The real

experts on sex
JACK O'SULLIVAN
IERHAPS rr WAS someone's idea of a joke, but I was recently
despatched by my paper to interview the new editor of Penthouse. No, it's not a magazine devoted to home improvements, unless you count 101 unusual things you can do in a shower. Penthouse is, or has been until now, run-ofthe-mill pornography, the type of product that has applied the butcher's eye to women's bodies, earning its editors the nickname, Dewhursts.
But all that has changed, according to Tim Hilditch, the new editor, who is revamping and relaunching the monthly. He is attempting, he says, to bring it out from under the mattress and on to the coffee table. It's going to be erotic, rather than pornographic, he says, giving women stronger, more assertive images, rather than making them passive subjects of male fantasy. Read this magazine, says Hilditch, and you will enhance your sexuality rather than simply arm yourself with lonely dreams that detach you still further from real life.
I was attracted by the sales pitch, if not the product. The idea that a publication should enhance the physical relationship between people, which is often too fraught with difficulty, seems like an excellent project.
Many people may find this hard to understand. After all, aren't Catholics supposed to be screwed up about sex, utterly repressed from infancy? Indeed, aren't all Christians made to feel so bad about sex that they are handicapped for life by their upbringing?
My own theory is that Catholicism is a great deal more open about and interested in sex than is generally accepted. It is certainly more at ease with the subject than some forms of Protestantism. (I'm reminded of a cruel joke about the Puritans, who were apparently banned from having sex standing up for fear that God would think they were dancing.)
FIE ONE THING, we never stop talking about sex. We're obsessed, to the extent that when the Pope makes-apublic statement and doesn't mention that three-lettered word, we are shocked.
Never mind that his statements are often about strict regulation of practice and usage, the constant references keep the subject at the forefront of our consciousness. Likewise, the celibacy of priesthood. It is, of course, about the denial of sexuality. Yet 800 years of denial like periods spent dieting are prone to make you more, not less, interested in the foregone pleasure.
And then just think of the sensuality of Catholicism, the incense, the pomp, the clothes, the music. The whole baroque nature of our services is full of the warmth and colour which seems at one with sexuality. Far more so than some dreary service amid white-washed walls in a bleak non-conformist chapel.
Add to this the surviving earthy humour and down-toearth sexuality of pre-Roman Gaelic Catholicism, and you have the making of a Church which has long taken an active interest in procreation and physical pleasure. We're not, it has to be said, in the same league as Buddhism our religious iconography cannot quite compete with its fertility symbols. But frankly, something must have worked for us to be so famously associated with large families.
Reassured in this regard, I settled down to my irksome task of examining the new Penthouse. Would it, I wondered, be capable of the full leap from mattress to coffee table and on to, perhaps, even the pew? Reader, I have to say, I was disappointed. Save your change instead for the Sacred Heart Messenger.
Certainly, women seemed more in control of the imagery. In one feature, they were each given a camera with a remote control so that they could film themselves undressing. But this remains a magazine with women in the spotlight and men out of the picture, presumably looking on at the objects el their desire. The power relationship is hopelessly unequal, the ideals far from reality.
It's a shame really becau.se to see men and women together in erotic pose can be, as all the great classical sculptors have recognised, a wonderful, inspiring experience. But it requires a commitment to honesty, which the modern pornographer finds too demanding. Better to settle back in the unchallenging security of old cliches ani unrealities.
It would be interesting to see religious a-tists, with the depth that they would bring to the task, filling the vacuum that the pornographer leaves in the representaion of sex and eroticism at its best._ The bold depiction of sexuality will always cause a fuss because it is so close tothe core of our lives. But religious people have never balked at making important statements and exploring difficult truths