Viva Sexual Fantasies

Hope you all had a nice weekend! As the work week begins, it’s back to porn stash studies for me. We’ve done the pictures, now it’s time to move on to the good part: the words. Pictures may indeed be worth a thousand words, but when it comes to arousing me, the right thousand words always do a much better job. It could be that I’m just a more auditory, language-focused person, but even at 14, it wasn’t the pictures in Viva that kept me coming back for more. It was the monthly feature called “Sexual Fantasies” by Dr. Robert Chartham.

I know I read these smutty confessions tons of times, settling on particular favorites, but really enjoying them all. The early 1970s marked the discovery of the sexual fantasy in American culture—or rather the willingness to recognize and exploit this aspect of our eroticism in a self-conscious way. Because of course, all pornography is a sexual fantasy of a sort. But with the publication of Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, suddenly even the minds of ordinary women--gasp!--were goldmines of dirty thoughts and scenarios. However, unlike Penthouse’s letters, these shocking, taboo-busting fantasies were considered safe to read only if they were properly “analyzed” by a trained professional.

Enter Dr. Robert Chartham who presents his insights into erotic fantasies including “their Meaning, Significance, and Contribution to the Human Sexual Condition.” Each issue of Viva generally ran three different fantasies (at first it was just men’s fantasies, but quickly went co-ed and females tended to dominate 2 to 1). Each fantasizer was identified by a first name with last initial and described in terms of height, weight, health, job, marital status. The reader was thus encouraged to think she was dealing with a real person, not by any stretch of the imagination the output of some professional writer who was given an editorial prompt to write something about gangsters or threesomes (more on that next time!) The fantasy is then presented in frank, titillating language which can definitely get you worked up if you're in the mood for it. It’s not unlike an erotic story or even a Penthouse letter, although the action is of course acknowledged as pure imagination. After each confession, Dr. Robert Chartham comments at length. Back in the summer of '76, I read these commentaries with great interest, part of me hoping this expert would enlighten me as to what my own fantasies meant as well as give me insight into the minds of those strange creatures called men.

Yet, even at 14, still subject to whims of teachers and other authority figures, I knew there was something a bit off about Dr. Chartham. He definitely played favorites. Rereading his comments now, I declare the guy a total fraud and complete mind fucker. Talk about having complexes! You only need to read a few issues to see the pattern. Dr. Chartham basically chides all the males for their politically incorrect dreams, whether it’s sleeping with a mother and daughter or transforming a plain Jane into a sex goddess. In the former case, the two fantasy women “are probably his way of compensating for his lack of sexual stamina.” In the latter, Dr. Chartham issues this sermon: “What selfish men these Pygmalions are…they feel like gods to whom women ought to be grateful…I have always based my sexual activity on the equality of the partners. Insofar as I am motivated by a certain degree of selfishness, I frequently have a strong desire to be the entirely passive partner. But I’ve always believed that ‘share and share alike’ gives both partners the best of both worlds. I am not, therefore, in sympathy with Richard (the fantasizer under scrutiny who claims to have lived his fantasy of transforming plain women into beauties many times), and I am sure no woman would be who had been through his hands and dumped.”

It may be true that “Richard” or his real life counterpart is a jerk, but surely a trained therapist should not be in the position of judging a fantasy as sympathetic or worthy or indeed assuming to know what others think? Or on the other hand seeing it as an expression of inadequacy, as if any human being on earth is without unfulfilled yearnings and needs. Although the feminism of the 1970s did express a lot of anger towards men, even then, I knew that belittling men was not the way to go. And to do it under the guise of an expert opinion is bordering on the downright dangerous. It’s true that women suffered far more abuse than men at the hands of mental health professionals, but to see someone, man or woman, reveal themselves in this way (even if it is all fictional) and then be held in contempt just, well, it pisses me off!

Dr. Chartham does not redeem himself in my eyes by treating the ladies more gallantly. If your name is female, it doesn’t matter what sort of fantasy you have, the good doctor is there to support you—and probably invite you over to his place to show you his black-light posters later. Yep, he’s full of crap, but I still have to share this little love letter to a writer named Martha W. who fantasizes that she’s at a swimming pool and a dozen gorgeous men come up and service her in various ways. Here’s what the doctor has to say from his professional perspective. I wonder, fellow writers, if you agree?

“The full-time writer’s job is a lonely one. If you write fiction, the experience is even more lonely. People your pages with all kinds of imaginary characters, make them as real and as solid as you can; but not one of them can rise from the page, put his or her arms around you, and provide the emotional and sexual solace you crave. It’s a hard life and it’s a lonely life. No wonder one fills one’s fantasies with crowds in a dolce vita setting.

“You and I, Martha, being writers, experience our sexual potential vividly. Because of the austerity of our working conditions, we have become fantasizing sybarites, seeking the practical comforts our lives deny us.

Let me be honest: I like being made love to slightly more than I like making love. You seem to feel similarly. And while I fantasize that my cock is capable of satisfying countless numbers of women, you fantasize that your cunt can make happy countless numbers of men. [blogger’s aside: one of these scenarios is more realistic than the other ;-].

(Caption from Viva cartoon: My mommy says when I'm older I can have as many of those as I want.")

In my fantasy, odalisques bathe all my sensitive zones with expert fingers and mouths. It is delicious, and so softly inspiring.

In fantasy, we are omnipotent. You say, ‘Stand in line, boys; you’ll all be accommodated.’ I say, ‘Stand in line, girls; my cock is there for anyone’s pleasure.’ Of course, both of us are sexual show-offs. We both need to be the center of sexual attention. But by God, we know we can deliver the goods! And it is this which gives us our sexual power and our sexual satisfaction.

No, I don’t think you are strange in the least! Take time off from your work, and use your ingenuity to find a real lover for yourself. [blogger’s aside: time to provide your phone number, doctor?] Or check out the group-sex scene, where you may find others who are in search of the same pleasures.”

Whew, well, he has us female writers pretty much pegged, but at least I’m not sick like those two weirdo guys! Ah, Robert Chartham, what happened to you in the intervening years? Did you merely pass on to the next world one afternoon as you lay passively in bed being serviced by a dozen female patients? Is this perhaps another research project to pursue in my endless quest to unlock the history of eroticism in America?

Next time—another light bulb goes on when I see how the good doctor inspired one of my first erotic publications!

Viva the Amorous Picnic!

Back before kids, one of my favorite amorous outings was a picnic. I’d dress up in something a little frilly—a skirt was a necessity of course—and pack my special wicker picnic basket with bread, cheese, fruit, fine chocolate and a bottle of red wine. My lover of the moment would haul the basket while I carried the blanket through meadow and forest. We’d wander until we found someplace fairly private on campus or in a park or the woods. The photograph above was taken in May of 1982 during one such picnic during my junior year at Princeton. We were alone to feast and be amorous until a groundskeeper rode by on his lawn mower. Thank heavens for the skirt. And please don’t ask what happened to that poor banana!

Now, appearances to the contrary, this picture actually does tie in to my discussion of Viva Magazine and its place in my erotic education. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, I’d like to give you a little background about why I have so many Viva’s in my filing cabinet. When I first discovered the wonders of e-bay, I thought of my sister’s naughty magazines and one pictorial in particular. This was my very favorite image story, one I’d return to again and again. I remembered certain scenes very clearly, even after thirty years. Given that my professional life (such as it is) revolves around sexual fantasy, it seemed like good research to find this issue and see how it affected me as an adult.
I remembered the story started with a woman in 18th century dress carrying a picnic basket out to the woods. She nibbled fruit and had a little wine. Then, tipsy on booze and the great outdoors, she stretched out on her blanket and pleasured herself. A passing Continental soldier espied the lady and decided to join her. She didn’t mind the company and a merry feast ensued. My best guess was the July 1976 issue, which would surely have something with a Continental soldier, but alas after acquiring the whole year, I discovered I was wrong. Nor did the scene appear in any issue from 1974 or 1975. I had nearly completed my set of early Viva’s before I finally hit the jackpot—December 1973.

To my surprise, even after all these years, “Secrets from My Diary” didn’t disappoint. In fact, it was better than I remembered. There were some especially interesting scenes involving food. For example, the man (not a soldier but a certain Lord Ffetherpenney) eats a wedge of watermelon—or is it mango?—from between the lady’s legs, while she sucks her own fingers. Soft core it is, but nicely suggestive. In another the lady pours wine in the man’s mouth, missing badly and licking the wet stuff off of his lips and chin. There’s a nice butt-kissing scene and another of my favorites: the half-dressed lord carrying the naked woman fireman-style back to his four-poster bed.This early pictorial is one of the hottest in my whole collection, so it’s no wonder it stayed with me. Gradually the Viva picture stories become tamer and more posed, more like Gatsby below and by 1976, they all but disappear to be replaced by a Penthouse-style boudoir shoot of a single naked man or sometimes a couple. My sister said she’d heard women didn’t buy Viva anymore; the main purchasers were gay men and this was what they were looking for. She stopped buying new issues after the summer of 1976. Thirty years later, so did I.

But enough about the death of the feminist dream of sexual homogeneity in American culture, let’s get back to me! So, as I was leafing through an old photo album to find that picture of myself dressed as a gay hustler (you’ll find out why next week!), I came across the picnic photo above. And suddenly it struck me. My urge to dress up in long skirts and drag my boyfriends out to the woods, mosquito bites on my butt bedamned, might indeed have originated in my subconscious memories of the diarist and her lord capering en plein air.

But which came first? Was I drawn to the food porn pictorial because the circuits of pleasure were already set in my brain? Or did Viva create new ones that still stoke my libido today? Did they feed each other, perhaps, like the lady and her lord in the sunny glade? What do you think?

In my next post, our tour of Viva continues when I move on to the magazine's most direct contribution to my career as an erotica writer. (Hint: this involves reading. Flashlights at the ready, please!)

Inside Viva: The Pictorials

I’m pretty sure I saw my first copy of Viva: The International Magazine for Women during the summer of 1976. I was fourteen and hadn’t seen much visual porn (except for a few photos in a women’s liberation pamphlet where the coupling lovers seemed so frozen in place I assumed they were dead). I had been reading sex scenes in books for quite some time before that, but that’s another story (see my discussion of The Godfather).

When my middle sister came home to stay with us for the summer after her last year of college, she put away her extensive collection of Viva’s in the bookshelf of her nightstand in plain view. My parents didn’t seem to care, they probably didn’t know what was in them. Magazines for women were by definition “safe.” And a lot of the magazine was safe enough. There was very high-brow fiction, like an excerpt from Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and interviews with Warren Beatty and Helen Reddy as well as feminist roundtables and confessions from Vietnam vet’s wives. But there were also pictures. Of naked men.

A comparative viewing (and I have both, so let’s pass them around) reveals that the Viva pictorial is definitely different from those in its brother magazine, Penthouse. Viva always provides one “narrative” series involving a couple and one feature which offers a variety of different naked men, say clothed crotch shots of men involved in different professions or “pin the tail on the male” where you try to match the naked butt with the face. At the time Penthouse, on the other hand, was almost exclusively a look into a lady’s boudoir. Apparently in private most ladies lounge around in various states of nudity and study their pubic hair with great concentration.

But the Viva pictorial provides so much more: props, costumes, atmosphere, even literary and historical references. Is this because the female mind needs more story, more relationship, more stuff to be aroused? Or just that the editors assumed so? At any rate, given that Emerald and I were discussing our love of The Great Gatsby, I was amused to find a pictorial called “A Glimpse of Gatsby,” where a brawny brunette with 1970s style good looks (a sort of Chad Everett look, if you’re old enough to remember "Medical Center") and 1920s clothes lounges around with a Daisy Buchanan blonde.

This intertextual approach does spark my imagination and I got to thinking it might be nice to see a whole series of these peeks into famous lovers' bedrooms. Maybe juxtapose this elegant afternoon tryst with an earthier Tom-Myrtle pictorial set in their New York City hideaway (with a few shots of Nick Carraway listening in)? Then proceed through the great works of literature—Darcy and Elizabeth’s honeymoon; a steamy encounter between Heathcliff and Cathy. Maybe move on to historical figures: JFK with Marilyn, Bogie and Bacall, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. The possibilities for couples in costume (and out of them as well) are endless.

Yet, even as I appreciated the context, I gradually became aware of a growing discomfort, even anxiety as I viewed these pictures today. I finally realized what it was. There are no erections. These naked men are in the presence of beautiful women in lingerie, kissing them, caressing them and still their members hang like limp hoses. Long, thick, limp hoses, but still. As a teenager, I remember noticing, although not fixating on the organs, but now, it’s hard to focus on anything else. All of the pictures cannot be set the afterglow. And yet, junior is not so happy to see the lady. Is it a relationship problem? A case for Viagra?

Of course, the simple explanation is that if Viva portrayed these situations realistically and showed aroused men, it couldn’t have been sold with Playboy and Penthouse at airports and newstands. It would be relegated to sleazy porn shops, and few women would ever see it, much less buy it.

However, the magazine still worked its magic on my adolescent mind. In fact, there is one picture fantasy that lit my fire then and still brings on a glow today. In the next post, I’ll talk about the Viva spread that stayed with me for more than thirty years and was mostly responsible for my e-bay buying spree. Til then, let's check out that great interview with Helen Reddy! (“I Am Woman” was my shower song of choice for more years than I care to admit).