5. TAN LINES ON CENTERFOLDS

I know, I know - melanoma, premature aging, holes in the ozone, we're not supposed to tan anymore. I myself do not tan so much as crisp, after which my fevered lobster-colored skin peels off in sheets to reveal myself underneath just as white as ever. I fear sun exposure with a very rational and sensible fear. But I can't help it - I still think tan lines on pinups are sexy as hell.

Maybe it was ingrained in childhood. ("Childhood!" you are saying, preparing to track down my parents and report them. But rest assured, they were just as surprised as you to discover my precocious taste for pornography, and even more disapproving.) Like so many of us, I stumbled upon somebody's Playboy collection when I was about eight - a two-foot stack of back issues that must've dated back to the mid-1960's, though I never made it down further than about 1979. Locking myself in the bathroom, I leafed through them for hours on end, cleverly telling my concerned parents that I wasn't sick, just "thinking." My reading skills far outstripping my comprehension skills, I breezed through the articles about oral sex pausing only to wonder what the clitoris was (since at this point I thought oral sex meant kissing with tongues), attempted to figure out what was funny about the Party Jokes, and learned from the Advisor that women are capable of coming just as men are. I took due note of this fact, though I wasn't sure where everybody was coming from, or going to. (Side note: god bless Playboy's sensible sex-positive progressive attitude, eh?) But mostly - mostly I looked at the naked ladies.

And resplendent naked ladies they were, lithe and bronzed, confident despite their nudity and the often absurd positions they were put in (I remember one layout in particular, set in a bowling alley, that featured the model surrounded with snacks, a wisp of cotton candy stuck artfully in her pubic hair) (yes dears, at one point Playboy models did have pubic hair). Dressed in the first few photos in haute couture, or sophisticated lingerie (I reported to one friend, mystified, that they wore bras upside-down around their waists, attached to their stockings), they gradually lost clothing over the next few pages (oh! the heart raced, the head grew dizzy with anticipation) and then there it was, the magic fold-out page, the seductive head and shoulders almost life-sized, the finally bare you know what (legs shut, always shut - it wasn't till many years later that I first heard the term "pink shot," let alone actually saw one) covered demurely with the fold-over questionnaire where this month's Playmate told us her turn-ons and turn-offs in bubble handwriting.

They looked like real women, the Playboy ladies. I'm certainly not proposing that they were a cross-section of the female population of Earth, but they were at least not homogenous - this one had Bond-girl hips and perfectly round nipples, that one had a sweetly curving belly, and if you squinted you could see the goosebumps on the girl in the wet swimsuit.

And the tan lines! Did they ever have tan lines! On their nut-brown skin, bright white triangles described whole summers spent on the beach in string bikinis of infinite smallness. The lines underscored the fact that this was not anatomy-book nakedness here, it was naughty nakedness - there used to be a bikini here, but now there isn't - we can see everything. The centerfolds of today, a uniform white-toast color from head to toe, are about as naughty-looking as Renaissance nymphs in a painting* (and have just about as much real flesh).

Sigh. But that was then and this is now and it takes a lot more to get me worked up than Playboy these days, unless by "worked up" you mean "pissed off" (aw Hugh, really, surely there are still a few ladies out there with breasts made of actual flesh?). But I still keep a couple old magazines around, you know, for old times' sake….

* I am sure there are plenty of you who got as bothered over art books as I did as a youngster, but for the sake of argument....