Tagged Eros

Naked and stripped. 18+

"Playboy"

The hungry and free 90s coincided with the heyday of glamorous magazines, which remained incomprehensible to my mercantile mind.

In the Moscow version of the American male magazine, a note was reprinted from the original publication “How to buy a jacket for $ 5”, fixing five by five thousand.

“Otherwise,” they explained to me in the editor, “they will not respect.”

In another journal, exclusively the goods of non -daily demand were advertised: diamonds, fur, Mazerati.

“Otherwise, competitors will eat,” they explained to me, “because we have consumption - a kind of sport.”

In the third glamor reached the handle: the mods were advertised not sultry beauties, but bald intellectuals, including me.

“Otherwise,” they explained to me, “it will be unoriginal.”

The fourth entered the editorial board of the Monkey, who provided financing the publication. Sitting down to my knees, she pulled a clock from her hand.

The fifth was called the "yellow submarine", but came out black and white and had nothing to do with submarines.

All this printed riot reminded me of the golden years of our emigration, when everyone released his journal, including, I will not hide, one called Masia.

Stormy social fractures always accompany a verbal boom. In the Prague Spring, guessing how it ends, weekly, monthly, even almanacs came out every day.

One way or another, in the liberal era of the 90s I eagerly greeted any freedom harvest and was printed everywhere where they called, excluding only “golf and yachting”, but only because I knew nothing about the first, and the sailing sport cost me conflict with rescuers who picked me up from under the keel.

It is not surprising that when I was offered to lead the column in the Russian “playboy”, I joyfully and recklessly agreed. Only by signing a six -month contract, I thought about what, in fact, is an object of upcoming classes from a literary point of view.

My inexperienced employers knew a little more about him. Trying to give the overseas magazine a domestic character, they celebrated the anniversary of Pushkin with his poems performed by naked models. The salt of the event, according to the editorial board, was that the undressed girls were not up to poetry, but they were mistaken, and all the experimental people cheerfully read " In the depths of Siberian ores, keep proud patience ."

“Interesting,” I thought, “I would like this venture to the author, who, according to Abram Terza,“ ran into Russian literature on thin erotic legs . ”

But this is easier for me. From experience, I already knew how difficult it is to talk to the body, completely devoid of my own language, and was able to describe only that lust, which is called appetite and is born at the table, and not in bed.

Just by this time, the story of Valery Popov about the cultural institute, where they decided how to distinguish erotica from pornography.

On one unfortunate day, the director of this institution got drunk and loudly stated that there was no difference, as a result of which 300 employees were left without work.

(I suspect that the basis of this opus was a real story about guides in Leninist places, which were renamed culturalologists overnight, overtaking the whole world according to their number of per capita.)

It’s good that my career in the dubious sphere did not last long. The Russian version of the Playboy suffered a blow about which only rumors came to me. According to one - the editor was kicked out, according to the other - the publisher was killed, but I do not know which of the two is considered to be hyperbola.

Pornography

Everything that I knew about sex in Russian literature was located between Limonov’s prose and Brodsky’s poetry. The first has exhausted the topic with extremely unpretentious naturalism. The second discouraged all the authors who took over this topic, announcing that " love as an act is devoid of a verb ." This did not prevent Brodsky from looking for him. For example, in the pair “debut”, where the participants are accompanied by asymmetric metaphors.

One for him:

*He undressed in his room,

Without looking at the then sipping

The key suitable for many doors,

Stunned by the first turn.*

For her completely different:

*She lay in the bath, feeling

with all the skin, a peeling bottom,

And the emptiness, fragrant with soap,

crept into it through another

A hole acquaintance with the world.*

The classic euphemism “The key with the castle” goes back to folklore and reminds me of student practice in the village, where the old women have harassed us with riddles like “ put it - got up, took it out - sung ” (boots).

But it is more difficult with a woman: what happened became an epistemological act. Eros of calculation opened the path of knowledge with the help of gaping - the voids, on which, in fact, all the tactics of pornography are built.

It is a dance around the void that pretends to be a mystery if it does not fall into a riddle, fraught not with erotic, but gynecological details.

In the Penguin Island, Anatole France re -describes the process of the fall and finds the origins of pornographic interest, explaining in detail the difference between naked and dressed penguins.

“When the penguins clothe their covers, the penguins will not be so well aware of what attracts them to them. Their obscure desires will turn into dreams and illusions ... Meanwhile, the penguins will lower their eyes and press their lips with the look as if they hide some treasure under their clothes. ”

The focus is that only dressed can be undressed. All the scasteness accumulated by mankind after the Neolithic is built on a delay before the denouement. The ban gives birth to Istoma. The taboo gives rise to culture. And all delay (from French kiss to the ladies' combination) transfers simple into indecent.

When the body is silent, he speaks for him “playboy” with all the concomitant paraferia of glamorous sex, distracting from the banality of the plot. And again Brodsky:

*... the beauty of the dress is pulled off,

You see what I was looking for, not new marvelous divas.*

To rid the situation of triviality, pornography offers a collection of fetishes - things equipped with sexual characteristics. At the same time, the main fetish is the woman herself. It is all covered with blush and lipstick, punted nail varnish, openwork lace gloves, a black nylon stocking. The naked body is hidden from the viewer, like a gold reserve in the safe of the bank. Instead, a bargaining coin of provocative outfits that are charged from the secret that they hide is being used. Their perversion is in lack of insignificance. It is the clothes that make glossy beauties obscene. And the difference between the naked and the stripped moves biology into culture, which gives rise to eroticism and complicates it as an experienced Byron wrote about this in his diary.

“Only by idealizing the earthly, material, physical in our pleasures, impressing these details and forgetting about them at all, or at least never calling them, even to yourself - this is the only way to protect yourself from aversion to them.”

Penis

If each sex, as the poet demonstrated, needs different metaphors, then the secrets of women and men are different. Some hide them, hiding in the void, others flaunted (in gulfs), which allows you to arrange a cursory excursion into the cultural history of the organ.

But in order to talk about him out loud, you need to find a name for him. We are used to talking about this in Latin, knowing that " the dead shame does not have ." The extinct tongue makes a “penis”, which once denoted only a “tail”, in a word more decent, but no less alive. Under such a pseudonym, it has become accessible to scientific studies. Especially after Sigmund Freud saw a lifting bridge in the subconscious in the penis and made it fit for discussion, including historians.

The Egyptians, they say, the Penis who won the death was the key to the afterlife. The Indians worshiped Lingama - a member of Shiva, who still decorates not only temples, but also the streets of the country. Even at the Buddha, some thought, there was a member, like a stallion. The neighbors of the Jews, the Canaana, ate the cut off the penis of the enemy kings to inherit their magical power. The God of the Old Testament did not have a body, but all the more jealous he treated his creatures, demanding the sacrifice of their foreskin. The sacred nature of this body emphasized the custom to verify the fullness of the high priest before he entered the temple. This tradition has also been preserved in the Vatican, where there is still a special chair for new dads passing on it the last verification before taking office (not castrate).

For the Greeks, the penis was God Priap, born of the Union of Dionysus with Aphrodite, that is, wine and beauty. Celebrating this event, the Hellenes wore multimeter wooden phalluses with painted eyes around the city. Plato saw in the penis a demonstration of the divine mind and divine madness.

The Romans did without philosophy. The penis was an instrument of the empire. Only he could inhabit her.

From childhood, each man wore an amulet of the corresponding form, which helped him win on all fronts. Even during the First World War, the Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando wore this decoration on the bracelet, hoping to increase combat power (Entente).

A pagan reverence for the child’s organ was replaced by a Christian fear in front of him - but not immediately. In the Gospels, as modern theologians emphasize, it is not at all said about sex, only about marriage and divorce. The Devil's attributes were given by the Church Fathers, first of all, Augustine, who led his own experience to this conclusion. Unable to cope with the temptations of the flesh, the future saint decided that his own member would take away his free will from him, given to man by God.

Having become the instrument of the devil, the penis acquired its features.

According to the testimony of witches, torn under torture, the devil possessed a black ice bifurcated penis, moreover, covered with scales. The sorceress, the Inquisition claimed, steal members in men. In the "Witch's Hammer" mentions a woman who settled the stolen penis on a tree where they lived like birds. Is it not here the source of the Pushkin Tale of King Nikita, where a similar situation is described:

*And the messenger could not endure ...

But only he was a casket

Birds - pork and flew away,

And they sat around the bitch,

And the tails are completed.*

Even in enlightened Renaissance times, the penis caused such disgust that the Florentine crowd beat the stones of the Naked “David”, and 30 years later dad hired an artist who covered the phalluses on the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

The deep source of all these experiences is the inexplicable autonomy of the organ, which is always “on our mind”: we cannot cope with it, but he can with us. As Leonardo da Vinci, who was the first to explain his device, said, " he only sleeps when I am awake and awake when I sleep ."

Lotman

The fact that sex is also a text, as well as about many other things, I first learned from Lotman when he visited our Riga Philfak. We had 10 times less students than students, and an assembly hall for 400 people was usually empty, even if we arranged a holiday with dancing. But not the time when Yuri Mikhailovich performed here. No matter how difficult it is to believe it today, but then his book “Analysis of the Poetic Text” was a bestseller.

At the first of the four lectures, prudent grasped chairs. The late sat on the floor, the desperate climbed onto the windowsill. Looking around the crowd, which was quiet in anticipation of a miracle, the professor had fun to work.

“In order to master the science of semiotics,” he said, “it is necessary to understand what a sign is in a historical context.” Let's start with the interesting. The length of the women's dress was always the same, but in different eras it covered either a bust or legs, never opening both both at the same time.

At this place, an impressive student fell from the windowsill, and I thought about the ladies of the XVIII century in lengthy, reminiscent of sailing ships dresses with a daring neckline, and looked back at classmates in mini-skirts and turtlenecks, which, because of the proximity to the west, were called "bitlovks."

The first Lotman lesson was that you can read not only books, but all in the world, not excluding the innermost, intimate, forbidden.

Japanese

The transformation of sex into art gives erotica not only aesthetic, but also national character. Far from everywhere and far from always seductive it seems to be the same.

The richest example of "cultivating" sex is offered by ancient Japan. We know about this from the books of her brilliant writers. The court ladies of the Hayan era (794–1185) Murasaki and Sei-Senagon left the best prose in Asia with the envious descendants. It allows you to judge the most exotic line of their bizarre life: about love life.

In Heyan, unheard of freedom of morals reigned. Windness here was considered a rule, fidelity - exception, jealousy is a disease. Innocence seemed risky from the point of view of evil spirits the state, from which they were in a hurry to get rid of.

Family life was built according to the laws of liberal polygamy, and not only men enjoyed it. Public opinion condemned flaws in the toilets of ladies much more strictly than the ease of their behavior.

Unlike Western knights, the Japanese aristocrats did not know the torment of Platonic passions, the dangers of tournaments and tests of the Crusades. The times of Samuraev have not yet come, so few of them knew how to sit on a horse and handle weapons. The courtiers devoid of important cases indulged in all their souls. The epicenter of life, which determined its taste, meaning, shape and content, was a love connection.

To turn a physiological act into a refined masterpiece, the Hayanians curbed in sex by veriges of conventions. Each detail of the intrigue determined the rules no less harsh than those that humble the Japanese poetry with the number of syllables and the registry of topics. Every novel turned on by notes written by tradition.

The first date was preceded by the exchange of letters. The important thing in them was not a template content, but a handwriting.

Calligraphy served the Hayans with a secondary sexual character that could light a love flame.

The night with his lover, during which a gentleman, armed with the experience of Chinese bed science, did not allow the lady to fall asleep, ended with a cry of a rooster. Leaving the bed, the lover was in a hurry home to write poetry about the unbearable of separation - be sure to the morning dew that soaked his clothes dried out. Having chosen the postman of a pleasant appearance and attaching a feather to the murdered rooster to the message that interrupted the affection, the gentleman did not consider the case to be completed until he received a poetic response.

There was nothing simple and natural in all this. From lovers they did not expect the sincerity of feelings, not the depths of passions, not the ardor of desires, but the scrupulous observance of the ritual, solemn, as a religious ceremony, and beautiful, as not yet invented by ikebana.

Sex was a ceremonial game, and a woman, of course, played the main role in it. In the beauty, however, what prevented her from resurrecting a person was valued. With black teeth and eyebrows drawn in the middle of the forehead, the Japanese aristocrat resembled a theater mask with her face, and all the rest - a decorated cloud of vague outlines. For each court lady there were 12 translucent robes, shining through each other impeccably selected colors. The most seductive part of the toilet was the sleeve that the lady exposed because of a special screen, which certainly hides her from the male gaze.

Under no circumstances, Hayanks did not allow themselves to see naked - they slept completely dressed. Until the Second World War, nudity in Japan did not cause lust. Another thing is complex structures from luxurious fabrics.

Each of the many layers of clothing distinguished its own degree of intimacy. Turning a woman, like a silkworm doll, a man delayed pleasure with the languor that could no longer understand the eyelid that invented a bikini.

Here lies the secret of “shung”, the famous erotic painting of Japan, born in the same Heyan. The gambling shamelessness of these drawings intended, incidentally, for the audience of both sexes, not in grotesquely enlarged genitals, but in the fact that the depicted clothes of lovers form a frame for their intercourse. The act becomes a theatrical action, whose participants, like all good actors, even in the midst of events retain the ability to look at themselves from the outside.

Thus, the sensuality brought up by the style and sophisticated tradition can tolerate an erotic vector from a naked body to what hides it. And this creates a unique dynamics in the relations of naked and undressed.

Hollywood

A thousand years later and at the other end of the world, a similar, but much more popular experiment on the sublimation of sexual energy in artistic creation occurred in the cinema.

This needed the intervention of censorship - the "Code of Heis", which has bealed in Hollywood since 1934. Since the Puritan rules forbade even the spouses to show in the same bed, in the old cinema, sex was replaced by the sex war. The struggle between men and women on the screen went with such bitterness that it is not clear where the children came from.

Hollywood did not know this either, because he placed wit between Platonic and carnal love. Giving the non -verbal experience of the word, albeit about another, the comedy converted the dialogue into a game with fire. The ban on the only topic that only interests the heroes led to the heyday of foreign language, Hollywood love implied the ligature of Obonyaks and the poetry of the hint.

The sports term Screwball , which gave the name to this at the same time romantic and parody genre of eroticism, means a twisted ball that behaves an unpredictable way.

All films of this kind were frankly poor. Like Shakespeare, luxurious outfits and the same dialogs were exhausted by the mise -en -scene. This movie still imitated the theater, often ascended to him and lived in words. It was talkative, witty and required the viewer of attention, which the special effects did not encroach on the first matured and then fell into a childhood cinema later.

The content of old paintings was reduced to a universal plot: how to make an ideal couple of old or new lovers. On the way to the “kiss in the frame” there was a funeral chopping border that replaced sex.

But it was the ban on outright scenes that loaded all the others with an immense erotic intensity. Underglory turned a movie into Azopov a comedy that requires bashful complicity from us. Then the debauchery of winking reigned, which was deprived of the simplicity of free cinema, where everything was called his name and showed without embarrassment.

The art of reading between the lines and peep into the crack disappeared along with moral censorship. Только этот эстетский реликт — старое кино — сохранило истому прелюдии, foreplay , пролога, 30 лет оттягивавшего развязку сексуальной революции.

Censorship

Следящая за нравственностью цензура схожа с политической тем, что обе скрывают общеизвестное. Даже в мое время, надежно бетонированное державой, все знали, откуда берутся дети, — с той же уверенностью, с какой мы верили в идиотизм политбюро.

Это не мешало властям прятать и то и другое, конечно же, безуспешно, но тень одной цензуры падала на другую. Что придавало антисоветский характер сексуальности в силу ее неуправляемости. Всякая непредсказуемость угрожала партии, смешивая карты и нарушая планы. Чем меньше человек походил на трактор, тем труднее он вписывался в пятилетку. Не способная справиться с нашей физиологией, власть занялась душой, игнорируя тело, если оно, конечно, не было вооружено киркой.

По обыкновению аскетическая практика привела к противоположным результатам.

Грешник часто отдается порокам, лишь праведник думает о них всегда. Уйдя с поверхности жизни, секс безраздельно завладел ею.

Подспудный эрос оплодотворял все сферы советской жизни, а не только ту, что ему положено. Поскольку об этом не говорили, то сексуальным могло быть все. Умолчание оборачивалось двусмысленностью, снабжавшей скабрезным подтекстом всякую строку, включая и ту, что печаталась в «Правде».

Фрейдистское чтение газеты — любимая салонная игра эпохи. Опытные уста, придавая неизбежной цепочке «порыв — удар — прорыв» определенный смысл, делали передовую заманчивей «Камасутры».

Даже зарубежная хроника, как отметил в своем дневнике Веничка Ерофеев, не составляла исключения: « Никсон попросил Голду Меир занять более гибкую позицию ».

Такой безадресной эротической эмоции подошло бы универсальное английское слово sexy , пригодное для рекламы чего угодно, например, мебели, хотя у нее из соблазнительного — одни ножки.

В атмосфере невидимой и всепроникающей, как воздух, сексуальности вырос специфический тип советского плейбоя. Он сам твердо не знал, с чем борется — с целомудрием или властью. Сладкий привкус недозволенности будил чувственность, которая казалась отвагой, а иногда и была ею. Ведь моральная неустойчивость считалась прологом к политической неблагонадежности.

— Лучше изменить жене, чем партии, — двусмысленно ухмылялись советские плейбои, надеясь одним актом задеть обеих, ибо власть ведь тоже была женского рода.

Обращая протест внутрь, рыцарь чужой постели компенсировал интимными победами гражданские поражения. Свобода звала его к подвигам, как Луку Мудищева, чья биография встречалась в самиздате не реже «Архипелага ГУЛАГ»…

Секс, кажется, — единственная область человеческой деятельности, к которой прогресс ничего не добавил.

Помпейские фрески, храмы Каджурахо, ацтекские статуэтки, гавайский танец хула свидетельствуют, что со времен прошлого ледникового периода в постели не изобрели ничего нового, кроме самой постели. Не в силах расширить репертуар, цивилизация сужала его с помощью культуры, надеясь обратить в искусство. И только когда наш откровенный век решил, что свобода приходит нагая, рассеялся волнующий дух неопределенности, так долго витавший над смутным эросом.

New York

Март 2023