The Pious Pornographers Revisited

" '... There is a difference of medical opinion as to the best method of toughening the nipples ...' "

Propped up in my favorite easy chair, I cautiously resumed reading the curious saga of Evelyn Ayres, troubled heroine of another stirring episode of "Tell Me, Doctor," the Ladies' Home Journal's long-playing feature on clinical sex and gynecological horrors. Years of familiarity with its format of fear, disaster and medical salvation had led me to think of this everexpanding anthology of female malfunctions as a kind of cryptoprurient Memoirs of a Woman of Misery, in which Evelyn Ayres now starred as the anxiety-fraught Fanny Hill of Breast Feeding. With her roseate but wrong-way nipple gently tugged into conformity with its perky twin, and toughened to accommodate the eager mouth of her expected infant, Evelyn nevertheless had a few ninth-month misgivings about trying to nurture her child at the bosom.

"The doctor looked at her in surprise. 'Why, Evelyn, you're the girl who told me on your very first prenatal visit how anxious you were to breast feed. You've been conditioning your nipples and breasts for weeks. Have you changed your mind?'

"'It's not that. But my friends who have tried to breast feed tell me it's no use, people won't let you. They say the nurses slip bottles to the baby in the nursery, make it as hard for you as they can ...'

" 'Sit down, Evelyn.' The doctor pulled forward the straight-backed chair he kept for his more pregnant patients. 'The things your friends mention can happen, I know ... But they are not going to happen in your case,' " he assured her. And how right the doctor was. "Healthy, lively William Ayres III, born 36 hours later, was given to his mother to hold before she left the delivery room, then brought to her thereafter for nursing at regular intervals. Evelyn was helped to empty the breast ducts three times a day, even before the milk appeared. By the third morning, when the milk came flooding in, the baby was suckling like a veteran. Evelyn looked up at the doctor with a proud, happy smile when he entered her room during the midmorning feeding:

" 'Why, there's nothing to it, Doctor! ... My breasts are running over with milk, and how Billy loves it! The nurse declared he smacked his lips all the way down the hall when she was bringing him to me!' "

Savoring a mellow swig of the high-potency formula which I had been gently nursing through all this, I reflected that male readers who had not been keeping abreast of the flow of ideas expressed by the women's magazines were apt to consider the act of breast feeding to be only marginally sexual. But I had Betsy Marvin McKinney's word for it, on page 12 of the same issue of the Ladies' Home Journal, that "one of the most stimulating predisposers of orgasm in a woman may be childbirth followed by several months of lactation," and that breast feeding was "now thought to be a final and specific maturing factor in developing woman's full sexual sensitivity and response to sexual intercourse."

For whatever reason, the ladies' magazines' new emphasis upon the joys of lactation was evident from the sheer number of articles on breast feeding that appeared in their pages during the six-year period commencing in August 1958, when Mrs. Florence Short of Chittenden, Vermont, invited all America to share in the "thrilling experience" of wet-nursing a neighbor's sickly infant back to health in the pages of the Ladies' Home Journal.

Upon being told of the ailing infant's condition, Mrs. Short--whose vividly detailed account has earned her a life-sized bust in my personal Hall of Fame as the literary mother of the whole come-to-mammae movement--"rushed down the hill" to her neighbor's house. "I asked the mother if she would consider letting me try to nurse the baby ..." Mrs. Short reported. "I took the baby and tried to encourage her to suck from my breast. She seemed too weak and undeveloped to suck at all, so I started squirting the milk into her mouth. As soon as she tasted the milk she became very excited. I managed to get a couple of ounces into her stomach in this manner. Another neighbor who was there exclaimed, 'Why, I never saw anything like it! ...' "

The baby's mother was equally impressed, Mrs. Short confided--and I, for one, could readily believe it. By way of an encore, perhaps, Mrs. Short promised to "hand-express some more milk in an hour or so and send it to her in a jar." That evening, an additional two ounces were rushed down the hill, and when Mrs. Short visited her neighbor the following morning, the grateful mother told her that "the baby, and she herself, had had the first good night's sleep in weeks."

During the next fortnight, Mrs. Short delivered "six to eight ounces of milk each day," while my own wakefulness increased to the point where I was counting pints, quarts and squirts in an effort to get to sleep. Not least among the causes of my insomnia was the knowledge that Mrs. Short's dramatic testimonial was to inspire the hand-expression of a number of similar outpourings in the pages of the women's magazines. By September 1963, claims for the virtues of breast feeding had become so numerous and various that Cosmopolitan felt obliged to lead off its monthly medical news with a warning to women who were laboring and loving under the dubious belief that "so long as they breast feed a baby they cannot become pregnant again."

In June 1960, the same magazine had already managed to clamp a large C-cup of sickness over the whole mammary mystique by noting the rise of a "breast-shape obsession" which led many women to seek "beautifying" plastic surgery on their breasts. This "morbid preoccupation with breast shape may cover up a personality disorder arising from such situations as an unhappy or abnormal childhood, bitter rivalry with a prettier sister, hidden homosexual tendencies, extreme self-love, etc.," Cosmopolitan declared, and backed this statement with a clutch of case histories--like the one about the "20-year-old blonde who so feared her breasts were 'repellent' (which they were not) that the very idea of ever exposing them made her avoid men and reject marriage."

Fortunately for Cosmopolitan, no such debilitating fears seemed to beset the cute and curvaceous young model on that month's cover. Clad in a brief red-and-blue bikini, her candid cleavage did much to attract attention to an issue devoted to "beauty all over." On the inside, the theme of the month was given uninhibited play with a shot of another young model taking a warm paraffin bath in full view of all who bumbled onto page 43 without knocking, and a large photo spread of eight shapely sirens modeling the latest in bikinis. The fact that the bikini had as many knockers as boosters was amply illustrated by an eye-popping news shot of a barely covered blonde being handed a ticket for "indecent exposure" on a beach in Italy, and a full-length study of bikiniclad Julie Newmar with the uniformed guard assigned to protect her lightly trussed charms from admirers in Puerto Rico. There was an eye-teasing takeout on the titular beauties who competed in the Miss World and Miss Universe contests, and a hip-to-hairdo flash photo of Holland's Corine Rottshafer having her queen-size bust dimension checked by a hand-held tape measure. "A defeated and disgruntled contestant charged that Miss Rottshafer was 'padded in the bra,' " Cosmo commiserated, "a calumny that is bound to outrage any beauty of today. However, the unruffled queen agreeably submitted to a verification test, and emerged triumphant. She added, 'I wasn't inhaling, either.' "

Back in the "Special Fiction Section," meanwhile, 12-year-old Jimmy Prescott, male protagonist of a short story called "The Gleaners," was gasping in wonderment at the sight of a large, unpadded blonde named Gloria Duval, who was doing a striptease on a moonlit diving board. The big, gorgeous color illustration showed little Jimmy leaning, weak with awe, against the board upon which Gloria was peeling down to her warm pink pelt. But the text revealed that Jimmy was merely conjuring up the scene in his head, while his little friend Karen gave an eyewitness account of the event, which had taken place during her parents' patio party the night before:

"Karen whispered on: 'So there she was, standing all alone up there in the moonlight ... and then she began to dance!' Jimmy's heart gave a jump. 'Began to dance right up there on that little board. She hummed a song to herself about a pretty girl is like a melody, and she smiled up at the moon and started taking off her clothes.' Jimmy squirmed just to think of it. 'And everybody down below didn't say any more. They just watched ...

" 'So she took off her clothes one by one and dropped them over the side, down to everybody waiting down below. When she took off her bra it must have fallen in the pool instead, because she was out on the end of the board at the time. And then she started to step out of her panties and changed her mind and dove into the pool instead ...' "

While the precocious Karen continued to describe the revels, and pour the ready-mixed manhattans on which she and Jimmy were to get so poignantly smashed, I began to awaken to the fact that Cosmopolitan had been shedding its fiction fig leaves for some time now. More and more women characters were to be found knocking around in various stages of undress, while bras and panties were being dropped as casually as hankies and gloves.

As early as March 1960, Cosmo's "Special Fiction Section" had featured a pleasingly plump heroine, named Mrs. Jefferies, whose ample and oft-displayed charms had the power to keep her husband in a high old state of erotic readiness. "The simple fact is that women like Mrs. Jefferies are not meant to wear clothes at all; they are meant to wander about nude," the author of "The Third Party" opined. And wander about Mrs. Jefferies did. Mr. Jefferies couldn't have been more pleased. He liked "solid, rounded women," but Mrs. J. yearned for the slim, angular figure of a fashion model. "She muttered about her fatness, and wailed about her shortness, she bemoaned her muscular legs and her (continued on page 202)Pornographers Revisited(continued from page 118) unmeltable fundament. Worst of all, she became impossible in bed. 'Stop touching me,' she would groan, 'it reminds me how fat I am!'

"Jefferies had tried his best. He loved her, every ounce of her. He begged her not to diet. He swore he wanted her the way she was ..." A big-body buff from way back, Jefferies seemed far less interested in his wife's bosoms than he was in her tummy that "curved out, gently and roundly," and her aforementioned "unmeltable fundament." Once, while savoring the nude sight of her lush curves and bulges, he had occasion to wonder, "Did she look a bit--a bit overblown? A bit--ample? But as he applied a cold, critical appraisal to the breadth of her pelvis, she turned and bent over, pulling on a slipper, and he suddenly felt a little warm, much less impersonal, and not critical at all ..."

Gazing at Mrs. J.'s jolly pink buttocks, Jefferies was visited by an inspiration. What she needed was someone to tell her that "she's a Real Woman," he decided--someone other than himself to "tell her she looks like Aphrodite ... tell her she's what every man really wants." In an effort to regain his bedded bliss, Jefferies dashed off a note to his old friend Dick, urging him to flatter Mrs. J. into an awareness of her Real Womanhood. At the cocktail party which followed, Dick so charmed Mrs. J. that she and he soon vanished into the darkness of night. "At last, after forty-four and one-half minutes, Dick and Jefferies' wife returned. Jefferies could tell instantly that the expedition had been an unqualified success: His wife was glowing, she walked like a queen, she radiated the self-confidence of a woman who knows she is a Woman." Reading between the lines, the reader gathered that Mrs. Jefferies continued to glow in bed that night, and that all her hubby's touches were ardently received. "She slept late in the morning. Jefferies, quelling the alarm clock, decided fondly to get his own breakfast and let her sleep. His eyes traced the lovely curve of her hip under the blankets. He sighed. No woman is as amorous as a woman who knows she is a Woman."

The story didn't end there, however. The happy fade-out on Mrs. Jefferies' curvy hip was followed by a Boccaccio-type twist in which Jefferies discovered that he had forgotten to mail the note he had written to his old friend Dick--thus leaving little doubt that Jefferies' wife and his best friend had been drawn together by mutual desire, and that the radiant reawakening of the Real Woman had been touched off by the all-too-real advances of a genuinely aroused Dick. "It's funny how a man likes to believe that other men desire his wife," the author mused in the tag line, "but hates like hell to get indisputable proof of it."

Other instances of extramarital darling-do were proven out in Cosmopolitan's very next issue. When John Kirk, the photographer hero of "The Unspeakable," was held under suspicion of being the sex fiend responsible for the rape-murder of five-year-old Chrissie Alonzo, he couldn't reveal his alibi to the sheriff, because the alibi was that he, Kirk, had been off in the bushes at the time, making love to the sheriff's young wife. "A shudder seized him. 'Mind telling me where you were, Mr. Kirk?' I was over in the park, in the dark, with Laury. I was making love to your wife. Cheating on you ..." In the same outdoorsy cast of nature lovers was young Mona Warren, a night-blooming teenager, whose alfresco frisking behind the grape arbor with a married handyman had led to an acute case of pregnancy--but "at least she had finally known a man's love," the author philosophized, "for whatever little it might be worth, for however much it might still cost."

Cost was no consideration when pert and pretty Julie Loring ran into her old flame, the now-married Harry, in the same month's lead fiction piece. "She stared at Harry with a rapt, moist gaze, hating herself deliciously at finding that after four dry years Harry could still, by no more than his presence, cause her to swell inside and tingle in odd places."

Julie made Harry tingle and swell, too. As they lay side by side on the narrow deck of his sailing sloop, Harry "began rubbing her back through the thin material of her dress.

" 'Julie, Julie,' he whispered. He did not stop caressing her. 'You can't know how much I've missed you.' "

After a brief bit of earlobe kissing, Harry's amatory massage "became more fevered," and Julie was moved to recall the romantic details of their first intercourse together: "'Golly, Harry, you know something? I can repeat almost every word you and I said that night in your old station wagon. You were going back up to college, and I was missing you already, and you wanted to do something right then and there, and I wanted to do it too, but I wanted worse to run away so I wouldn't have to choose between doing it and not doing it, because you said it wasn't going to be so long before we were married anyhow, so why didn't we do it and--how did you say it, remember?--you said, "Oh, Julie, let's just do it and charge it to our account."' The gentle, persuasive hand on her back faltered in its stroking, then continued with renewed, more earnest application. Julie knew she was blushing vigorously, and thanked the darkness for hiding it from him.... 'Well, Harry, you were right. Any woman is a sucker for a charge account.' She gave a short laugh.... 'So we did it, and you went away, and then, whoops-my-dear, I heard three weeks later that you were married into the upper crust.' She chided him gently now, as though he were her weak-willed brother ..."

Protesting that his marriage had been an "awful mistake," Harry "humped himself closer to her, so close that they lay now in total contact," and whispered, "'Honey, Julie baby, listen, it isn't too late, ever. I've got to see you again. I can get down every weekend this winter, I think. I need you, Julie!'

" 'No!' she said with intentional loudness. More softly, she added, 'It couldn't work.' Still facing the dark water, she grinned; how funny it was to have Harry beside her on the foredeck of this little old boat, wearing his shiny-stripe tux pants! She knew the whole length of him beside her, pressing her, hard and shaking with his tension. Then the monotonous rubbing of her back suddenly stopped.... His clever fingers plucked at the zipper of her dress; with a quick tug he pulled the zipper completely down, then slipped his hand in to rub the bare skin of her back. 'Stop!' she cried, but she did not move in any way to stop him ...

" 'Shhh! It's all right,' Harry said to soothe her, and his hand began carefully to explore the eye hooks which closed the band of her brassiere."

Since April 1960 was still a bit early for Cosmopolitan to permit its readers whoops-my-dear prose peeks at people actually "doing it," the story was so plotted that Julie rolled overboard the moment Harry got his clever fingers on her brassiere hooks. Having rubbed and caressed every last ounce of titillation from the scene, the author deftly unzipped a new angle--namely, that Julie had been merely leading Harry on in order to fake a drowning and involve her old flame in a scandal that would revenge his having jilted her after all that sweet talk in his old station wagon.

After more than a year of such literary foreplay, Cosmo finally came out with a story of sex in the South Seas, which gave its fair fiction fans a full-view, flagrante-delicto description of sexual intercourse, without any distracting involvement with zippers, hooks, station wagons, grape arbors, sailboats or off-stage shrubbery. As Zola Martin, the middle-aged French protagonist of "Prisoner of Paradise," explained it, he had gone to Polynesia because love in the islands had "a simplicity, a spontaneity, a kindness, that we Europeans have lost"--an observation that was most passionately affirmed within days of his arrival upon the frangipani-fringed shores of Tahiti-iti:

"During the night I awoke slowly, and there was a hand in my lava-lava. It was the hand of a girl who was crouched down beside me, staring into my face and smiling at me. She was young, perhaps 13 years old. She was very slim and her breasts were just barely large enough to hold up her pareu.

"She bent her head close to my ear and whispered into my ear in French. She told me that the dancing had excited her especially because she had never seen a white man dancing. As she spoke, she let her hand wander over my legs and between them.

"For a moment on that warm beach, my European conscience rebelled. I felt I could not do what the child wanted. What she wanted me to do was technically a crime in every civilized country of the world. She sensed my reluctance and laughed. It was not a nervous or hysterical laugh; it was the curious laughter of an inquisitive child. I took her and it was sheer pleasure. She made love in the style that the natives call maori: quick, savage and silent. At the climax, her tiny body arched up, she moaned, and then her fingernails scratched down my face. It was over very quickly, but it was a very skillful performance and the girl seemed to be deeply satisfied. I am still not quite sure how I feel today, except that I know that I am excited."

I'm still not quite sure how I felt that day, either--except I know that I wasn't too surprised to find that Cosmopolitan had finally abandoned its fictional maidenhead. It was a skillful performance, for all its brevity, and undoubtedly left a goodly number of lady fiction lovers deeply satisfied. For many, it must have been sheer pleasure just to get a vicarious hand between a man's legs without having to visit the medical department and feign clinical interest in ailing prostate glands and low sperm counts.

This is not to suggest that "Prisoner of Paradise" abandoned entirely those high moral principles which most Americans would expect to find in a family-type magazine. In fact, a certain aura of propriety began to settle about the sexual affairs of Zola Martin and his little Tahitian friend, Toma, shortly after the talented teen-urger had taken him for his first spin on the seaside maori-go-round: "At Zola's invitation, she had moved from her relatives' house into his house. They lived together for about six months and then Toma told Zola that she was pregnant. Zola insisted upon being married, and being married in a church."

Toma, blissfully unaware of the ladies' books' oft-expressed horror at the mere thought of unwed teenage mothers, "was puzzled, but she consented"--thereby eliminating one obstacle which may have stood in the way of the story's acceptance. Another point in its favor was the fact that, after only a few years of marriage, old Zola wound up bored with his child bride: "Toma could make only one flower arrangement, could cook poi only one way, cook fish only one way, make love in only one way ..." In short, with no women's magazines to guide them, Tahitian wives were in such a culinary and erotic rut that a native hubby knew exactly what dinner would be like when he opened his eyes in the morning, and could predict the little woman's sexual responses down to the last scratch and moan.

"For them, sex is not really an act of love," Zola explained to the young writer who was the story's nameless narrator. "It is a way to break tedium, a way of breaking the monotony of endless beautiful days. It is like a game, but no more than a game." For all its predictable moves, jumps and gambits, however, the game seemed endlessly fascinating to the Polynesian teen set. "We had almost finished our walk when we met a young boy and girl walking in the opposite direction," the narrator wrote, apropos the native belief that it's better to maori than burn. "They said hello to us and then vanished on the path. Zola turned and looked at me.

" 'They have just finished making love in the bushes,' he said. His voice was expressionless.

" 'How could you tell?' I asked.

" 'Really it is an exercise in probability,' he said. 'Quite literally, every time a Tahitian girl and boy meet casually, it leads to sexual intercourse. The only exceptions are if they are brother and sister, or if one of them is malformed.' "

There were times when it seemed that the same "exercise in probability" could be applied to most of the boy-girl meetings that occurred in Cosmopolitan's fiction. For example, while little Toma was groping inside Zola's lava-lava in a manner calculated to make the world-weary Frenchman forget to inquire about her cooking ability, a nude and nubile young maiden, named Lena Cartwright, was to be seen stepping from an outdoor shower stall into a patch of American moonlight, on page 100 of the same September issue: "... There they were: the moon, its shadows, and Lena. The soft wind blew over Lena's wet and willing body, chilling her. She folded her arms and they were empty. She was empty outside, and empty inside. In the full light of the full moon, she stood and let the wind caress her, sweet as the scuppernongs." Actually, though, Lena didn't care two hoots about being caressed by the wind. She wanted Mac Hayworth to caress her:

"Once under the scuppernong vine, she and Mac had all but arrived at an understanding. It was a warm night, and the scuppernongs were golden ripe and sweet to the taste ... Lena almost had him persuading her; she was ready to say yes to the warm persuasion of his hands, when he heard the sound of a dog trailing something in the branch woods behind the house, and he left her there, persuaded but unavailed."

"Everybody said that when Mac Hay-worth heard a dog sound, there wasn't anything that could stop him," the author of "September Moon" remarked--and, in this case, everybody was right. Mac was so devoted to his hounds, he never did come back, and Lena's "expectation that Mac would find her there, waiting to be persuaded, wasted with the last scuppernong ..." Just what Lena wanted the warm-handed Mac to persuade her to do, and what sort of "understanding" they had almost arrived at, was anybody's guess. But, in the year that followed, Lena was made terribly restless by "ideas." "She could not rid herself of them. They stayed with her all day long, followed her like some silent hound, eating at her like the hunger for something sweet."

All summer long, "Lena made nightly pilgrimages to the bathhouse ... She always knew something would happen, out there alone"--and, sure enough come September, something did. There she was, standing in the moonlight, letting the wind caress her willing body, when who should happen along but Mac and his pack of dogs. "'Why, Lena,' he said. 'I'd forgot all about that mole there.' "

Moonlit mole and all, Lena "leaped back into the bathhouse," and waited: "When the last sound of the dogs had died away, she stepped out into the light and shadows, her kimono drawn about her. Through the wind in the pines, she heard Mac Hayworth call her softly from the scuppernongs.

"The dogs had gone, but he had been waiting for her. All she needed now was some more persuading."

Since that was the end, and it wasn't likely that Mac would go high-tailing after his beagles at that hour, it was no more than an "exercise in probability" that Lena got all the persuading she needed--right under the scuppernongs.

But so much for the old-fashioned love story. While Lena and Mac, Toma and Zola, and the Tahitian teen set were cutting up in the bushes, and on the beach, and out in the grape arbor, a bunch of small boys were up in a fictional chinaberry tree getting an eyeful of the neighborhood shenanigans described in the next story in the same sex-happy September issue. Recounting this voyeuristic adventure in "I Came Down in Splendor," the story's narrator recalled all "the little night scenes not meant to be witnessed." One such scene involved 16-year-old Barbie Flaxman and her young gentleman friend: "Boy, did she have a conniption when I told my mother what we saw them doing from up here--her and that stupid buckethead Calvin Fox!" And, in yet another vignette, sex was provided with an indoor setting for the first time in many a Cosmopolitan moon: "Miss Dahl had company in her back bedroom and, naked as the day they were born, the two of them were dancing as though they were on a ballroom floor. I watched them for a time, but then the light went out ..."

Peeping between the leaves of subsequent issues of Cosmopolitan, I found that most lovers preferred bushes to back bedrooms, and that sexual passions were likely to flare up the minute any man and woman got within 30 feet of any green growth--be it a scuppernong vine, a frangipani bush, or a patch of municipal crab grass. The same autumn season found handsome Bill Fernley and his "best friend's young wife," Moira Cummings, engaged in a losing struggle against the aphrodisiac aromas and verdure of an entire Malayan rubber plantation: "Her perfume was in his nostrils, a smell of woman, of sweat, of horse, all mixed up with the warm, fecund odor of the jungle.... This was an atavistic dream of a man and woman alone in a Garden of Eden, perfumed, flecked with butterflies. A red petal fell from the African tulip tree ...

" 'Oh, Bill,' she whispered, half-choking.... Then he kissed her. Her lips were like orchids--crumpled, soft, cool, moist. They clung to his. Her arms were around his neck...."

Whether Moira Cummings moaned and arched her back at the climax suggested by those four fecund punctuation points, I wouldn't venture to guess. But as she and Fernley trotted home on horseback, she gave every indication of being deeply satisfied and relaxed:

" 'I'll say I had a fall,' Moira said.

"A fall, he thought. That was the right word.... My best friend, he thought. How often had he read about it in the papers. How many men had betrayed their best friends? ..."

Quite a few, I gathered, after a quick spot check of Cosmo's fiction pages. Adultery was all the go, and if a chap failed in his attempts to make maori with another man's wife, it was probably due to his being trapped indoors. "Molloy was a man who thought he had everything.... Could he add the lighthouse keeper's wife to his special collection?" Cosmo asked, a couple of months later, at the top of a story called "Flashing Red." The answer, of course, was no, because the ground was covered with snow, and that stupid buckethead Molloy made the foolish mistake of approaching the lighthouse keeper's wife indoors--in a bedroom!

Though I may have missed a few allusions to indoor intercourse during this six-year survey, my records reveal that fictional descriptions of extramarital sex were locked out of the bedroom until February 1964, when Cosmopolitan allowed Bob Jointer to get under the sheets with his brother's wife, Lillian. But, even then, the scene lacked the passionate frenzy it might have had if it (or she, or he, or they) had been laid outdoors, amidst the warm, fecund aroma of horse, sweat and African tulip trees:

"We stood for a moment and then turned, and quite naturally walked to the stairs, Lillian leading then, because those stairs were narrow. Once we were in the bedroom, we began, one on either side of the couch, reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly--although perhaps not in the fear of God--to pull back the spread and open the bed. Then, quite unaffectedly, both of us undressed, and I was careful to fold my trousers in their creases, my jacket too, and my shoes side by side, my watch and billfold where I could find them. Lillian was just as meticulous. When we were in bed we made love as naturally as though we had done it a hundred times, and then for a while we slept.

"Somewhat later we made love again and this time Lillian began to cry," Bob reported from somewhere in the bed. "... She sobbed and then held me fiercely. 'You must not think that I was trying to get even with her,' " she sobbed, in tearful reference to Bob's wife. " 'You wanted me just as much as I wanted you. We just didn't do it to get even with her.' "

Bob soothed her doubts, and Lillian's tears soon melted into laughter. "Then we slept again, and then we talked again, and then she said, 'I just didn't know how much I need this, and you've got to think of it as just that ... But you've made me feel alive, and I don't know how to thank you for that.' Then she cried, but not so violently as before, and then said, 'But you mustn't think this happens every time I meet a man, because it doesn't. It hasn't happened since ... well, for a long, long time it hasn't happened at all. And I don't want you to think ... what you might think, because it isn't so but I am a woman, and I want to be a woman, and ...' "

As I meticulously folded the February '64 issue of Cosmopolitan, and carefully put it where I couldn't see it when I climbed into the sack for eight blissful hours of uninterrupted sleep, Lillian's sobs and protests kept echoing in my ears. Much of her agonizing had probably been due to the stress and strain of having to "do it" in bed, I felt. And now that it was over, I was in a better position to understand the reluctance of all the fictional heroes who had fought so long and hard to keep from being seduced into any sort of indoor hanky-panky.

Take Clem Regan, the rugged male lead of "Run Like a Thief," which Cosmopolitan trotted out in May 1962. While his wife Liz was in the hospital having their first baby, Regan found himself trapped in his New York apartment with a lapload of Elena, a passionate little teenage beatnik, whom he had previously rescued from mass sexual assault by a gang of neighborhood hoods:

"Her mouth felt soft, moist, hungry. The kiss lasted and lasted while my brain reeled and my body responded. My arms were around her, clutching those female curves against me. She proved her point, all right. She was a woman worth taking.

"In that endless minute, I didn't think of Liz, my marriage, ethics, commandments, morals. I didn't think, period.... All I know is that I twisted my fingers in that black hair and pressed her face to mine.

"Lack of breath made us end that kiss. We had to come up for air. Elena was panting, but her whisper was clear. 'I showed you. And that is only the start.'

"That blew the final whistle.

"The curves in my arms belonged to the wrong girl. She was Elena something, not Liz Regan.... I stood up and dumped Elena from my lap to the floor.

"She hit with a crash, stared up at me, ugly with shock.

" 'Sorry,' I said. 'Nothing doing.' "

Infuriated but determined, Elena was up at the count of two and "began to tug the sweat shirt up over her head.

"I couldn't just stand there, enjoying the striptease, because I knew Elena wanted more than applause. I didn't dare wait for the finish," Regan explained. "As soon as her head was muffled in the folds of the sweat shirt, I charged.

"My right shoulder hit her in the middle as hard as I've ever taken out a defensive halfback. She doubled over, the whoosh of knocked-out air lost in the sweat shirt. Without checking my drive, I carried her to the door.

"It was like wrestling with an angry seal, but I managed to get her down the stairs," the dauntless girl-wrangler recalled. He "set her on her feet outside in the courtyard," and "ran like fury." He "bolted the courtyard door, raced up the stairs," and locked himself in the apartment. Whether he ever came out again, or whether Elena finally got revenge by laying for him in the courtyard, I'll never know, because my attention was soon distracted by a nude study of a young blonde, which was used to billboard next month's "spine-tingling novel of mystery and suspense."

Cosmopolitan's new-found tolerance toward fictional sex has never been more succinctly expressed than it was in "The Gimlet Affair," another "Complete Mystery Novel," published earlier in the year. Seated in his law office late one afternoon, W. Gideon Jones found himself "distracted by the red head of Millie Morgan," his secretary, whose other charms were reputed to be "even more distracting than her head."

"If you have no serious objections," Millie said, "I'll leave now."

"No objections," W. Gideon Jones said. "Go on home."

"I'm not going home. I've got a date for cocktails and dinner with an engineer. We may try sex."

"You'll like it," W. Gideon replied. "It's fun."

Like Millie Morgan, any "Complete Mystery" character was liable to try sex at any time, I discovered. The mystery was not only "who done it," but who was going to "do it" next--and to whom? Three paragraphs later, for instance, W. Gideon Jones himself was in the Kiowa Room of the Hotel Carson, where he met up with sultry Beth Webb, "as conniving a blonde as ever tried to steal another girl's husband." A few rounds of gimlets and a little knee play under the table soon laid the groundwork for an assignation in Dreamer's Park. Only Beth's untimely murder prevented W. Gideon Jones from going astray in the shrubbery that night--but the reader's evening and the sexual reputation of the great outdoors were saved by a couple of teenage kids who had been warming up in a short story on page 96, called "The Bridge."

From the very beginning, there was no mystery about who was going to go to grass with Laura. She had been walking home from school with George for years. "I want to do something," George announced, as they stood on the lonely bridge, shortly after their 15th birthdays. "There was no noise," Laura recollected. "He looked at me for half a minute before he did it, with his eyes wide and the flecks inside the gray shifting and swarming ... Then they came closer, and all I could see was his eyes, and he didn't shut them when he kissed me.

"It took a long time.

" 'There won't be anybody else,' I said.

"We went across the bridge to the soft dark grass and the deep ragged tree shadows like pieces torn out of the night and I said: 'I will not ever love anybody else in my life, nobody but you.' I put my arms around his shoulders and I pulled him down on top of me on the grass."

Shifting my gray-flecked eyes from the two new shadows that merged on the soft dark grass like yet another piece torn out of the night, I found that Cosmopolitan had embodied the "try sex" theme in a "Special Report" on "Trial Marriages," on page 82 of the same issue. The big news was that "more and more young people" were sleeping together without benefit of clergy, and that premarital honeymoons and other forms of playing house were on the rise. The effects of this "disturbing trend" were weighed and examined with the same thoroughness that characterized the women's magazines' other studies of mating and dating among the young--for, despite Cosmo's permissiveness toward the fictional affairs of such warmly persuadable adolescents as Laura, Lena and Toma, teen sex was the single most distressing problem the ladies' books had to worry about during the entire 1958--1964 period.

In the same February month when George and Laura exchanged the ultimate in Valentine greetings on the soft dark grass, the Ladies' Home Journal ran a think-out on "the unwed mother--what should she do?" In outlining the options open to a pregnant young miss named Nora, the Journal displayed the same deep concern for parturient teens it had manifested back in August 1958, in "teenage illegitimate pregnancy--why does it happen?" The Journal knew why it happened, of course, and had merely adopted the interrogative in order to arouse reader interest in the stories of such unfortunate girls as Adele Collins ("who at the age of 15 had given birth to two illegitimate children"), Martha F. ("When Martha was 14, the girls in her high school reported that she was pregnant"), Sandra (whose mother told everyone that Sandra "had a spot on her lungs"), and "cheerful, happy-go-lucky" Bernice ("She discussed her sex life gaily and frankly. She said that she began to have relations with boys when she was 12 and she guessed she just couldn't help it ...").

In November of the same year, the Journal added to its case load of little mothers in a cover story that jumped up and shouted, "schoolgirl marriages--why?" In this one, the editor-writer--who was, apparently, on a first-name basis with all fecund young females who found themselves in a family way--introduced the nation to the toothsome likes of Marlene, "a tall, lush blonde, fully developed physically although she is only 15," and Georgia, "a rounded, sun-ripened 18-year-old, glowing with vitality." It was Georgia who first got down to the grass roots of the problem by exclaiming, "I had to get married. That's the reason for most teenage marriages, isn't it?"

Phyllis, who was "a little heavy but well built," obviously agreed. "It happened the first time after a Christmas dance at school," she recalled. "Of course there was a lot of drinking, and, well, with the liquor and all, and thinking I was really in love with Mac, and the automobile right there, it just seemed impossible not to ..."

"Of course it's awfully hard not to," a "tall, pretty blonde" named Peggy admitted. "You both want to so much." "I managed to hold off for almost two months, but on February first I gave in," Laura, "a thin girl, with softly tumbled curls," added. "It was just impossible not to ..." Most unfortunate of all was a "softly rounded" little loser named Barbara. "The thing was, I was nearly five months pregnant and I didn't know it," she said. "We really hadn't done anything wrong. That is--we never had intercourse. But of course we'd played around a lot, pretty close and all that. But I never dreamed it could make me pregnant unless we went the whole way!"

Even more perplexed was Olga, "merry of face and body," who didn't know "what made babies" until after she had given birth to her first. Ignorance was no excuse for the next five, however, and Olga went on to become the star of "Sometimes Life Just Happens," another Journal story on unwed mothers, which appeared in October 1962. In all, Olga, Helen, Ruby, Mattie, Lily and Linda were on the receiving end of 21 unscheduled flights of the stork--thereby establishing a record which was still standing in September 1963, when the Journal's "New Open Door Policy for Wayward Girls" invited readers to put themselves in the sexual shoes of Lana, "a pretty 16-year-old, with darkish-blonde hair," who, at the age of 11, was "sexually attacked by a man while she was baby-sitting for his five children"; Roberta, who "had her first sexual experience when she was ten, promoted by her older brother for his friends"; and a nameless nymphet who was "molested by her grandfather before she was ten."

Women who preferred to avoid incest and do their mental sleeping around on the university level, could pick up a copy of the same month's McCall's for a candid look-see into campus carnality: "sex and the college girl." Starting off at the top of the same page, writer Gael Greene and anthropologist Ashley Montagu took off in different directions to discover that coeds are sexier than ever. "has chastity a chance at college?" Dr. Montagu asked. "Are the young women of America now losing the right to say 'no'?" Miss Greene, for her part, was more disposed to listen to "college girls talk about chastity."

"These are college girls talking," Miss Greene stated at the outset. "These are freshmen, upperclassmen, recent graduates of Bennington, Vassar, Ohio State, the University of Michigan, Wellesley, Marymount College in Tarrytown (N. Y.), Texas Woman's University--102 colleges and universities throughout the country. They are voicing the slogans and the bewilderment of the quiet revolution--the evolution of sex on the campus ..." "sex on the campus" had, indeed, been the title of a cover story by Margaret Mead, which had appeared in the October '62 issue of Redbook. And February '64 found the same magazine cover-plugging "love and sex: a code for college girls"--the same month in which the Ladies' Home Journal came out with a title that sounded like a message intercepted from Big Chief Eagle Eye, the Redbook Indian scout: "too much sex on campus."

Why were so many college girls moon-lighting in intercourse and majoring in "making out"? Ashley Montagu laid much of the blame on "massive social pressures, applied not just by ardent young men but by a host of cultural forces, to participate to the full in premarital sex experience." In addition, he found that "a substantial number of motion pictures, and much of the modern literature and art college students are expected to examine, chronicle a most marvelously diverse parade of extramarital sex."

"Movies, popular songs and television constantly portray only the passion side of human love, giving our adolescents the false impression that this is love in its entirely," Dr. Marion Hilliard had warned in the Ladies' Home Journal article that had chronicled the premarital sex experiences of its softly rounded teen brides.

"What accounts for the continuing high birth rate in the United States?" Cosmopolitan had inquired in its bikini- and breast-shape-obsessioned "beauty all over" number. "Sociologist John W. Dykstra (Jersey City State College) thinks that sufficient credit has not been given to just plain sex--and the preoccupation with it by the younger generation. What he names 'the ubiquity of sexual stimuli in American life'--sexy music, dances, movies, TV shows, ads, stories, and female attire--act as the throbbing chants, the pulsing rhythms of tom-toms, and the undulating gyrations at the 'fertility' rites of primitive peoples ..."

Of all magazines, Cosmopolitan could not be accused of giving insufficient credit to "just plain sex." Ever willing to seek beyond their own pages for the most lurid examples of "sexual stimuli," its editors had devoted a considerable amount of space to describing the ubiquity of sexy music, dances, movies, TV shows and female attire. In the same November issue in which Bill Fernley and Moira Cummings had succumbed to illicit passion amidst the smell of horse, sweat and warm Malayan jungle, the reader was handed a prose-and-picture passport to "The Roman Orgy of Movie Making." "The Eternal City has exploded into a capital of sex, sin, tinsel dreams as glamorous as the Hollywood of the 1930s," the teaser announced. " 'A girl's surest way to a screen career in Italy,' says one ironic observer, 'is a huge bosom.' " By way of illustration, there were photos of "bikini-dotted beaches," "baby Bardots," and the fully developed likeness of Anita Ekberg, who had touched off "the now-historic 1958 striptease orgy" at the "Party That Shocked the World."

Meanwhile, over on page 64, the throbbing chant continued, as Cosmo's concern with the "sexual saturation of American culture" was further evidenced by an unflinching survey of movie censorship. Still photos from daring films were arranged and captioned for the reader to study at her leisure: " 'Too explicit' scenes like this from The Lovers ..." " 'Frankly amoral,' Never on Sunday ..." "Controversial novel, Lolita, being filmed ..." "Lesbianism, theme of The Children's Hour, is dealt with openly ..." "Succeeding months brought these subjects to the screen: rape (The Virgin Spring), adultery (The Apartment), voyeurism (Private Property), and orgies (La Dolce Vita)," the author observed. "It is hardly surprising, therefore, that movies have become the subject for profound worry by righteous and upstanding organizations like national women's clubs, religious synods, and parent-teacher associations."

Strangely enough, however, no women's clubs or righteous organizations were much concerned with the sexual output of ladies' magazines like Cosmopolitan, where carnal cameos depicting prostitution, Lesbianism, voyeurism, frottage and assembly-line intercourse might appear--not in succeeding months, but in the same issue, or all jam-packed into one single article. Such was the case with "Girls After Dark," an April study of sin in Manhattan, by Gael Greene, in collaboration with Harold Greenwald, Ph.D. Leading off with a full-page shot of the fringe-spangled pelvis, navel and breasts of a night-club belly dancer, and ending up with a full-page snap of a young streetwalker posed on a dimly lit stoop, "Girls After Dark" zeroed in on more tawdry sex than an orgy of moviemaking was likely to produce in a month of Never on Sundays:

In a Greenwich Village strip joint, Fifi L'Amour "sheds two-thirds of the remaining gauze, hiding first behind her chestnut locks, then behind a length of orchid silk, twirling, bumbling, lolling, writhing in a three-shows-a-night-six-days-a-week ecstasy." In a Broadway dance hall, or "rub club," a professional hostess, "Verajean Miller, aims her breathy whisper at the sucker's ear, rubbing against the lad ...

" 'It's an art,' says Verajean. 'A dollar twenty-five for a ten-minute shuffle. You brush 'em with the fluttering false eye-lashes, give a lot of friction. God, how their paws sweat ...' "

Friction of a more thoroughgoing sort is the professional specialty of other "Girls After Dark":

"The buzzer sounds in a penthouse apartment on Central Park West. Bonnie Larabee, $25,000-a-year (tax free) callgirl, hurries to answer it ..."

"Sherri O'Neill, the prettiest drum majorette who ever twirled a baton for a small-town high school, 23 years old, five years a callgirl, has had four visitors today--three convention delegate 'Johns' and a Harlem bass player ..."

"Livia Borkman, class of 1955, former teacher, a slim figure in a bulky vicuña coat, stops at the hotel reception desk. 'Any messages for me?' She glances through half a dozen memo slips, steps into a lobby phone booth, dials: Plaza 6--

" 'Judy? This is Livia. What's up?' "

Judy and Livia are "one-hundred-dollar girls," who work by appointment only--high-line hustlers in comparison to Dede Tallmer, who "works the street" to keep herself and hubby in narcotics. But, regardless of price or motivation, no girl in sex-mad Manhattan is as busy as April Sinclair:

" 'Look, I told you guys, I'll only take one. You'll have to find some other girls.'

" 'Listen, we promised these guys ...'

"April Sinclair shrugs. ('I'm what they call "not a pro," ' April likes to say. 'Girls like me don't look for action. I'm a painter and a commercial artist. Once in a while, though, I need a little something extra to pay the rent.') 'Geez, fellas, I'd like to help, but ...'

" 'Just talk to the boss.'

"Across town, a few minutes later, April, a bosomy little brunette, trips on rhinestone-studded heels through a luxurious hotel suite past what seems like a regiment of men.

" 'Is it the money, miss?' asks the tall, gray-haired man in the bedroom, pulling an alligator wallet from his pocket. 'We've brought in all these dealers to look at our new cars and we've got to give them a good time. There's another girl on the way over. So just tell me. How much?' He pulls two hundred-dollar bills from his wallet."

Four hundreds and a few odd twenties are piled on the bureau before bosomy little April agrees to service the waiting line of car dealers. But Cosmopolitan's "Girls After Dark" aren't all engaged in peddling their favors. There's a Broadway understudy who is writing a novel, and a young Greenwich Village poetess who waits on tables at The Fat Black Pussycat. "Worry about walking home late at night?" the poetess muses. "No. Usually, I have company. There's a gay (homosexual) bar on my corner. No interest there in me. It's my escorts I have to worry about."

Before the night is over, a girl named Judy wards off the advances of a young Lesbian, called Kitty, in the ladies' room of an all-night delicatessen, and an attractive lady cop nabs a middle-aged masher in a 42nd Street grind movie: "A balding man with an overcoat folded over one arm slips into the seat beside her. Harriet tenses. The man brushes against her. Finally, a hand slides across her knee.

" 'What do you think you're doing, mister?'

" 'Listen lady, I didn't mean no harm.'

" 'Sure. Out. Move it. You're under arrest, mister ...' "

As Harriet hustled the abashed knee feeler up the aisle, I couldn't help wondering whether he had been driven to such behavior by sexy movies and TV shows, or by reading Cosmopolitan. Whatever the cause, he was not nearly as aberrant as some of the sex offenders Cosmo pulled in for examination. In the same issue in which Mr. Jefferies was warmed by the nude sight of his wife's bent-over buttocks, for instance, readers were given clinical insight into the psychology and behavior of a whole line-up of sex deviates. "Sex pyros use fire as a fetish, just as some perverts use women's undergarments or baby clothes," one article explained, and cited the case of an "18-year-old Florida youth" who "couldn't settle for a run-of-the-mill fire perversion. His only excitement came from setting blazes on the one night of the month when there was a full moon, achieving orgasm by the time engines arrived."

The moonlight-and-matches firebuggery seemed downright romantic compared to the "psychopathic sex killing" of eight little old ladies by a blood-guzzling Britisher named John Haigh, however--to say nothing of the macabre peccadilloes of the infamous John Reginald Halliday Christie, who "liked to consummate his affections for women by strangling the daylights out of them while making love, then suspending their cadavers behind a false back to his kitchen cupboard or burying them in his yard."

Appropriately or not, the month's leading question was "Do Women Provoke Sex Attack?" The answer was a six-page wrap-up on rape, beautifully illustrated with photos of an unescorted blonde perched provocatively on a bar stool, a teenage grocery boy ogling a housewife's carelessly exposed cleavage, and a young couple necking in a parked car. "A delivery man may get ideas if a housewife habitually greets him in nightgown and negligee ..." one caption warned. "Even a trusted boyfriend can become violent if pushed past the point of no return," another shouted, like Mother from the top of the stairs. "In petting sessions, some girls go dangerously far ..."

To document this last observation, the author capsuled a batch of yes-my-darling data gathered during a sex survey of 139 young women at Pennsylvania State University: "46 of the 139 admitted they had allowed a boy to fondle their breasts; 34 had engaged in mutual masturbation; 22 confessed that, on occasion, they had undressed for a man. Small wonder," the article added, "that, in many such cases, a young man's desires are aroused past the point of no return and, when the girl resists, he seeks gratification by force."

Some women, I learned, "invite rape, openly and consciously.... Sometimes they do this out of extreme masochism, a fierce longing to be hurt by another person. More often, it is because they desire an otherwise forbidden sexual experience--intercourse with a blood relative or a person of another race." Examples were given of a seemingly innocent Illinois miss who had provoked multiple rape in the woods, and a librarian whose subconscious desires caused her to run into a deserted park in order to "escape" attack. In some women, the desire to experience intercourse without having to abandon their high moral standards led to fantasies of rape--a form of wishful thinking that caused one highly repressed schoolteacher to display every symptom of pregnancy. As the months went by, her "breasts remained enlarged, her abdomen grew bigger. At the end of nine months, she developed labor pains, was put to bed and 'delivered'--of a large amount of air. Thereupon, her menstruation resumed and, shortly afterward, her mental state returned to normal."

As I sat viewing this parade of pyromania, rape, vampirism, murder and false pregnancy, my own mental state was such that I was ready to start knitting booties for the schoolteacher's airy heir. Perspective on her flatulent fantasies was gained only by a night at the movies, where I had the curious fortune of catching a rerun of Inherit the Wind and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

No relief from the bizarre was to be found in the Ladies' Home Journal, certainly. Just the month before, I had been privy to a discussion between the Troubled Woman and her Trusted Physician about a baby born with a "bowling-ball head," and this month it was a question of whether hermaphroditism ran in families. "I only know that, as a child, there was something queer about Aunt Maud," the Troubled Woman was saying, when I looked in on page 30. "According to the letters, she was taken for a boy until she was about eight years old. Then things began to happen which made everybody frightfully confused, even the doctors.... A few years later they apparently decided that it was better for 'him' to be treated as a 'her.' "

This sort of easygoing tolerance was not discernible on the part of the parents of Don, delicate teen star of "I Was Raising a Homosexual Child," which Cosmopolitan brought out in January '63. "I stumbled into the living room to face my husband," Don's distraught mother recalled. "He told me, in his maddening, monosyllabic fashion, that the call was absolutely correct. Don had been caught on a bench in Central Park, being embraced by another man ..."

Luckily, a good shot of psychoanalysis helped Don to discover his maleness. In time, he broke off his affair with Wally, and, without so much as a whoops-my-dear, began dating girls. Toward the end, his heterosexual adjustment seemed so complete, I began to wonder whether he might not end up as a despoiler of persuadable coeds in some future study of sex on the campus.

At any rate, I knew that if Don were to read his story in Cosmopolitan, and then go on to become engrossed in that month's fiction, it wouldn't mean that he was identifying with a lot of flossy little heroines. Not by a long shot. He might, rather, be putting himself in the driver's seat of the married male protagonist of "Stranger of the Night," who was going mad with desire for the gorgeous, unattainable blonde who drove around in a kimono with the top down: "Every night he saw her on the turnpike, racing her little red sports car.... He wanted to touch her, reach her in the most desperate and hopeless way."

On the other hand, he might merely be identifying with the necrophilic old Marquis in "The Glass Coffin," who kept "a glass box lying on a Louis XV bed": "The glass box contained the body of a dead woman. She was pretty and young, some 16 or 18 years of age, and entirely naked ..." And, if the boy were really cured, he might even dig "A Sound of Distant Music," and find himself in Southwest Africa, going native with Fritz Von Wertheim and a little Bushman babe named Twickwe:

"... As he put his arm round her to hold her close, she took his hand and held it to the quick beating of her heart and he was suddenly aware of the small soft breast rounded under his hand and her gentle mouth seeking his. For a moment he was bewildered, startled at this sudden change in their companionship--Twickwe was part of his life at Nauheim, part of his world of freedom and space, part of his world of tracking and campfires, of animals and birds, of golden sunshine and silver moonlight: a child, a playmate. Now this sudden change had come about and this small golden-skinned girl with her slanted eyes and infinite grace, who smelled of sunshine and wood smoke as her body twined round his, was a stranger--infinitely desirable ..."

But enough. The time has come to kiss goodbye to all the torrid little nymphets and golden-skinned playmates. While yet a shred of manly virtue remains, we must put aside our ladies' mags and return to our own world of freedom and sunshine. Adieu to sex under the scuppernongs, ta-ta to all the Tahitian and Malayan bushwhackers! So long to the sex pyros, streetwalkers, stripteasers, callgirls, Lesbians, murderers, necrophiles, knee feelers, child molesters and homosexuals! Au revoir to the wayward teens, erring wives, wandering hubbies and unwed mothers! Toodle-oo to the big-bosomed beauty queens, baby Bardots and sexy coeds! Adios to April Sinclair and her regiment of friendly car dealers! Auf Wiedersehen to the 34 mutual masturbators of Pennsylvania State University! And, last but not least, a most hearty farewell to Evelyn Ayres, the Trusted Physician, Mrs. Short, Aunt Maud, the kid with the bowling-ball head, and the unmeltable fundament of Mrs. Jefferies!

As we take leave of the strange wonderland of sex in the ladies' popular monthlies, acknowledgement must be made of the fact that Cosmopolitan finally did get around to publishing a survey of the sexual content found in some of America's periodicals--the men's magazines! The author was Marie Torre, and her article, which appeared in May 1963, in a special issue on "the corruptible male," was called "A Woman Looks at the Girly-Girly Magazines."

As a nongirly woman writer with a large reputation for indignation, Miss Torre came on swinging a big prose ax, and a moralistic machete that might have seen service in Cosmo's numerous skirmishes with sexy movies, TV quiz scandals, and other forms of vice: "Like the Pied Piper who led children astray, a new social phenomenon is entrapping young American men in a never-never land, where bachelorhood is a desired state, and bikini-clad girls are over-dressed, where life is a series of dubious sex thrills, where there's a foreign sports car in every garage, a hi-fi set in every living room, and 'Home Sweet Home' is a penthouse pad.

"This corroding and debilitating image of the American Eden is as subversive as communism. Perhaps it's worse; communism is branded a national peril, at least, and thus is guarded against.

"But purveyors of the playboy syndrome, as this addiction is called, flourish in our society, leaving in their wake, degeneracy, obscenity, eroticism, perversion and a tragic insulation from life's realities.

"The identity of these public enemies is discernible at almost all newsstands. They are the men's girly-girly magazines--the adult 'comic books' of our time."

Well, that was only the beginning--and don't let that little zinger about "adult 'comic books'" trap you into thinking that Miss Torre saw anything the least bit funny in the menace of the men's magazines. No, indeed. She was deadly serious and fighting mad. Without stopping to document her references to degeneracy, obscenity, perversion and "dubious sex thrills," or bothering to show how the capitalistic image of a hi-fi in every living room and a sports car in every garage could be part of a subversive plot worse than communism, Miss Torre brought up her heavy artillery: a retired associate professor, a Methodist minister, and the nation's number-one cop. "An expert on public enemies, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover thinks smutty books can have insidious effects," she declared. "Dr. George W. Henry, until retirement associate professor of clinical psychology at Cornell University Medical College, testified before the Kefauver committee of the Senate that children could be sexually perverted by looking and dwelling upon pictures of suggestively photographed nudes."

Since none of the experts cited any particular publications or described any specific instances of perversion-by-pictures, their word, like Miss Torre's, had to be taken on faith. "Recently, on a lecture trip to Oak Park, Illinois, I ventured into a small ice-cream parlor crowded with teenagers quaffing sodas on the way home from school," she recalled. "One entire wall of the establishment was papered with girly-girly magazines. Anyone entering the premises had nowhere to look but at this shameful display. In the interests of profit, no doubt, the store owner permitted the high school children to read these magazines while sipping sodas. There was giggling and clowning and a few flushed feminine faces, but their attention was riveted to the pages."

Just which magazines and what material so engrossed and amused these high school "children," Miss Torre didn't divulge. But with the after-school activities of Cosmopolitan's 15-year-old Laura and George fresh in mind, it seemed to me that sipping sodas and reading men's magazines were certainly harmless enough. It's possible, of course, that the business-shrewd store owner kept his women's magazines under the counter--for if the printed page had the power to incite as much lust as Miss Torre believed, the fictional escapades of teens like Laura, Toma, Lena and Twickwe would have cleared the kids out of his shop for good. To hell with sipping sodas. They would have been out looking for a lonely bridge or a likely patch of soft dark grass on which to twine bodies and "do it."

Offhand, it was difficult to ascertain whether Miss Torre was more disturbed by the fact that men's magazines might be looked at by adolescents or read by male adults. " 'Do you like to read Playboy?'" she asked "a middle-aged male friend, a television newscaster with a keen mind and a wholesome skepticism."

" 'Yes, I do,' he answered. 'Playboy sometimes has articles that interest me.'

" 'And the pictures?' she asked.

" 'Well, I'm human,' he rejoined. 'I like to look at beautiful nudes. It reminds me of my lost past.' "

At this, Miss Torre grew more disturbed than ever. "If these magazines are selling a 'lost past' to our elders, they are selling a tawdry future to our young-lings," she exclaimed. "Let's examine these fulsome products!"

In so doing, Miss Torre must have left the sex-hip readers of Cosmopolitan wondering what all the fuss was about. After taking Playboy to task for originating the Playmate centerfold, she jabbed at one of "the imitators of Playboy, known as Gent," for having "the audacity to allude to Sir James Barrie's classic, Peter Pan, in presenting a selection one month." Running back to slap Playboy for saying that Playmate Jean Cannon likes animals and "brings out the beast in anyone," she then took off after Cavalier for its handling of a Miss Week-end feature: "Maria Arno has a 'date with destiny,' blared the magazine. 'She is a girl of great inner poise and has a strength of character that projects almost physically,' read the caption beside the nude photo."

Since evil, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder, no one can question the fact that Miss Torre truly found these things objectionable, and saw herself as a champion of purity, out to break up a "parade of filth." In an upfront biographical squib, Cosmopolitan noted that Miss Torre was still stuck with "some of her research material: 75 girly-girly magazines stacked in a corner of her Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, bedroom." In transporting these materials home, she said, "I had them in the car seat beside me and kept thinking apprehensively, 'What if there's a road-block to catch a criminal, and the police stop me and open my car door and find all those magazines on the seat beside me?' " And now, having written her "trenchant analysis," "she tried throwing the magazines in wastebaskets--only to balk at putting them outside her suburban door where they might fall into the hands of her children."

In this respect, at least, I can sympathize with Miss Torre's predicament. My bedroom, too, is cluttered with research material--more than 200 women's magazines, which I have collected over the past six years. Acutely aware of their contents, I, too, balk at putting them outside my door, for fear that they might fall into the hands of equally impressionable urban younglings.

It has occurred to me that I might try stashing them in the basement, of course. But I keep thinking apprehensively, "What if they should be discovered by some prowling sex pyro, who might read them and become incited to set fire to the bundle, 'achieving orgasm by the time engines arrived'?"

Happily, however, I think I may have found the perfect solution. Since Miss Torre is as embarrassed by her pile of old magazines as I am by mine ... Tell me, honey, Miss Torre baby, do you want to swap?