Before your very eyes. Two polarizations:
He’s casually slumped in a terrace chair, overlooking what seems to be the Riviera. He’s good-looking in that surly cinéma vérité attitude, hair longish and eyes smoldering. His clothes are midway between Errol Flynn and Bobby Sherman, shirt open to midchest. A girl who could not possibly be filmed in anything but soft focus lounges against the railing of the terrace. Her eyes seem misted with adoration, yet faintly discernible in the lovely contours of her face can be seen the mark of the innocent, the victim. She watches him without speaking. (Has he just come from a sex bout with her, an encounter fraught with mild sadism and screams of passion muffled into a pillow? It seems likely.)
He turns to us languidly. “I know what girls need,” he says. “They don’t need fake eyelashes and brassieres and all that stuff. What girls need is a little love.”
Who could doubt him? Is he not the epitome of caddish self-assurance? Is he not stylish, indolent, surfeited with the unasked-for treasures of the world? Is he not what each of us with our muzzy morning-breath and razor-nicks would wish to be, had we but a genie’s boon?
Then—and get this, because it’s the key to getting it on with unattainable women—he hauls the girl across the terrace by the waistband of her slacks. She comes, Jack, she just comes! She don’t linger, she moves it! And he touches her alabaster skin with a gentle/rough finger; a touch of possession, of power and authority over this incredible dream-creature you or I could never even share a dimensional plane with. He touches her face with a holy solution, with a mystic ablutive, with a scented magic, and he says, “Love’s a little color…and you can use it to put something on your cheeks, or your chin, or even that little nose of yours. And no one will know you have it on…not even me.”
The sun in the background seems to flare more brightly. The nova of passion is approaching. Lord and chattel in the good land. I will go and eat out my heart for that creature of quicksilver movement and holy flesh.
But she’s his. Always was, before either of them were born, until the last tick of eternity. His name is engraved in musk and platinum threads on the doe-soft inner thigh of her amazing right leg.
It is wise to know when one cannot compete with gods.
And…
She comes striding out of the darkness. She is Bill Blass-accoutered in free-swinging elegance. Her stride is as the ibex—sure, graceful, drenched and imbued with strengths of femininity and purpose. I hear the voices: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”
She steps into close-up and whirls off her Australian bush hat with the diamond pin clasping up one side of the brim. She spins it away and tosses her leonine mass of hair in defiance. She is her own woman. She is the New Woman. She has empathy…but determination. She has gentleness…but cunning. She has love…but on her own terms. She is no man’s plaything; she is as far from a Hefnerism folded in three parts and with pubes air-brushed as Mies van der Rohe is from the architect of McDonald’s Golden Arches.
She begins to unpeel her cigarettes and she stares at me with an early warning system of carnality and sensual alertness that dares me to prove I am man enough to compete with her Visigoth lust. She is not to be tampered with. She is the slag bucket ready to catch the white-hot rivet. But only if my aim is precise and proper. She is totally liberated: clothes as she wants to wear them, for herself and her comfort and her freedom; makeup or no makeup, whichever suits her purposes; Cigarettes slim and potent.
If I think I can whip one of my 1940s male chauvinism numbers on her, I’m wrong. She will toy with me. She will outthink, out conjure, outmaneuver me. Then she will beat me at straight pool, fifty balls at a buck a pocket.
I turn to boysenberry jelly.
What hath God wrought? And where do I go to say thank you?
This will be a study of sex on television. What’s that I hear you mumble? There is no sex on tv? Situation comedies are as sterile and aseptically asexual as Priapus’s birthday in a eunuchs’ dormitory? And who’d want to make it with Lucille Ball anyway? Oh, my friends, you have been seeing blindly; you have been led to the land of joy and have wandered witless at the periphery.
For television today is the richest peephole for a voyeur ever conceived. It bubbles, it seethes, it overflows with goodies. Turn on your set, anytime, and but behold the joys. The most beautiful women history has ever known, filmed in phosphor-dot fantasy with scrims, with gauzes, with gels, with halations and solarizations, ranged and trotted out for the predilection and lust assuaging of the most seasoned connoisseur.
Ignore the soap operas with their psychotic ladies and their endlessly destructive affairs. Ignore the dramatic shows with their surface-skimming attempts to delineate deep emotion and characterization in tissue-paper archetypes. Ignore the comedies that extend misshapen and hideous crones as the ne plus ultra of pulchritude.
Flash on the commercials, you nits!
And the late night talk shows!
And for those of you who secretly lust after nubile young wenches, there are the rock dance programs. And for Humbert Humberts in our midst—in the past relegated to lurking in the basements of grade schools or surreptitiously peeking up tots’ skirts on subways—try Saturday mornings and the hordes of Mattel and Kenner commercials with their prepubescent Lolitas flaunting their softly rounded bodies beside endless Suzy Homemaker sets.
One has only to open the cover of the current beaver magazine to see to what end all this permissiveness and sexual forthrightness has brought us: scruffy ladies with needle marks tracking their arms and thighs, lying out like slaughtered animals, knees opened and pudenda exposed. Sights of nauseousness more closely resembling massacre photos from My Lai than sexually arousing titillaters. A silken crossed leg is still more pulse-crippling than Gobi Deserts of pimple-studded flesh. We seek not the phony hypocrisies of Victorian prudery or cheap arousal, we merely seek to retain a touch of that mystery that lies between men and women, that indefinable come-on men have employed with aftershave lotions and rugged looks, that women have stated with subtle scents and a certain way of moving their hips when they walk.
Blatancy is to be cast away. Subtlety ennobles.
And what more subtle come-ons have we ever known than those currently on view tube-wise?
Come with me, then, as we run barefoot through contemporary commercials like prep-school boys on a weekend in a harem.
The conscious symbolism, the sexual allegories, the devious but stirring come-ons. For instance:
The flower of Southern womanhood (an idealized image, I assure you, having spent considerable time below the Mason-Dixon line) in close-up. Curled locks silver and shining. A ripe mouth, petulant and little-girlish. A body lush and fruitful. Like the Life Savers she smiles into being.
And she tells us about the fruit in the basket. The lemons…in which a hole appears. The limes…in which holes appear. The (oh, God!) cherry…in which a hole appears.
And all through the arousing descriptions of ripe fruit and how they are the same tastes one receives from Life Savers…with holes in them…she plays coquette. She turns and smiles over her shoulder; she expands her chest and strains her bosom toward us; she seems gentle and kittenish and altogether available, if only we can grasp the subcutaneous implications of holes in fruit.
Cancel those dates! Forget buying dinner and holding hands in the movie! Pass on picking up girls in rock joints! Get in front of the tv. Sit thyself down and pay attention to the lessons to be learned. Sexuality is rampant in the universe, can you but glean the key messages, can you but recognize the touchstones.
Southern girls sell Life Savers…
What does that say to you?
The synonyms are obvious. The riches incalculable. The mind boggles. The gonads leap.
Watch the screens a new way this week. We’ll pick it up from here in the next installment.