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By Root 1289 0

it was right by the entrance and visible from the street through a large plate-glass window, so you were vulnerable on all fronts. One of your mom’s friends could walk past and see you and raise the alarm—there was a police call box on a telephone pole right out front, possibly put there for that purpose—or a pimply stock boy could clamp you on the shoulder from behind and denounce you in a loud voice, or your dad himself could fetch up unexpectedly while you were frantically distracted with trying to locate the pages in which Kim Novak was to be seen relaxing on a fleecy rug, airing her comely epidermis, so there was practically no pleasure and very little illumination in the exercise. This was an age, don’t forget, in which you could be arrested for carrying beer on your bosom or committing an unspecified crime against nature, so what the consequences would be to be caught holding photographs of naked women in a family drugstore were almost inconceivable, but you could be certain they would involve popping flashbulbs, the WHO-TV mobile crime scene unit, banner headlines in the paper, and many thousands of hours of community service.

On the whole therefore you had to make do with underwear spreads in mail order catalogs or ads in glossy magazines, which was desperate to be sure, but at least safely within the law. Maidenform, a maker of brassieres, ran a well-known series of print ads in the 1950s in which women imagined themselves half dressed in public places. “I dreamed I was in a jewelry store in my Maidenform bra” ran the caption in one, accompanied by a photo showing a woman wearing a hat, skirt, shoes, jewelry, and a Maidenform bra—everything, in short, but a blouse—standing at a glass case in Tiffany’s or some place like it. There was something deeply—and I expect unhealthily—erotic in these pictures. Unfortunately, Maidenform had an unerring instinct for choosing models of slightly advanced years who were not terribly attractive to begin with and in any case the bras of that period were more like surgical appliances than enticements to fantasy. One despaired at the waste of such a promising erogenous concept.

Despite its shortcomings, the approach was widely copied. Sarong, a manufacturer of girdles so heavy-duty that they looked bulletproof, took a similar line with a series of ads showing women caught by unexpected wind gusts, revealing their girdles in situ, to their own horrified dismay but to the leering delight of all males within fifty yards. I have before me an ad from 1956 showing a woman who has just alighted from a Northwest Airlines flight whose fur coat has inopportunely gusted open (as a result of an extremely localized sirocco occurring somewhere just below and between her legs) to reveal her wearing a Model 124 embroidered nylon marquisette Sarong-brand girdle (available at fine girdlers everywhere for $13.95). But—and here’s the thing that has been troubling me since 1956—the woman is clearly not wearing a skirt or anything else between girdle and coat, raising urgent questions as to how she was dressed when she boarded the plane. Did she fly skirtless the whole way from (let’s say for the sake of argument) Tulsa to Minneapolis or did she remove the skirt en route—and why?

Sarong ads had a certain following in my circle—my friend Doug Willoughby was a great admirer—but I always found them strange, illogical, and slightly pervy. “The woman can’t have traveled halfway across the country without a skirt on, surely,” I would observe repeatedly, even a little heatedly. Willoughby conceded the point without demur, but insisted that that was precisely what made Sarong ads so engaging. Anyway, it’s a sad age, you’ll agree, when the most titillating thing you can find is a shot of a horrified woman in a half-glimpsed girdle in your mother’s magazines.

By chance, we did have the most erotic statue in the nation in Des Moines. It was part of the state’s large Civil War monument on the capitol grounds. Called Iowa, it depicts a seated woman, who is holding her bare breasts in her hands, cupped from beneath