my father's Playboys and smuggled all of them in five year old armloads (yippee!) to my room and hid them under the tent I had made from bed sheets till mom found them days later. Where did you find these? she asked me shocked. In the closet I said. I don't know what happened after that.

2. In kindergarten I had a pretty teacher who wore long skirts and one day we were all playing, all of we kids rambunctious in the classroom with the colors and shapes and words and pet snapping turtle in the clear glass bowl, and she strode among us to settle some rowdiness or dispute and I in the midst of that commotion took that moment to actually dive underneath her long orange skirt actually between her sandaled feet. I was small & impetuous. In a riotous moment. Instantly I was scared when I realized I had just dived under the teacher's skirt. She gasped and stepped back above me revealing me in my small impish opprobrium and laughed, embarrassed, and I was embarrassed too in my young way.

No, I won't be running for president, why do you ask? Lordy it's late. Night now.


Tennesee mom, 1935.