I wouldn’t say my mom is a hoarder. She’s more of a connoisseur of collecting. She’s organized about it. And there aren’t boxes obstructing the walkways in our house. But if I tell her that I really wish I could find the pink spandex outfit I wore in the fourth grade talent show or if I asked her if she still has that mug she got from the restaurant where she worked in 1978, the answer would be the same: it’s in the garage. Our garage has been home to old lawnmowers, bike pumps that don’t work, hoes (the garden kind), rusty tools (the garden kind), things seen on TV that only work on TV, sometimes a car, and thousands upon thousands of nostalgic relics.
Since my mom is trying to sell the house, she’s been cleaning out the garage and saying goodbye to the past. Therefore, I’ve been the lucky receiver of several boxes full of stuff. The most recent box housed a book we read together in third grade, a manuscript she wrote in 1983 (It’s amazing, written on a typewriter, and totally publishable.), and a HUSTLER magazine from 1976.
I know what you’re thinking: What kind of articles are in that 1976 HUSTLER magazine? Well, there’s a profile on Doyle Brunson, the world’s greatest poker player at the time. There’s a story called ‘The Fiend’ by Charles Bukowski. And there are jokes like, “The HUSTLER dictionary defines a cheap loser as a guy who fucks an old whore, turns the rubber inside out, fucks her again, and catches the clap.”
Man, after the seventies, clap jokes really fell off.
I cannot get over the sex pots of this magazine. Of course their makeup and shoes contrast the recent, but the actual bodies look almost alien compared to those of today. Because they’re real. There are no implants or photoshop in this HUSTLER and, actually, there don’t seem to be any razors either. It’s just a real celebration of the female body. The real, natural female body. I just happened to have a HUSTLER from 2011 in my possession (the articles!), so I compared. Photoshop plus the melange of treatments we give our bodies to remove our hair or bleach our assholes or tighten our vaginas or re-size our nipples or lift our faces just make us seem so… fake. I bet if a Hustler model from today walked onto a HUSTLER shoot from 1976, people would scream, poke at her boobs in fear, and then fuck her (because, come on… It’s a HUSTLER shoot).
I vowed recently to stop writing about vaginas because I am more than a mere vagina writer, but there’s no way to look at a HUSTLER without commenting on the vag-er-oos. The ones from 1976 are basically nests of hair with a tiny bit of pink poking through. It’s a hair parade. In fact, I thought for a minute this was a magazine you get at the hair salon to showcase all the new styles. Hair. And it’s not even pruned around the edges for easy swimsuit wear. We’ve been convinced in the last few decades to think that hair is bad, but these women don’t seem to mind it. It’s natural. It’s part of the human body. While the vaginas of today are completely bald, they’re also so unnaturally monochrome that they look like plastic copies of pre-pubescent vaginas. They’ve been so photoshopped or bleached or chopped that even real fourteen-year-old girls probably think these vaginas look young.
I’ve known for a while that we’ve been creating this unattainable ideal, but putting these magazines side by side actually scared me. We have trained society to beat off to something that doesn’t even exist naturally. There is so much plastic and fakery in these HUSTLER bodies that I barely see a difference between jerking off to them or a mailbox. Or a set of forks. Or a Conair 1800-watt blowdryer with retractible cord. I not only fear for women who see this stuff and feel like beauty is unattainable, I fear a constant disappointment. This and every other magazine is teaching men to be attracted to something other than the natural female body, which seems a bit counterproductive to procreation. Eve: Let’s fill the earth with the fruit of our loins. Adam: I’m actually not really feeling it. But maybe if you shove some plastic bags filled with silicone under your nipples, get laser hair removal, and cut an inch off your labia minora.
Oh, humans are funny. I hope this is just a phase and we can all soon go back to appreciating what we already have. I am oddly okay with a good wax though. Just to better see the goods. Show the goods! The real ones.
