Word: disports
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...jungle out there, teeming with hordes of unseen enemies. Bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites fill the air. They cluster on every surface, from the restaurant table to the living-room sofa. They abound in lakes and in pools, flourish in the soil and disport themselves among the flora and fauna. This menagerie of microscopic organisms, most of them potentially harmful or even lethal, has a favorite target: the human body. In fact, the tantalizing human prey is a walking repository of just the kind of stuff the tiny predators need to survive, thrive and reproduce...
Crepuscular clouds drift lazily across a Crayola orange sky. To the right, a mauve villa, ornamented by a dazzling splash of tropical trees; to the left, an azure pool, inviting in look but impossible in perspective. Four couples, paired in matching pinks, yellows, lilacs and greens, disport themselves playfully while the estate's elegant mistress lounges provocatively on a poolside chaise. Suddenly a stranger springs into this daydreamer's view of a motley Mediterranean paradise: a macho greaser in shades, tight white pants and black silk shirt. The woman rises and sniffs the wind. This is Italy...
...coitus, could say of sex: "There is nothing to be afraid of, and never was." Now, in the Age of Herpes, Playboy employees jokingly refer to the swimming facilities at Hugh Hefner's Los Angeles mansion as "the herpes pool." A Manhattan resident who had always longed to disport himself at a sexual playpen called Plato's Retreat now says he will go only if he can wear a full-length wet suit. Flesh Merchant Al Goldstein, editor of Screw magazine, says glumly, "It may be there is a god in heaven carving out his pound of flesh...
...chains, gauze and spangles, disco Spandex and Southern belle white, they hang from the ceiling and leer out of doorways. Their cigarette smoke makes haze of the atmosphere; their singing and screaming and chanting and ranting produce an unholy, stupefying, din. They are painted like puppets; they contort and disport to uncanny visual effect...
Finally, Talese fails to draw the conclusions his evidence provides. He shows how Hefner's freedom to disport has pained his partners. He admits that Sandstone was hard on some who went there. What he does not say is the obvious: given power over others, hedonists can be as tyrannical as censors. The injunction to perform can be as chafing as the commandment to abstain. Talese thinks that the war between men and women could be called off if women would learn to like "recreational sex." He does not add that this fantasy of surrender is a boring substitute...