Sex parted company with art some time ago. So it's no surprise that Playboy has decided to auction off some of its T&A artifacts from better days.
Hard-core Internet porn has displaced it to the point that Playboy's survival seems like retro posturing. This week the company posted a $27.4-million U.S. third-quarter loss, and is now trying to turn its vault of paintings, transparencies and pictorial memorabilia into cash through a Dec. 8 sale at Christie's.
You can buy a Dali canvas of a reclining nude if you like, or a picture of a young Brigitte Bardot covering pretty well everything worth covering. But why would you want to?
Playboy's artful soft-core nudity now seems like the antiquated precursor of online sex. Porn has it made because it goes straight to the point: No taboos, no make-believe, no waiting. Pleasure, it turns out, is crass and crude and in a rush to be satisfied.
But if porn is so triumphantly successful, why does it still provoke a lingering sense of dissatisfaction and disgust? Playboy may be as good as dead in the business world, but resistance movements are arising to oppose porn's domination.
In England, 22-year-old student Matt McCormack Evans launched a site named antipornmen.org that dwells on the personal harm done by pornography - not just the casual debasement of women that seems essential to porn's power-tripping but the destruction of young minds that can no longer experience real sexuality without reference to online fantasies and fetishism.
With millions served and serviced, contemporary porn has become the junk food of sex. And just as junk-food culture prompted a Fast Food Nation retaliation, the powerful inevitability of junk sex has spawned an opposition that aims to return prurience to Playboy's more inviting imagery.
Latter-day pinup magazines like the Brooklyn-based Jacques steer well clear of the disgust-impulse online porn tends to feed. Instead they engage the imagination, precisely by leaving more to it with their demure depictions of girl-next-door modesty. Hipsters who find porn's tastes too dumbed-down are rediscovering the libidinous arts of 1950s-style striptease: They've figured out that desire's appeal is much more about the drawn-out dance than the desperate destination.
If it seems pointless to turn back the clock on Internet porn, consider the parallel efforts in the world of eating. Both economic logic and human appetites favour an industrial model where the instant appeal of salty, fatty food served cheaply and fast became the diner's default option.
If progress was about giving people more of what they wanted the moment they wanted it, who would dare to create an alternative that deliberately confined people's choices (the locavore movement), or made them work harder and longer to make a meal (home-cooking from scratch), or asked them to pay much more in order to achieve an earnest and untainted simplicity (shopping at Whole Foods)?
And yet somehow it happened. Fast food is the easy option, but that doesn't make it inevitable or admirable. It may seem reason- able and persuasive for scientists to insist that wine is a drug on a continuum with crack, if all you're measuring is the final state of intoxication.
But just like porn addicts on an orgasmic binge, they're missing out on the key difference that makes nonsense of their comparison: The layers of artistry and pretence that surround the process of thoughtful drinking enhance its pleasures many times over - getting there is almost all of the fun.
Playboy is dead? Well, long live Playboy. The idea that modesty can be sexy may seem like a lost cause in a world of screen-filling implants and Viagra-fuelled orgies. But restraint will beat grossness over the long haul, because the well-placed hand or veil or moment of hesitation is far more provocative and interactive than porn's instant-on vulgarity.
In the sexuality of everyday life, we find other people attractive and engaging for all kinds of reasons that can't be equated with what passes for sex in the narrow world of porn. For some reason - perhaps a fear of acknowledging the intense sexuality of everyday life - we've let porn's laptop shortcuts define feelings that are much bigger and more neatly nuanced.
Porn is consumed in private, and in hiding. It isn't our reality, not yet. And that may be the best that can be said about our rapid progression to the X-rated life - that we can still feel some shame about where we've gone, and what we've left behind.
John Allemang is a Globe and Mail feature writer.