EPITAPH FOR EROS

...Long after the ninth inning and the departure of the rest of the fans, these experts lingered on in the twilight, hoping that the glow from their orgones would enable them to find something interesting in the dark...

...Ridiculous as they were, the professional shrinkers from sex could do no more than run a dead heat with its euphoric friends...

...Freud is cold, Jung is old, and there's no talon about Ad 181 ler...

...Purely commercial exploitation was obviously inevitable once the intellectual forces of sex bivouaced on the battlefield...

...Writing a book, painting a picture, composing a concerto simply posted an open invitation to the neighbors to inspect one's linen before it went to the laundry...

...And the copy writers who prepare the newspaper ads for the film industry were able to develop a respectable pornographic art form of their own...

...Unquestionably, it's a relief...

...The entire female anatomy, from curled top knot to painted toenails, has been redesigned...

...In the front, there are articles which sneer at sex and prove that premarital chastity is worth at least $5,000 a year to the income of the average family...

...The occupational limitations on women in our society are merely a distinction without a difference...

...The bedroom of the Carlyles, the recesses of the Bronte's Haworth rectory, the desk of St...

...The valley separating the female breast on the right from the female breast on the left (both revealed just shy of what appears to be the arbitrary boundary of the nipples) was fully as important as wrestling in stimulating the growth of the art of television...

...A major branch of literary industry developed, whose market depended upon routinely labelling American women as the lost, second or—at the risk of ambiguity— the mislaid sex...

...The energies left aimless by the end of the struggle over sex have an en tire universe in which to operate...

...Patrick's deanery, became as clogged with critics as the lower levels of Grand Central Station with commuters before the New Haven trains pull out...

...Now safely in the hands of the Mickey Jelkes and Mickey Spil lanes, sex has eased itself out of a situation in which it was once something to be anguishedly against, feverishly for, or even a particular source of concern...

...Fortunately, not even the most in discriminate use of testosterone could result in the surplus of sighs, leers, whistles, pinches, and attempts to commit assault in crowded elevators these merchandisers promise...

...In the popular novel, sex almost made history habit forming...

...Did A go bankrupt, B stop writing, C achieve alcoholism, or D join the Foreign Legion...

...Commercial taboos, once breached, gave all of mass culture as heady a Du ftt as that which emanates from an overworked harem...

...Artificially frizzled or straightened hair, nasal irritants with hopefully licentious labels ("Libido" is par for the course) emerge from the chemists' test tubes, along with uncounted tons of unguents, softeners, hardeners, bleaches, dyes, and suffocators of odor...

...The latter promised uncollectable promissory notes on utterly impossible pleasures...

...Daughters glowered at their mothers, beamed at their fathers, and gazed speculatively at their brothers...

...If one product in a thousand had its intend ed effect, only those female purchasers with a head start to the hills would have been safe...

...As Thomas Hood wrote in another connection, "One can't always be stir ring the fire...

...The cosmic juggling of the X and Y chromosomes which sorts the population out into boys and girls, the fact that wives instead of husbands become mothers, was parlayed into an indictment so devastating that with it Zola could have convicted a regiment of Esterhazys...

...The sheer volume of accusations obscured the fact that there never have been adequate guarantees for the quality of the product offered by the female sex...

...And when Kinsey readied his second volume (itself the object of one of the most efficient exploitation campaigns since the death of Barnum), he was aware that at least two book-length commentaries on his female findings were already in galley form, requiring only the insertion of his percentages in the proper places...

...Perhaps inevitably, the mingled elements of ecstasy, ephemerality, and expense made sex an object of suspicion...

...Once sold itself, sex has sparked the sale of everything from tomato sauce to machine tools, from phonograph records (whose illustrated covers are only reminiscent of the lush back of the bar paintings that characterized saloons during Theodore Roosevelt's administration) to earth moving machinery...

...The customers have caught on to the fact that the model in the gauzy nightgown does not come with long-wearing percale sheets...

...Only a limited numbers of emotions are available for distribution between the sexes, and the possible arrangement of two or more human bodies in fourdimensional space-time continuums is even more limited...

...Before contemplating sex, the rigors of rationalism were checked at the door...

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...Other pastimes have elbowed out promiscuity...

...When female "antiseptics" occupy expensive pages in mail order catalogs, when even the most liberal parent perusing the advertising columns in the New York Times might yearn to have it delivered in a plain wrapper, the war is over...

...Sex has not been abolished, merely piled up along the edges of the right of way to allow the passage of more important traffic...

...The gamut of the sexual theme is demonstrated in the women's magazines...

...Mothers merely basked, figuring that no matter how the cat jumped, they would remain in control...

...The general dimensions, drape, and relationship with the azimuth of the female breast have been the focal point of the attack...

...The newspaper headlines provide new daily proof of man's glorious incompetence to rationalize his relationship with either his fellow man or with himself...

...IV The popular arts, following the lead of the skilled craftsmen who engineered sex into control of brand preferences, succumbed gratefully to the opportunity to celebrate the red, hot, and indisputably blue...

...History and art could only be studied after translation into the Esperanto of the erogenous zones...

...Neither opin ion seemed built on the bedrock of human intelligence...

...Competing with Marxists who gleefully superimposed clear cut class angles on everything from tennis matches to turbine mechanics, the sexual theorists uncovered something less than sermon material in stones, and in running brooks dredged up a haul that would have chilled the blood of Kraft-Ebing...

...Explication de sexe swept every precinct over explication de texte...

...Intellec tually, the revival of interest in the Marquis de Sade is recent...

...II As sex entered into its imperial modern age, the pendulum crashed through the other side of the clock...

...Even the tired pioneers, retreating from their exposed position in the scouting force, are now willing to admit that even the upper classes have probably been doing very well for themselves, thank you...

...While the breast has been engineered out, the belly and buttocks have been constrained by harnesses only made possible through the progress of stress analysis...

...Implausible as it may seem, sexual activities per se have aroused the abhorrence reserved in some societies for eating meat and milk out of the same dish, neglecting to flee into the jungle when one's mother-in-law looms on the trail, or turning surplus cows into filet mignon...

...Properly combined with the recommended laundry soaps and furniture polishes, with the na180 tionally advertised biscuit mixes and the disposable toilet-bowl swabbers, the chemists' products can guarantee that even the drabbest female can be turned into a AA-League Astarte...

...The gods aged fast...

...Sex became the single key which unlocked the secrets of all human activities...

...On the broad scale, the experts finger chemical, bacterial, and nuclear means for hastening man's total demise...

...Three centuries after Newton, scientists are still only hopefully shying pebbles about on the vast shore of the unknown...

...And it was fortunate that dianetics, so to speak, died aborning...

...The frontier is homesteaded by the suitcase farmers...

...Thought, analysis, and action may 177 turn to other fields...

...Art tagged hopefully after the study 178 of life...

...In the simple thesis of these books men were solely to blame for all the ills consequent upon female biology...

...Commerce likewise lathered the chin of science...

...The discovery that men and women, with a gaudy specificity, could be maneuvered in and out of bed, narrowed the playing field...

...main street is lined with porcelainfronted stores...

...In an age marked by creative costiveness and critical hypertrophy, it was inevitable that the critics should seize upon the new emphasis on sex to add a new dimension to their gloomy ratiocinations...

...The freedom from dusting and the dishes thus ends in two daily hours on the committing train devel 179 oping a creative sales pitch for the new line of industrial belting, or brooding over the drop in production at the Buffalo plant...

...Sons brooded as they confronted a domestic smorgasbord...

...There are other important motivations for getting up in the morning, staying awake all day, and even for going to bed at night...

...But most of all, there is the daily impact of advertising aimed at remodelling the female body to increase its customer appeal...

...Its philippics were catnip for the majority of book-buyers...

...Deliberately glossed over was the fact that things were no better on the masculine side of the street...

...And commercially, the constant abrasion of the exposed nerve endings has induced an inevitable anesthesia...

...Mammarism has long since outlasted the Momism of the amateur sociologists...

...The passing of sex as the core of man's existence leaves no great vacuum, only the cleared path on the snowbound highway after the plow has been through...

...Ambushed in the market place, assassinated on the peaks of culture, the enemies of sex are in full retreat...

...When fornification, adultery, and rape among the long-since departed palled, larceny, aggravated assault, and murder became to the popular novel what bottling was to Coca-Cola...

...The remainder would have been better off in Berlin when the Russian troops moved in...

...And there is little danger that time will hang heavy on human hands...

...Every object offered for sale is advertised as a stimulant for the sexual act, increasing either male aggressiveness or female availability...

...Sex is no longer the treatment of choice in epatering des bourgeois, a repetitious technique for scratching a ballot of confidence in society as it exists...

...The single goal of the motion picture industry is a star with measurements of 48-20-38, possessing universal joints throughout the trunk and pelvis...

...Chemists have trod hard on the heels of the engineers to make the approaches to sex as subtle and efficient as a beartrap...

...Moreover, Western civilization itself arose proclaiming out of the one side of its mouth that there was no such thing as sex, and out of the other that sex was unqualifiedly bad...

...Soap is now being bought to banish dirt, not because it is repetitiously depicted annointing the skin of a willowy blond...

...Even serious advocates of sex who have other sources of income are losing their zeal...

...The ocean of truth is still largely uncharted, the horizon is still far away...

...Exploration of the bedroom, the bathroom, and the bassinet provided automatic answers...

...The skeleton was hauled from the closet and enthroned on the pedestal once reserved for Kathleen ni Houlihan, or the opportunity to die on any side of an issue involving Danzig...

...Titillation has tired its target...

...Realistically, sex is now no more cosmic than cookery...

...Thus, with the plot automatically roughed-in, the novelists could process sex as thoroughly as the stockyards handle a shote, and even show a profit on the squeal...

...In even advanced circles, it is conceded that reading a book or consulting an expert are not essential passports to a satisfactory sex life...

...If the authors of these books were right—and their number included more than a few traitors from opposition restrooms —American kitchens were lined solely with wailing walls...

...A tradition developed in which tired but dutiful fathers glowed quietly whenever their daughters entered the room...

...Sitting out in the left field bleachers of modern intellectual life were the hopeful followers of Wilhelm Reich...

...This antipathy to sex was entombed deep in the past, among the obscure archeological lumber below the surface of the human mind, in the myths, legends, and anciently endorsed codes of etiquette never sorted out and sold to the dealers in obsolete ideas...

...And then there were the books that recounted, with an enthusiastic masochism, the uniquely unhappy plight of women in modern society...

...Fortunately, these Schmisse of devotion to Eros vanish with the night, only to reappear, slightly out of register, the next evening...

...The time has come to relax...

...The Tares and penates were jostled aside by Oedipus and Jocasta...

...On a more immediate level, pressures toward conformity from both the top and bottom are making modern intellectual life a vast, other-directed public housing project...

...As for the arts, the sign "Help Wanted" has been yellowing on the factory front for lol these many years...

...And those intricate but inherently limited variations on the basic pattern of him and her, once guaranteed conversation pieces, now arouse only a yawn when competing with the attractions of high fidelity and contours d'elegance...

...Toothpaste wins acceptance because it tastes good, and not because it offers an immediate merger with the buccal mucosa of the open-mouthed model in the ad...

...The age of pioneers is past...

...Still, although the shouting may have been excessive, the sexual revolution was both fun and functional...

...Four letter words are no longer the passport to both the docks and the doctorate...

...All autopsies were conducted on mattresses...

...Kinsey's first book not only lined the pockets of his publishers, but provided temporary employment for a host of shallow draft commentaries that huffed and puffed while easing Kinsey's liner into its place along the dock...

...The middle third of the American housewife who has obeyed the proper advertisements resembles, as she prepares for bed, nothing so much as the cross-hatched face of an incompetent German student duellist...

...At the back of the book, advertising columns are filled with sexual advice as explicit as that handed down to girls at puberty in some of the livelier primitive tribes...

...To elaborate the breast, engineering data obtained from the construction of suspension bridges, cup sizes taken over from the gaudy dreams of the olive packers (graded upward commercially from "giant" through "mammoth" to "colossal"), and comprehensive surveys of the inflatability of sponge rubber have been combined to come to a glorious fruition in the modern brassiere...

...It may be that these excursions into the suburbs of sex, whose extent could only be measured by a dolorimeter, have the self-limiting status of a fad...

...given the local ground rules, women can only expect liberation sideward, not upwards...

...The gluteal muscles, that with their fatty integument possess in simpler societies a size-graded sexual premium of their own, have been compressed by latex, sandwiched with strips of steel, and molded in metal like a fancy gelatine dessert...

...By the time it appeared, the manufacturers of historical novels and detective ro mances had lapped the Marquis twice...

...Politics, anyone...