But over time these exchanges left me with the distinct impression that love--or even just good sex--was often quite complicated, requiring of its participants an almost unnerving degree of trust and vulnerability, patience and negotiation, all of which could lead to unimaginable thrills or horrible disappointment. Or anything in between. It was here, in the Advisor, where Playboy willfully undercut the silken ease and bachelor suavity it projected elsewhere in the magazine. It was here where bodily matters went unairbrushed, where seduction proved beyond one’s skillful way with imported vodka, where men would not infrequently be scolded for treating their girlfriends or wives shabbily.

There’s hardly a trace of the old journalism, and no fiction, but there are the numerous girlie pictorials, in this case teasingly non-nude; the gadgetry and the spiffy autos; the obligatory fashion spreads. However, where the sexes are concerned in lad land, it’s almost completely separate but equal, which is to say equally puerile. These mags are full of bravado (not limited to the guys) about hooking up, but otherwise, basically, the twain never meet: you might score with the opposite sex, but you hang out with your own—which perfectly captures a sensibility people my age (fortyish) tended to ditch before they left their teens, and which indicates that the average lad finds girlfriend scary...

Aside from the C-list starlets, who come off like well-bred dames in this context, the majority of laddie girls profess exactly the interests of the lads themselves: roughhousing, football, beer chugging, NASCAR, girl-on-girl, muscle cars and motorcycles, pro wrestling, video games, burping, and being as dumb as humanly possible. In short, these women are but lads with tits, making all the leering that presumably goes on among readers of these mags curiously akin to looking across the table at your poker buddy, imagining him as a woman, and wanting to get nice.

The laddie burlesque of male chauvinism is almost purely a reaction to feminism’s ascendancy, which people of both sexes have long taken for granted. And feminists are quite right to feel unthreatened by the lads’ rebellion. Because in fact, it isn’t a rebellion at all but, rather, a capitulation. It’s as if American masculinity has finally surrendered to decades of feminist criticism, criticism the lads have assimilated fully, because—unlike the Playboy men of yore—they’ve known no other world. One can wish that the lad shtick were subversive minstrelsy of a sort, an absurdist attack on unflattering male stereotypes, but more likely, and all pretend insensitivity aside, the laddies are sadly sincere in their embrace of buffoonery. They’re adopting—before the fact, and with the cold comfort of intent—the very characteristics that would most ensure further criticism, further rejection, which is essentially to take control of defeat by forfeiting the game rather than risk another losing effort. It is, in short, to take control by running away.

Most people with diplopia learn how to disregard the dimmer visual image by concentrating mentally on the image of the dominant eye. When both eyes are used in focal coordination, volitional effort is necessary, and this eventually produces mental visual fatigue and organic eyestrain tending to cause headache. Under mental or physical fatigue or emotional excitement, visual decoordination increases (as noticed at times in Lincoln by his contemporaries) and the stronger image is underlapped by more or less of a shadowy, weaker image, increasing mental confusion and uneasiness. Lincoln learned in boyhood to cultivate a calm, humorous, patient, kindly attitude and friendly interpersonal assurances, and a common-sense philosophy of life that generally protected him from emotional provocation and increase of this distress. However, he had a singularly impressive mystifying experience with more persistent diplopia after a fatiguing day upon the evening of his election as President. His description and interpretation of this experience to Ward Lamon and Noah Brooks is given in Chapter XLII. The strange mystery of his double vision and its superstitious meaning for him has been cited by many biographers as an indication that Lincoln had clairvoyant sensitivity. It seems evident now that it was the simple result of an old injury of his brain in childhood.

Through his adult years Lincoln had many nervous attacks, characterized by eyestrain and headache with nausea and indigestion, so severe that often he became unable to work and had to lie down with a cold compress over his eyes. He had couches in his law office, at home, and in the White House, for this purpose.

Labels: misc, playboy