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| Turn on, tune in, drop dead. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Turn On or Keep Out of the Sex Business." Originally published in Gallery (Gallery Press), vol. 2, no. 1, January/February 1973. Credited to "Dick Trent."
Excerpt: "Many women still experience something that borders on disgust, when it comes to sex. They have been raised to feel this way . . . that all men are beasts and that the sex drive is something left over from the lower animal forms. Of course, there is much more hope for these women today than there was fifty years ago."
Reflections: One of my favorite pastimes as a youth was going to used book stores and comic book stores and picking up old issues of MAD magazine from the 1960s and '70s. Not only did I love the writing and artwork, MAD also provided a valuable education about America's recent and semi-recent past. First and foremost, I learned about movies and TV shows that were slightly before my time—I'm sure I read "The Odd Father" long before ever seeing The Godfather—but MAD also clued me in about politics, fashion, music, fads, and changing social values. These were tumultuous decades in which young Americans were challenging the values of their elders, and MAD was there to cover it all, generally from the perspective of the harried, beleaguered Everyman who was just trying to keep up.
There's no better example of this than cartoonist Dave Berg's recurring feature, "The Lighter Side." Corny as they were, Berg's comic strips—sitcom-style vignettes about the hassles and headaches of modern suburban American life—were my window into the world of adulthood, including sex. (And I'm not the only one who feels this way.) While viewpoints on sex and morality changed rapidly in this country, Berg's flawed, fallible characters were there to debate it all.
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| A typical example of Dave Berg's "Lighter Side." |
The title of Ed Wood's article "Turn On or Keep Out of the Sex Business" was probably intended to make us think of Dr. Timothy Leary and his famous mantra, "Turn on, tune in, drop out." But as I read it, I thought not of Leary but of good old Dave Berg. Specifically, this article seemed like it could have been written by Berg's surrogate character, Roger Kaputnik, the doughy, middle-aged husband and father who generally represented the "square" old-school view of the world.
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| Dave Berg aka Roger Kaputnik. |
Not that this article is stodgy or prudish, mind you. In fact, this is another of Eddie's "sex positive" stories. He applauds the new openness with which we are all discussing sex nowadays, and he seems also to be in favor of couples having premarital sex to see if they're compatible in the bedroom. Eddie explains that this might prevent a trip to divorce court down the road. In short, this article captures Ed Wood trying to seem "with it," i.e. keeping up with the times. But at heart, he's still Roger Kaputnik, a relic from the previous generation. Kaputnik was the type of guy who'd remain faithful to his wife but couldn't resist ogling some young secretary in a miniskirt if she happened to cross his path. You know those cocktail lounges Eddie's always writing about? It wasn't the hip young kids going to those places; it was the Roger Kaputniks of the world.
Once again, to give the article some validity, Ed Wood has chosen to cite a scholarly, real-world book about sex, in this case The American Sexual Tragedy (1962) by American psychologist Albert Ellis, Ph.D. (Eddie also namedrops Arthur Kinsey as well as Masters and Johnson, but Ellis is the only author he actually quotes at length in "Turn On.") The passage that Eddie has appropriated deals with the unhelpful and unhealthy messages that both boys and girls are given about sex in their early lives and how these messages can cause problems for them as adults.
Ellis was an eminent, if controversial, practitioner of his trade, and I'm sure his book was meant to be taken seriously at the time of its publication. The passage that Ed Wood quotes is actually rather dry. It's interesting, though, to compare the cover of the hardcover edition of The American Sexual Tragedy with that of the mass-market paperback. Clearly, some publisher decided that any book with the word "sexual" in its title must be at least a little dirty and slapped a naked lady right on the front of it. Who knows? Maybe it was that very lady who inspired Ed Wood to pick up this book in the first place.
Next: "Climax Needed" (1972)