Opting Out

I once subscribed to Playboy Magazine.  I subscribed to the magazine for much of the 1990s and continued to do so until the early 2000s.  I enjoyed the articles.

Seriously, I did.

I was not alone in enjoying the magazine.  On occasion, I had to retrieve the magazine from my daughter’s room once she matured enough to appreciate and understand the articles presented—especially the in-depth interviews with important figures of the day.  My wife normally finished most of the articles before I did.  While most of the “men’s” magazines transformed into softcore and then hardcore pornography, Playboy held to a far less revealing form of nudity.

Playboy recently announced (with the blessings of Hugh Hefner himself) that the magazine will no longer feature photographs of fully nude women.  The pervasive nature of sex and nudity on the internet and in all other media has made the once provocative and revolutionary magazine passé.  This is an astounding change for a magazine that exploded onto the American (and world) stage in 1953 featuring nude photographs of Marilyn Monroe inside.

In a sense, Playboy is a victim of its own success in broadening the acceptance and demand for sex and nudity.

According to a story in the New York Times written by Ravi Somaiya, Playboy Magazine has seen circulation plunge from 5.6 million in 1975 to 800,000 at present.  The November 1972 issue sold over 7 million copies, making it the best-selling issue in the magazine’s history.  In August of last year Playboy’s website dispensed with nudity and saw unique user traffic jump from 4 million to 16 million per month.  More astoundingly, the average age of the readers dropped from 47 to just a bit over the age of 30.

That Playboy should opt out of nudity is no small shift.  In a very real sense—for better or worse—Playboy Magazine acted as the flagship fetching nudity into the American daylight.  Hugh Hefner pushed against censorship and fought to protect First Amendment rights.  The move to dispense with nudity is nothing less than provocative.

--Mitchell Hegman

The Answer is “Maybe”

Years ago my phone rang one Saturday morning as I sat drinking my morning coffee.  I answered after a couple of rings.

Me: “Hello.”

Friend on the other end of the line: “Mitch, I am hanging a new light in my kitchen.  When I hooked it up and tried it, sparks flew and the breaker tripped.   I am naked on the ladder looking at it right now.  Can you help?”

Me:  “Maybe…but I am not coming over.  We will try to fix this one over the phone.”

--Mitchell Hegman

The Difference Between Naked and Nekkid

The other day, while I stood in one of those typical cattle-like lines at the Denver airport trying to catch my flight back to Montana, former Senator Alan Simpson, ambled by on his way to board a flight destined for his home state of Wyoming.  I am pretty certain that I was the only person to recognize him.

Most recently, Senator Simpson is known for co-chairing the Simpson-Bowles Plan (The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform).  The Simpson-Bowles Plan is designed to restructure and reduce our unremitting national debt.  The plan proposes kicking at all legs of spending and altering all aspects of our present tax structure.

Senator Simpson is also known for being a bit cranky at times and more than a little folksy.  In simple terms, he is “quotable.”  Today, I thought I would share one of my favorite Simpson quotes:

“Do you know the difference beween naked and nekkid?  If you’re naked, you don’t have any clothes on, but if you’re nekkid you don’t have any clothes on but you’re up to something.”

--Mitchell Hegman

The Curious Account of Banana Slug Sex

Perhaps you recall the nasty story of John Wayne Bobbitt and his wife Lorena.  She, a saucy little number from Ecuador, took a horrendously large kitchen knife to John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis and severed it off as he lay in a drunken stupor in their bed.  Lorena Bobbitt then fled off into the night in an automobile and, at some point, flung John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis out the car window into a field.

Luckily, a crack penis search and rescue team was dispatched to the field forthwith.   The search team managed not only to locate the penis (based strictly on member size, I doubt they would have had such luck had I been Lorena Bobbitt’s victim), they also found the member in a timely enough fashion that the penis was yet viable.

Surgeons later successfully re-attached the penis to the rest of John Bobbitt, though doctors informed Mr. Bobbitt that he would likely be unsuccessful in pleasuring women again.  John Wayne Bobbitt proved the doctors wrong in that regard.  In fact, he even went on to “star” in a few porn movie productions, including: John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut and Frankenpenis.

    

Some versions of the Lorena Bobbitt story make claim that she (pun not necessarily intended) whacked off John’s penis because he did not properly pleasure her on the night of the assault.  Lorena is known to have a temper.  Long after the John Bobbitt incident, she was accused of slugging her mother because her mother switched to the wrong television program while they sat together watching a shared television set (Lorena’s actions in this second case do seem somewhat defensible to me).

Anyhow, I bring up the story of John and Lorena Bobbitt because I saw a banana slug while hiking through a redwood forest in California last week.

For those of you lacking in knowledge about the sex life of banana slugs, you need to know a few things about banana slugs.  First of all, banana slugs are endowed with an enormous penis.

We are talking seriously large here.

Banana slugs can grow to a size of 6 or 8 inches in length.  A slug’s erect penis can be as long as its body.  That’s pretty big relatively speaking.  Oddly enough, you might think that surgeons mistakenly attached the slug’s penis to the wrong spot because the erect penis sprouts from the banana slug’s head rather than from “down there.”

Banana slugs are also hermaphrodites.  For this reason, all adult slugs have female parts and should also be endowed with a whopper penis.  In this way, any slug should be able to mate with any other slug—a convenient arrangement at slug bar closing time.

Here is the part where Lorena Bobbitt enters Slug World.

 

Not all mature adults have a penis.  Some slugs have had their members lopped off.  Well, gnawed off might be closer to the mark.  Seems as though some slugs will sever the penis off their mate during the act of sex by vigorously chewing through it.  Slug experts—yes they do exist—are not entirely certain why slugs engage in such behavior.  Are they selfishly limiting gene pool options?   Does the severed penis remain as a “plug” to make sure that sexual transfer material remains in place?   Are the slugs stuck together and merely trying to escape?  Or (this is entirely my own theory) has one slug been a dismal lover?

I was a bit horrified the first time I read an account of slug lovemaking.  Slug World is a slow, yet, apparently brutal place.  For those of you likely to encounter a slug at any time in the near future…I suggest you not allow your penis near said slug.

Posted is the photograph I captured of the slug I met along a shadowy trail.

       --Mitchell Hegman

Slug information thanks to: TGIPF: The Weird World of Banana Slug Sex: Redux, by: Cassandra Willyard

Vudu Sister: “Psalms”

A bit of purely American music.

--Mitchell Hegman

Among Giants

I have been disappointed by more than a few tourist destinations in my life.  Not so with California’s Humboldt Redwoods State Park.  Upon entering the forest of giant redwoods, my own smallness produced a sense of slow-motion that overwhelmed me.  The first urge was to stop the car and step outside in an effort to measure—to fathom what surrounded me.  The next urge was to walk deep into the so-called “darkness at noon” created by the shadows of the giants.

Something about everything changed once I wandered out among the trees.

I touched one of the giants and looked up.   The trees are so tall, I could not see the top from where I stood.  Some are so broad at the base, they might be mistaken for buildings.  The scent of ancient earth and the silence of untold years enveloped me.  Looking back at that girl among the trees and the tiny car just off the narrow road, a sense of my human frailty came clear—a feeling not so different from peering up into the endless arrangement of stars from the open prairie late at night.

Some things are beyond my simple forms of measure. 

  

Imagine.  These giants were alive and old when my great grandmother’s great grandmother was born.  Some of these goliaths have been alive for 2,000 years.  Whole human empires have risen and collapsed at the feet of these titans.  A fallen (freight-train-sized) tree might remain extending across the ferns on the forest floor for hundreds of years.

I have always been interested in the biology and the science of the clockworks and beasts that surround me.  But upon entering the redwoods the impact was entirely sensory and emotional for me.

Posted are two photographs from deep in the redwood forest.  That girl (you will find her in both photographs) provides some perspective of size for the redwood trees.

--Mitchell Hegman

A Toast to Tire Jacks and Mountain Lions

First, I would like to thank all the powers that be for not ending the world yesterday.

Apparently, the world was supposed to end yesterday and—once again, thankfully—I missed it.  I am still here.  This time around, the fey prediction of the end came from eBible Fellowship.  At least we are now incorporating in internet into the nutty predictions of doom that have been following us around like a stray dog for the last two-thousand years.  Perhaps this is a step in the correct direction to reach our doom. 

Now to the toast.

Upon leaving Shelter Cove yesterday morning, we opted for a somewhat “sketch” dirt road shortcut through the King Mountains.

Four things about that:

One: Did not make it through.

Two: Got stuck in a deep and boulder-strewn spring’s crossing.  We extricated ourselves after the girls gathered a bunch of sticks and rocks so I could use the tire jack to raise the car and crib under the tires to gain traction.  After a half-hour or so, we freed the car again.

Three: Saw a mountain lion as we retreated back to the main road.

Four: I had one of the best days I have had in a very long time with my two girls.

Upon reaching San Francisco late in the evening, we raised our glass in a toast to tire jacks and mountain lions.

Cheers!

 --Mitchell Hegman