Feature Articles: The Emotional Effects of the Pill, Victims of the VD Rip-Off (Conclusion), The Bill
Exclusive Interview: Gore Vidal
Cover Art:
The mood is right, the man is right, and you, clever lady, took your Pill right on schedule. Okay, start worrying. According to The Emotional Effects of the Pill by Lionel Tiger, the Rutgers anthropology professor who wrote the bestselling The Imperial Animal with Dr. Robin Fox, and Men In Groups, a study of male bonding, you're in trouble. You already know the grim rumors connecting the Pill with embolisms, heart disease, high blood pressure, chronic despondency, all kinds of neuroses, and even cancer. Now the Pill, which forestalls pregnancy by giving the body the chemical message that conception has already taken place, also precipitates such expectant syndromes as water retention, torpor, confusion, anxiety of appearance, nervousness, diminished sexual zeal - all quite evident, says Tiger, to the male, and none of them a pretty sight. Tiger suspects, therefore, that the long-term results of Pill-taking will be sharp, unnatural disruptions of human nature, including perhaps a devaluation of sex. In short, a "fertile source of ruin," to borrow a phrase of Thucydides.
A further caution to women is Edward Brecher's Women-Victims of the VD Rip-off, part two of his Viva expose of the puritan taboo against knowing how you are - especially if you enjoy that insidious symptom of moral turpitude, God's own syph. Brecher, a Ph.D. and author of Licit and Illicit: A Consumer's Guide to Drugs, highlights, evaluates, and recommends an armada of nostrums for warding off the scrud through simple hygienic rules and practices. Equally optimistic is Germaine Greer, the feisty author of The Female Eunuch and the sexiest feminist in the regiment. Taking up cudgels with idiotic, although ladylike, chest armature in her Last Word essay on the obsolescent brassiere, Greer demolishes the notion of the "effete slob" and celebrates the body unelastic. "The unbound breast is reality against fantasy, humanity against fetishes, love over lechery," says the Australian-born professor of English literature.
Also looking ahead, Gore Vidal thinks bisexuality "may be the only workable pattern for the future, and it is a most healthy one." In his Interview with London-based staffer Lynn Barber, Vidal, the author of The Best Man, Washington, D.C., and Myra Breckinridge, talks about bisexuality, prostitution, violence, politics, Washington, Watergate, and the mysterioso shooting of George Wallace - which Vidal suggests was the would-be fruit of a conspiracy related to the other happy plans of the Republicans in 1972. Vidal also talks about his new novels, Burr-about Aaron Burr, third vice president of the United States, who slew Alexander Hamilton in a duel - and the forthcoming sequel to Myra Breckinridge, wherein Myra becomes Myron again and tangles further with the double-headed chimera of sex and Hollywood.
Other two-faced professionals are Herb Denenberg's targets: institutionalized racketeers-doctors, lawyers, dentists insurance companies-who claim to serve the public weal but all too often act only to preserve their extortionate fees and their monopoly on certified incompetence. Denenberg, Pennsylvania's controversial Naderesque Commissioner of Insurance, has become something of a celebrity, something of a hero-and something of a bastard to the gilt-edged con-men he's exposed. Fred Ferretti's Viva profile of the Commissioner, Horrible Herb, is undoubtedly only the first of many well-earned tributes Herb will receive from grateful consumers. Ferretti, a former political reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and NBC News, is on the staff of the New York Times.
If you fail to see the humor of this, turn for a sardonic smile to Donald Barthelme's The Bill, a strictly hilarious and mordant account of the cost of modern loving. Like most of Barthelme's widely praised fiction.
Exclusive Interview: Gore Vidal
Cover Art:
The mood is right, the man is right, and you, clever lady, took your Pill right on schedule. Okay, start worrying. According to The Emotional Effects of the Pill by Lionel Tiger, the Rutgers anthropology professor who wrote the bestselling The Imperial Animal with Dr. Robin Fox, and Men In Groups, a study of male bonding, you're in trouble. You already know the grim rumors connecting the Pill with embolisms, heart disease, high blood pressure, chronic despondency, all kinds of neuroses, and even cancer. Now the Pill, which forestalls pregnancy by giving the body the chemical message that conception has already taken place, also precipitates such expectant syndromes as water retention, torpor, confusion, anxiety of appearance, nervousness, diminished sexual zeal - all quite evident, says Tiger, to the male, and none of them a pretty sight. Tiger suspects, therefore, that the long-term results of Pill-taking will be sharp, unnatural disruptions of human nature, including perhaps a devaluation of sex. In short, a "fertile source of ruin," to borrow a phrase of Thucydides.
A further caution to women is Edward Brecher's Women-Victims of the VD Rip-off, part two of his Viva expose of the puritan taboo against knowing how you are - especially if you enjoy that insidious symptom of moral turpitude, God's own syph. Brecher, a Ph.D. and author of Licit and Illicit: A Consumer's Guide to Drugs, highlights, evaluates, and recommends an armada of nostrums for warding off the scrud through simple hygienic rules and practices. Equally optimistic is Germaine Greer, the feisty author of The Female Eunuch and the sexiest feminist in the regiment. Taking up cudgels with idiotic, although ladylike, chest armature in her Last Word essay on the obsolescent brassiere, Greer demolishes the notion of the "effete slob" and celebrates the body unelastic. "The unbound breast is reality against fantasy, humanity against fetishes, love over lechery," says the Australian-born professor of English literature.
Also looking ahead, Gore Vidal thinks bisexuality "may be the only workable pattern for the future, and it is a most healthy one." In his Interview with London-based staffer Lynn Barber, Vidal, the author of The Best Man, Washington, D.C., and Myra Breckinridge, talks about bisexuality, prostitution, violence, politics, Washington, Watergate, and the mysterioso shooting of George Wallace - which Vidal suggests was the would-be fruit of a conspiracy related to the other happy plans of the Republicans in 1972. Vidal also talks about his new novels, Burr-about Aaron Burr, third vice president of the United States, who slew Alexander Hamilton in a duel - and the forthcoming sequel to Myra Breckinridge, wherein Myra becomes Myron again and tangles further with the double-headed chimera of sex and Hollywood.
Other two-faced professionals are Herb Denenberg's targets: institutionalized racketeers-doctors, lawyers, dentists insurance companies-who claim to serve the public weal but all too often act only to preserve their extortionate fees and their monopoly on certified incompetence. Denenberg, Pennsylvania's controversial Naderesque Commissioner of Insurance, has become something of a celebrity, something of a hero-and something of a bastard to the gilt-edged con-men he's exposed. Fred Ferretti's Viva profile of the Commissioner, Horrible Herb, is undoubtedly only the first of many well-earned tributes Herb will receive from grateful consumers. Ferretti, a former political reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and NBC News, is on the staff of the New York Times.
If you fail to see the humor of this, turn for a sardonic smile to Donald Barthelme's The Bill, a strictly hilarious and mordant account of the cost of modern loving. Like most of Barthelme's widely praised fiction.
