Penthouse Magazine
Death is a severe and daunting portal to the realities of the cosmos, but sexuality is only a little less daunting. Throughout most of human history childbirth has represented perhaps the greatest of all mortal risks. Fortunate was the ancient woman who survived the birth of her several children. Moreover, in the light of what seems to happen to others, deciding the choice of mate and a pre-determined ensuing life course can be enough to cause the rational agent to forswear its inconveniences. Considering its health and other unintended risks can likewise place sexual love in a dubious light.
Sexuality however has a warm, magnetic strength that death lacks. In the plant world this Springtime strength is unalloyed, in the delicacy and the perfume of flowers. In animals however, something of the tinge of death, disease and putrefaction is intimated. Menstruation is a device of nature to keep distance between the sexes, thus granting the woman a certain respite from the advances of an aggressive and oversexed mate. It’s also an intriguing reminder of forbidden fruit. Even the forms of the genitals convey something alien, otherworldly and strange, something that beckons across the threshold of death itself. The lives of humans in particular are thereby made substantially more complicated and necessarily more ethical than those of the plants.
Humans universally have adapted to sexuality through culture, in particular by maintaining modesty and reserve in polite company and confining inartistic sexual exhibitions to the company of the vulgar. This general pattern was creatively interrupted in the West by the 1960s and 1970s sexual revolution and a strong media and ideational presence, but the outcome has been somewhat problematic, with perverse and largely submerged socio-cultural consequences. For many, Guccione’s Penthouse Magazine led the way here, functioning as an avatar of ideational magnetism, intersexual stumbling and disappointment. Penthouse accomplished something important, but nobody seems to know yet what it was.
Sexuality in art and subject to artistic sensibility has always been celebrated, from paleolithic fertility figures used in difficult-to-imagine ways, to the high classical art of Greece and Rome with its superhuman and divine frames of reference, to the newly exuberant eroticism of Renaissance painting, made possible by a a surfacing of interest in ancient magic, to the modes of dress and modes of speech in Western countries today, which seem to have become extremely problematic for teenage mental health. Of particular interest to us is the leading example of Penthouse, which used Guccione’s considerable abilities as a painter and colorist to bring pornography, if surreptitiously, into the mainstream and contribute powerfully to the subjective, smartphone focus of popular culture today.
From our point of view, the vintage Penthouse Magazine of the 1970s and early 1980s produced an exceptional visual content that its editorial content was never able to match. Guccione simply never acquired the intellectual depth that would have been necessary to sustain the publication. He simply ran out of decent ideas. The denouement was embarrassing overreach and travesty, culminating in a throat cancer that diminished his quality of life at its end in a terrible way. With the acquisition and development of the right intellectual balance, by way of contrast, we think Penthouse or its successor could enter a Renaissance of its own.
Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian occultist and philosopher, during Europe’s Great War 1914-1918 said he expected human evolution to reach a stage in which human procreation would occur not by the organs of sex but by the organs of speech. Steiner’s claim is that the future human will reproduce its kind not in a physical, water-based medium but in a medium of a psycho-physical, aerial sort. Terrestrial man at that stage of his evolution, according to Steiner, will inhabit a higher world, a world governed by the laws of the cosmical, astral light. We think a start on this world can be made today.
A healthy Sunny Leone and the deteriorating Bob Guccione.