Word: libido
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...Libido. After 2� years, Hef graduated from college, married Millie and, with his cartoons tucked underneath his arm, canvassed the Chicago publishing world for a job. Nothing doing, so he took a job with a Chicago firm that produced and printed cardboard cartons. It was, says Hefner, the closest thing to journalism he could get. Eventually he landed a job with the subscription department of Esquire magazine. But when, after several months, he asked for a $5-a-week raise, he was turned down. He went to work briefly for a publication called Children's Activities, but he decided...
From then on, he aimed Playboy straight at the libido. Since sex is part of the whole man, he reasoned, why not devote part of a whole magazine to it? "Would you put together a human being that is just a heart and toenails?" he asks. So he put together a magazine that was largely bosom and thigh and not especially distinguishable from other girlie slicks. But he added more substantial content as he went along; today's Playboy is a well-stuffed product, bulging with intellectual ambitions and self-confidence. It even includes some tips from John Paul Getty...
BEAZLE (interrupting): Of course not. I intone: You have suffered an object loss in which you had an over-cathesis of libido and have been unable to decathect the libido and invest it in a new object. Do you follow...
Instead of the neat Oedipal triangle, the talk today is more likely to be about "unresolved dependency needs." Instead of "libido" disturbances there is apt to be worry about failure to "communicate." Adler's "inferiority complex" has been widely replaced in pop-psych jargon by "feelings of inadequacy," which sounds less formidable. And as a result of recent sexual emancipation, the problem no longer seems to be repression so much as living up to everyone's high hedonistic expectations...
Indeed, man's capacity for misunderstanding his neighbor seems inexhaustible. Take sex. Thomas Jefferson believed that apes raped black women as one way to climb a notch on the social scale. Even today, people like to think that apes possess a savage and unrestrained libido. Actually, they are scarcely interested in sex at all. In 466 hours of directly observing gorillas in the wild, Anthropologist George Schaller witnessed only two copulations and one unsuccessful try. Furthermore, gorilla swains are sadly underendowed by human standards: the erect male organ measures a scant...