SEX APPEAL AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

 Sex appeal went out of style years ago.  As with most cultural trends, pinpointing an exact date and time is not easy.  However, I think I can give this one a good guess.  December 1953.  And why is that?  It is easy when you think about it.  Counter-intuitive even.  Too much of anything is a bad thing.  Vices are only fun when they are consumed in limited quantities and with a healthy appreciation of the dangers that lie in overindulgence.  

Yup.  That is when Playboy came out and, pardon the pun, stripped away what should have stayed in your head and put it all on paper.  

And that is when things started to go bad.  Pop historians, almost by unanimity, will tell you the opposite.  The narrative goes something like this:  America was a sexually repressed society. The censors were peeking through bedroom keyholes to enforce conformity and punish the libertines.  Hollywood censored movies all in the name of protecting the young and innocent from the depredations of pornography and bad manners.  The Catholic Church had a list of forbidden movies.  The entire panoply of illicit literature and conduct was secreted in an underworld of seedy whorehouses and dangerous bars.  There was a code of conduct that most “decent” Americans were expected to follow.  Anyone not towing the line was labeled a sexual deviant.  Think Lenny, The Night They Raided  Minsky’s, and The Music Man.   There are many others.  The Kinsey Report is a required appendage to this historical fantasy.  Only with the end of the Eisenhower presidency and the advent of JFK and his Camelot propaganda machine were Americans freed from the shackles of sexual constraint and their Babbitt like existence.  What was better kept between one’s ears was now bombarding TV, movies and music.  About that there can be no dispute.  It happened very slowly and then very quickly.  Playboy morphed into Hustler which brought us pornography that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.  Ditto music.  Think not?  Check out the lyrics to Brown Sugar, The Rolling Stones classic and you wonder how it every made it past the censors.   No way could that song ever get past the PC police in this supposed enlightened era.  Let's compare some choice videos from the old era.

        I submit the thoughts passing through any man’s mind while listening to this music were more erotic than anything some cheap peddler of smutty lyrics could ever conjure up and throw on a music sheet.  The date when music started the descent?  It is easy to say Woodstock but that event, more memorialized after the fact than celebrated during the event.  But it was more of a warning of what lay ahead of the era of cultural nihilism:  overdoses, violence, and sickness, all in an orgy of drugs, sex, and rock and roll.  For me, the transitional moment, caught so perfectly on tape, was sometime in 1971.  I was babysitting for a neighbor and turned on something called Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert.  It was a regular feature every Saturday night at 11:30.  And here is what forever changed my attitude towards black women.  The only word I can think of is RAW!  

  Don’t get me wrong.  I love Tina Turner.  One of the greatest entertainers of all time.  Proud Mary was a classic.  It pushed the envelope of music, video and sex to a very appropriate edge but the progression of what followed was a bathos of musical pornography with no redeeming virtue.  Check this out and imagine your daughters or granddaughters being inundated with this trash non-stop. 

And the same could be said of movies.  There is (or at least was) a certain shock value of seeing a woman butt ass naked in front of you.  But novelty very quickly turned to boredom which generated more graphic images of violence and sexual depravity.  But this bottoms out as the senses are dulled to the point of indifference.  What was once left to the imagination has been cheapened.  Sex appeal was never about raw sexual acts free of any moral constraints.  Quite the contrary.    Check Rita Hayworth out on this clip from Gilda

And this one.  

Or Jon Hamm playing the dapper Don Draper of Mad Men fame

Ask yourself.  What is sexier?  Engaging in this dialogue with a curvaceous women or watching her prancing around naked in front of you with her tongue hanging out and $20 bills in her thong?  Correct.  It’s  not even close.

And, of course, the  TV ads of the era.  

The operative word here is restraint.  Knowing when to say when.  Better to have 3 ounces of brandy and a nice cigar than chugging a whole bottle and suffocating yourself with 5 While Owls.  The point can be summed up perfectly with this dialogue.  I can’t remember the movie or the actors but I remember the words:

            Man:  What took you so long?

            Woman:  I was putting on my make up.

            Man:   But you do not look like you have any makeup on.

            Woman:  That is why it took me so long to do it.

Touché.