Remembering Hugh Hefner.

America is a Boob Culture. Boobs sell everything. The Ad gives you the expectation of getting a boob, and then substituted the nipple with a pacifier: a car, some beer, cigarettes, a razor, you name it. What’s going on?

Watching Murdock Mysteries from around 1900 all the women are clothed from the floor to the head. Gloves, and even a veil sometimes. You don’t see any skin. You would think there were Muslims. And the 50s (I graduated from HS in 1955 so I was right in the middle of it) were the last hold out for the corset. When I met my wife bought up in small Va town, she still wore a corset. The 50s was the last left over from the Victorian age.

And here come Hugh. BAM! Public print media got cleaved with naked women. WOW! It was okay to look. The Image of breasts connected the male self image—an image what was created by its separate from the body/breasts—with his Lost Body/Mother.

What I’m exploring here is that (watch Mad Men) the modern man is an image man, and the image is disconnect from the flesh and blood reality of body. This disconnection happens in early childhood at first when the hospital intervenes between the natural bonding of the mother and child. Here, have this bottled milk, it’s better. And we’ll let you cry in this basket feeling abandoned for awhile so you can make the shift from bonding with the mother to bonding with culture and the institution.

We are addicted to sex because that is the only way we can bond with the body and get out of our acculturated mind. Along came Playboy. But Hefner didn’t heal the wound created by the separation of the infant from the mother, what he did was create a magazine that was like a pacifier. Here, suck on this! Playboy was a creation of the Print World. When the internet came alone it no longer has the same Snap. On the internet, everything is exposed. There is no controlled eroticism. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is taboo.

And now, that we are bored with breast cleavage, we are attracted to Butt Cleavage. The message is the cleavage! The imagination fills in the blank. Eroticism is in the saddle and rides modern man. Eroticism is the tease of something more, and for eroticism to work there must be a taboo, something that cannot be shown at the risk of death or exile, or just shaming. There is shame in showing the taboo area of the body, which is now narrowed down to the trinity of the two nipples and the vagina, and even that is shaved.

Where do we go from here? We have the full Monty. What’s left? How can we sell anything?