ABSTRACT
The Playboy world is first and last an achievement in abstraction: history, politics, art, ordinary social relations, religion, families, nature, vanity, love, a thousand other items that presumably complicate both the inward and outward lives of human beings. The white space on a page of a Playboy was dressed with sketches of a man shaving with an electric razor, in the company of a Miss Buxom clad in black stockings and gloves. The mind represented or created by Playboy, in short, locates decay in the past and understands the present as the first moment of intelligence for humankind. Mere assertions of female sexuality, like those just cited, announce the existence of a common need, imply that rebuff is the exceptional rather than the normal experience—but of course this in itself hardly suffices to quiet every misgiving.
