Among the Intellectualoids
Maloney, Stephen R.
Among the Intellectualoids by Stephen R. Maloney2 (One of civilized man's eternal misconceptions is that the barbarian always rides a charger and whoops for blood, a head impaled on his spear,...
...We still wage war against a pitiful band of fundamentalists, boosters, and middle brows, fearing that at any moment a furious reaction against progress and putative liberality is going to come roaring out of Arkansas...
...I am not accusing Mr...
...Penthouse has its key, its nude centerfolds ("Pets"), its advice column(by hooker-philosopher Xaviera Hollander), its endless letters section (more about this later), even a club of sorts (albeit no clubhouse): the "Penthouse/ Viva Leisure Club...
...Condoms, "stimulating" and/or "sensuous," seem to be making a comeback, dealing with the Problems of unwanted children (remember them...
...M. J. Sobran, in a fine National Review article on Playboy (February 1, 1974) decided that what Hugh Hefner, his magazine, and its readers had in common was that they were "self-consciously tasteless...
...Playboy originated a new type of letter to the editor...
...it consists of missives from outraged readers who are, one sometimes thinks, trying to be the last person to discover an act of sexual repression in these United States...
...For even if, as I suspect, Penthouse is not much read, it is much looked-at—the ads as well as the pictures—and a picture is worth, in this case, five million buyers at $1.25 a head...
...Less visible publicly, without the logorrheic paeans to his own studhood, without the pleasure grotto, certainly without closed-circuit television equipment to monitor erotic movements in his pad...
...Robert MeTiernan Taft and the New Isolationism • • One of the fascinating side-effects of the widespread disenchantment with America's postwar foreign policy has been a revival of interest in the foreign policy views of Senator Robert A. Taft, especially among New Left critics of our Vietnam involvement...
...On and on they go, issue after issue, proclaiming that Killjoy was here, there, everywhere...
...Well...
...When she isn't on the job, and when he isn't fornicating with her 15-year-old baby-sitter, they " b* *I" a lot...
...Guccione, meet Dr...
...Senator Eugene McCarthy said recently that the country would have been better off if Taft had beaten Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican convention...
...But after Penthouse lifted the veil, se to speak, Playboy had to follow...
...perhaps they convince the fat man in Dubuque that they care about him, that if he were in the right place they would be available, eating their apples and pouring their water over themselves...
...In the meantime the barbarian, mimicking the ways of yesteryear's progressives and civil libertarians, is turning our civilized order into a shambles and continually snipping at the Bill of Rights...
...He is eternally a philistine, a fraud, and a scoundrel.—RET,jr) A Dim View from the Penthouse Among the contemporary girlie magazines, Penthouse is only number two...
...Penthouse's resident expert, Dr...
...so, in a sense, does Penthouse, although it would probably blush and giggle if one mentioned the word "soul" (in a nonmusical context, that is...
...It would no doubt disturb Robert Taft to find his policies being voiced and his name invoked by those who want to turn the nation's attention away from foreign involvement and toward enlarging the public sector at home...
...Ernest van den Haag once identified the view underlying pornography as a belief that life reduces to "organs and orifices" and the permutations thereof...
...An added bonus for those who obtain the latter book is the opportunity to learn through the magic of the written word "The Panther's Kiss...
...And all those fabled airbrushes, the cameraman's depilatory, went into the trashcan...
...The "Leisure Club" is, one infers, sort of a raunchy version of the Arthur Murray clubs, suggesting—one doubts delivering —an occasional group grope for Mature Adults...
...A typical scenerio: perfect strangers, she beautiful and willing, he handsome and lascivious, meet (often, strangely, in a laundromat) and immediately begin to copulate ceaselessly and imaginatively...
...Supposedly true confessions, most of these offerings are pilferings from the poorly-stocked larder of pornographic lore...
...Post-industrial society crawls with these barbarians...
...A recent book by Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism, contains sympathetic portraits of Taft and four other right-wing opponents of U.S...
...The mass of men, it turns out, do lead lives of quiet desperation, even in their sexual fantasies...
...Alas, if fantasy flies, anatomy creeps along the ground...
...Despite Arthur Vandenberg's conversion to bipartisan foreign policy, i.e...
...like the photographs, the essays deal only with surfaces, believe only in them, in fact...
...Another correspondent, a New York city fireman, whose thing is making love in full uniform—does he make siren noises?—informs us grandly: "I know that I am not alone at the sexual frontier...
...Pornography does not hide its disgust for the body, its desire to mortify the flesh, and thus it inevitably glides into sado-masochism...
...Penthouse's one claim to originality among the slick girlies is its introduction of pubic hair...
...In its "Forum" readers unload their masturbatory fantasies...
...Penthouse articles leave one with a new appreciation of Ted Baxter's news broadcasts...
...One imagines the disappointment of this public servant if he were to be one-upped by an astronaut...
...The Taft Record In 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams outlined in a a July 4th oration his view of the United States' proper role in world affairs: "She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy...
...Penthouse is an unashamed imitator of Playboy...
...We shall exhibit the various activities, disguises, and personalities of this modern barbarian...
...Guccione and the other photographers of consciously making homely girls look ridiculous...
...hell, contrast them with the chaste (in retrospect) maidens of Playboy's early days...
...The article would have been much improved by cutting it to one sentence, further improved by printing only the title...
...One of the reasons Taft advised caution in making foreign commitments was that he was very scrupulous about the need to keep them once they were made...
...And so today have we learned that liberty may be scotched at any time, from any direction, by an biped...
...It doesn't have to...
...But that is only a metaphoric claim to priority over Playboy...
...At times this will make for highly amusing reading, but—even in the archest moment—the reader must remember that—no matter how ridiculous the claims and misadventures of the intellectualoid—the intellectualoid is, down deep, as dangerous to the civilized order as yesterday's Ku Kluxer and as dangerous to liberty as the votary of Prohibition...
...I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one...
...In fact, it may be Penthouse tells us more about the real meaning of the sexual revolution than do all the earnest participants in academic (and girlie magazine) symposia...
...Radosh, a former student of revisionist historian William Appleman Williams, calls himself "an advocate of a socialist solution to America's domestic crisis...
...In some versions her sister, mother, or grandmother arrive to spell one of the participants...
...A picture begins to emerge of what kind of a man reads Penthouse: he is a balding fellow with b. o. who is a flop in bed because he ejaculates prematurely and, worse, uses 25-cent contraceptives...
...His opposition to sending troops to Europe and Asia should not obscure his belief, clearly demonstrated by his bitterness over the Communist victory in China, that the United States had an important responsibility to resist Communism on those continents...
...Guccione the magazine has taken up the Cause-of-the-Month liberalism we associate with Playboy, which demonstrated that dirty pictures and attacks on the free market were unbeatable money-makers...
...He is founder, original editor, president, chairman of the board, 14 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 and—eat your heart out, Hugh—chief photographer of Penthouse...
...The saturation point for Playboy imitators will probably be reached when they total about thirty, the number of days in an average month...
...Like its girls, Penthause writers are almost certainly rejects from Playboy, which pays more money...
...Playboy admittedly has its moments...
...I don't trust a one of 'em...
...To be sure, very few people actually read those tendentious, but oh so chic, pontifications by John Kenneth Galbraith and Garry Wills in Playboy and its brethren...
...But after all, he did vow to make her an actress...
...It is merely "tasteless...
...The misogyny, if not misanthropy, of Penthouse is obvious to anyone who can look clearly at the burnt-out cases who make up the "Pets...
...But in a world where body (matter) and sensations are all there is, we eventually come to the situation described by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment, where God is dead and thus "everything is permitted...
...it is an Edsel with buyers in a society that is all eyes...
...One who "makes it" with women about as often as he does with panthers...
...This has been a deeply held view in America, and at the end of the Second World War, Robert Taft was its leading spokesman...
...And it is worse yet...
...Students of the "girlies" often misunderstand the relationship between our (admittedly often exaggerated) Puritan heritage and such magazines as Penthouse...
...He is a more attractive kind of Hefner, considered superficially...
...Another major concern of the readers is hair, which women can do nothing with and which men cannot seemingly keep ontheir heads without the aid of various elixirs...
...Don't ignore the bags and sags, the fat legs and plasticized chests, the pathetic "sexy" leers that passed thirty years ago for sensuality...
...Contrast, in short, these "poor bare forked animals" with, say, the Venus of Praxiteles...
...Whatever the girls get it isn't enough...
...There are striking similarities between Taft's foreign policy views and those of the New Left, just as his views paralleledthose of some of his most liberal contemporaries, such as Henry Wallace and Claude Pepper...
...she said, "I've never cared much for that 'end of civilization' chatter...
...it has all the vices of selfishness...
...Yes, friends, Mike Royko broke the story: Hefner videotapes posteriors in action for posterity...
...In this series The Alternative will undertake yet another public service for its readers...
...Immoderation in defense of the obvious, Mr...
...But for this would-be stud there is hope, if he will only send away for the books that will change his life: How to Pick Up Girls and, after he has done so, How to Make Love to a Single Girl (will there be a companion volume if he decides to settle down...
...will March bring a gang-bang...
...However, consistent with the general impression of sex being Serious Business, of "lovers sweating palm to palm," as Huxley put it, wit is almost as rare in Penthouse as arguments for premarital chastity...
...they seek only a peace with honor...
...Penthouse articles demonstrate planned obsolescence applied to the written word...
...We get paragraph after paragraph of unstructured, unassimilated comments, belaboring the obvious...
...Stylization is the homage the artistic sensibility pays to reality...
...Playboy is guilty of some of the same sins as its younger brother, but it at least appears to like women, even if it does not respect them, the obligatory liberal gestures to Women's Lib notwithstanding...
...Not if airbrushes couldn't, the irreverent reader replies...
...Penthouse's worldwide circulation is 5,350,000...
...Yet especially in its attitude toward women and its portrayal of them Penthouse reinforces a dangerous tendency prevalent in our century...
...Distrust of involvement in European affairs had long been a hallmark of Taft's 16 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975...
...Still on the political front, Karl Hess, who in another incarnation wrote speeches for Barry Goldwater, informs us in an essay that "Americans Hate Politicians," a piece typical of Penthouse's prose offerings...
...His repeated warnings against getting involved in land wars in Asia have also contributed to his reputation among today's liberals...
...The success of these publications grows out of what we might call the Iron Law of Voyeurism: one can occupy himself ogling the Playmates and assorted bunnies in Playboy for at most a few hours...
...Penthouse's lack of philosophy, relatively attractive compared to Playboy's excess of same, is finally a lack of self-consciousness...
...Look at the girls...
...Hefner could sue...
...Buy a Penthouse—and make it your last...
...Cost is $25 for singles, $32 for two, if Penthouse readers have a friend that is...
...Penthouse is lucky if it manages a few seconds...
...The International Magazine for Men" (Penthouse's humble self-description) is, one suspects, directed to the downwardly mobile, people who lie on advertising questionnaires, those who have never loved intensely—only lost...
...she is successful too—as a prostitute...
...its implicit motto is: do unto others...
...Among the Intellectualoids by Stephen R. Maloney2 (One of civilized man's eternal misconceptions is that the barbarian always rides a charger and whoops for blood, a head impaled on his spear, flies buzzing about his disheveled noodle...
...This is far from the mark, but as misconceptions go it has amazing stamina...
...The February Penthouse has two naked females trying to stimulate a bored-looking beach-boy...
...The difference between "The Naked and the Nude," as Robert Graves suggests in a poem of that name, is style, another name for grace...
...A female colleague of mine at the University of Georgia mentioned that she had recently looked at a few of the girlies...
...but when I looked at that magazine for the first time I thought I saw the beast slouching...
...When columnist Xaviera Hollander advises that incest can be fun, that the taboos against it are unscientific, the genetic defects exaggerated, she is wrong (as a scientist informs her in the "letters" section...
...How is one to waste the rest of his time...
...Puritanism in Pueblo," "Grundyism in Grand Rapids," "Comstockery in Compton...
...he is a fairly successful businessman (for Penthouse that might mean $12,000 a year) and adulterer...
...Now a self-respecting man's magazine would no more think of displaying a naked girl sans pubic hair than Julia Child would of cooking without wine...
...The headings in this section, incidentally, are occasionally witty, even if the letters are sad in their manifestations of spiritual and creative poverty...
...In any case, since Penthouse contains a half-dozen or so aerosol spray ads we see that it does not let ideology stand in the way of business...
...In an amoral world, fashion and "style" replace intellection and analysis...
...Surprise: Americans neither like nor trust politicians...
...And the book jacket endorsements of Prophets on the Right is a "Who's Who" of American radicalism, including Noam Chomsky, Anthony Lewis, and Karl Hess...
...Today's barbarian is the intellectualoid, the solemn purveyor of half-baked notions of enlightenment which, upon closer scrutiny, always appear as the purest voodoo...
...Eliot once spoke about those authors who become confident enough to transcend mere allusion and to steal outright from their predecessors...
...As de Sade knew centuries ago, the taste for pornography can only be maintained by increasing perversity ("upping the ante," as Kevin Phillips says of Playboy), culminating in an obliteration of the distinction between sexuality and violence...
...What kind of man indeed...
...Note well the awkward poses: the girls teetering on one leg, or nearly toppling off a hard chair, or spreading their legs grotesquely like a 1930s whore...
...In format Penthouse is perhaps best described as Playboy after arteriosclerosis: short reviews, inept articles on fashionable topics, unfunny cartoons, leering advertisements directed toward dirty old men who fancy themselves fashionable lechers, oodles of questionable advice to the hung-up...
...Under Mr...
...But who, after all, does incest harm...
...Playboy, not devoid of kinks, had a thing about hair, leaving portrayals of its genital manifestations to the magazines one purchased in decayed tobacco shops from grizzled men with nicotine-stained hands...
...And most important, Taft opposed military buildups and foreign commitments because hefeared they would augment the power of the federal government...
...the Administration's internationalism, Taft was to remain an ardent believer in avoiding entanglements with other nations...
...I do not want to imply that by itself Penthouse is a major threat to Western civilization...
...it probably serves some good purposes, for example as a do-it-yourself kit for Prufrock's "lonely men in shirt sleeves...
...And always just beneath their fragile veneer of learning grunts the primitive mind of a Vandal...
...Publishers of the girlies know, of course, that such magazines do not live by color pictures alone—there must be a text of sorts, lest mammaries, derrieres, yea even pudenda, become boring through repetition...
...The hookers want, in brief, an end to police harassment...
...Jim sums up his own playboy's philosophy in a stirring aphorism: "Life is money, sex, and booze...
...The omnipresent cologne ads suggest that Problem Number Three is the difficulty of smelling sweet...
...One sweet old thing informs "Forum" readers of the heretofore undiscovered "erotic effects of enemas...
...Not the "consenting adults," whose instincts, wishes, and desires have for so many the force that Yahweh's prophets had for the Hebrews...
...Not at all...
...Penthouse has a variation on this form, in keeping with its general uninterest in a non-existent Puritanism...
...True, in an age which offers us the films Deep the Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 15 Throat and Pink Flamingoes, Penthouse is relatively mild pornography, probably not even enough to titillate Justice Douglas...
...entrance into World War II and critics of America's postwar "containment" strategy...
...We shall at times identify particularly odious intellectualoids and plumb the depths of their fatuities...
...it is a "boylie" magazine, breasts and vulvae being replaced by hairy chests and quiescent penises...
...The girls are not very pretty, a deficiency exacerbated by their struggles to simulate erotic gestures...
...But it would be a little like John Wayne naming Mickey Rooney as a co-respondent...
...Viva is a spinoff from Penthouse...
...A friend of mine, remarking about the Kama Sutra, noted sadly that position 74 is exactly like position 73, except that it is effected with one's fingers crossed...
...The hostility that the Puritans felt toward the body finds its fulfillment in Penthouse, Playboy, and their progeny...
...Despite his wariness of Asian land wars, it would be difficult to imagine Taft supporting, as so many liberals did, a cutoff in aid to a long-time ally such as South Vietnam...
...Guccione does possess at least a tad of the Hefnerian megalomania, however...
...Naked girls removed from any human context, standing or sitting around with their genitalia shoved out are being ripped-off in a sense more important than the financial...
...But theredoes seem to be a force other than mere aesthetic blindness operating here...
...The February 1975 Penthouse asks: "Will Aerosol Cans Destroy Us All...
...Hess, is no virtue...
...T.S...
...That journalistically valuable device, the visitor from another planet, would, reading Penthouse, develop a curious view of our society's wants and 'concerns: What kind of enterprise advertises in Penthouse...
...van den Haag...
...Cheatham, thinks this statement is terrible, which it is...
...The man responsible for this breakthrough is Penthouse's Hefner of sorts, Bob Guccione...
...Then the "readers" can begin again...
...Their pretensions to intellectuality and virtue are boundless...
...Despite its occasional half-hearted attempts at sophistication, mainly reduced to what-the-in-crowd-is-wearingdrinking-or-smoking-this-year, Penthouse reflects at base a rather cheap materialism...
...She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all, she is the champion and vindicator only of her own...
...But unlike Avis, this glossy gawk sheet does not try harder...
...Somebody cares...
...One remembers poet-critic Allen Tate's description twenty years ago of the "new provincials," the self-declared fashionable and cosmopolitan types without roots in any community or tradition, people who, in Tate's words, "begin each day as if there had been no yesterday...
...Penthouse does not have any style...
...first she appears on "Hee Haw," now she stars in Hefner's re-runs...
...It appears that the kind of swingers (old meaning) that read this publication have their hangups...
...and/ or unwanted clap...
...It will be more than sad if we are liberated from the mistaken belief that sex is "dirty" only to be imprisoned by the even more dangerous notion that the human body is ludicrous and contemptible...
...Referring to an ear-freak's unusual sexual preference, the head-note reads: "Aural Sex...
...So as Joan Rivers remarked when Johnny Carson informed her that "modern psychology" teaches us that a woman reaches her sexual prime at age 37: "Yeah, but nobody cares...
...It is, incredibly, more banal than its sire...
...In quality Penthouse is to its prototype as the "Before" picture is to the "After...
...And what kind of biological, emotional, and economic concerns and needs do these ads appeal to...
...Poor Barbi Benton, Hugh's playmate...
...But Jim's philosophy is also the magazine's, although it might add "and quadrophonic stereos" to his utterance...
...We learn also from this issue that Vietnam veterans are in this year, as are prostitutes and their right to pursue their profession without having to do unpleasant things such as pay fines, bribe police, and put in time in the slammer...
...Hess, it seems, toured America asking people what they thought of politicians, an activity equivalent to asking Baptist preachers how they feel about sin...
...So where can you find them, what do they look like, what are the fauna and flora of their range...
...Like the other purveyors of such offerings (Oui, Rogue, Gallery, etc...
...In the 1920s civilized Americans discovered that the barbarian was often a go-getter Rotarian, a 100-percenter, or a hayseed Luddite, when he was not a man of the cloth launching tirades against the cocktail and sermonizing on the essential sinfulness of the Ford...
...Nevertheless, this fashionable regard for Taft is ironic in several respects...
...An expanded "Penthouse Forum" we learn is available in separate monthly form—presumably for masochists...
...Taft always showed a deep distrust of intervening in the affairs of other nations, and he feared that after the war America would become an imperialist power...
...Puritanism believed in the dualism of body and spirit...
...We do not need to recall Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to remind us that relatively few people really believe in the worth and dignity of the human person...
...In its "Couples" section the magazine features a fine young couple, Jim and Sue...
...The Number One Problem is ejaculatior praecox, testified to by the pervasive huckstering of an impressive variety of desensitizing creams...
...Answers (in paraphrase): "They're all crooks...
Vol. 9 • October 1975 • No. 1
