Ken's Idea of Maxim Magazine

Parental Advisory: explicit content, etc. 

Back around the time Eva and I married in 2000, I had a subscription to MAXIM magazine. I may have been the only subscriber in their database that never looked closely at the pictures, let alone let the women in those pictures into his fantasy world. (Paper, they all taste like paper...) 

MAXIM, before it declined like most print magazines as the world shifted online en masse, was a treasure trove of interesting articles, ribald jokes, and vicarious living. Even without getting the pictures all sticky, I got a lot out of each issue. 

Now, it's a pale shadow of its former self. The pictures are still there, of course: gods forbid the male of the species be deprived of his visual aids.

Why do you humans--men and women--fantasize about people you stand zero chance of ever meeting? How does that even work? Doesn't your mind short-circuit the fantasy as Kate Winslet says "ah, you must be Ken, I've been just dying to finally meet you!" in that sultry voice of hers...then she drops to her knees, pouts ever so sexily, and THIS CAN NEVER HAPPEN ABSOLUTELY NOT BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT

(And even if it did happen, ha-ha, I don't even *know* her. For all I know she has an utterly repulsive personality. Not only would I never meet her, not only would she never do...anything...if I did, if against every odd that ever was I met her and she wanted me, I wouldn't even be able to summon the requisite upswelling of emotion so necessary for other upswellings to occur. That's three levels of impossibility. I may as well fantasize about sex with the mermaids of Mars.)

Ahem.

There's nothing to MAXIM anymore: it's just another celebrity rag-mag infused with some testosterone. 

The Maxim magazine I'd love to read nowadays would be full of...maxims. I'd do a whole issue on "shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased -- thus do we refute Entropy".  I'd  have articles about maxims from other cultures, and how cultural experience influences pithy sayings and the other way around. On the bottom of each I'd have contronyms, which I find fascinating: words that have opposite meanings. How did "fine" get to mean both "excellent" and just "good enough"? If you say something's "finished", you might mean it's completed...or it's destroyed. A "handicap" is an advantage in golf and a disadvantage everywhere else. There are dozens, scores of these things. "To screen" means to present...or to conceal; to "weather" means to stand up to or to wear away from...somebody slap me...

Anyway, many of my favourite maxims have to do with love and relationships. Here are a few:

"The people in the relationship matter more than the relationship"

--Veaux and Rickert, MORE THAN TWO

This one is counterintuitive at first glance. After all, longevity in relationships is often prized, and this seems to be suggesting that the form of the relationship isn't really all that important.  

I believe this to be true. More: I believe that focusing on people rather than the relationship you're in with them is the surest way to sustain that relationship. If you start viewing the relationship as more important than the person, depending on where you are, you might

• "settle" for someone who is not right for you
• take the person for granted
• hold someone too close, making a prison of your partnership

...none of which are good for you or your partner.

Related: "Relationships are not needs-fulfillment machines" (I THINK that one's original to me, but I can't be sure.

This, too, runs against Mother Culture's wisdom. How many songs have you heard with variants of "you're all I ever need" or "you complete me" in them? The song on the radio may think it's about love, but usually it's about the opposite: competition, obsession, ownership and entitlement. 

YOU ARE A COMPLETE PERSON IN AND OF YOURSELF. SO IS YOUR PARTNER. Don't ever start thinking otherwise: relationships are supposed to be interdependent, not co-dependent.  I think as soon as you start looking to your partner to get your needs met, you're setting your relationship up to fail. 

(This is not to say that you can't complement each other: ideally, you probably should. But nothing kills a relationship faster than expectations.)

"Sex without love is merely healthy exercise"

--Robert A. Heinlein

I could have chosen any number of Heinlein love quotes here: he, perhaps more than anyone else, has shaped my attitudes on love.  Spider Robinson, a disciple of Heinlein's and the source of Callahan's Law above ("shared pain is lessened"), phrased it

 "we weren't making love, we were fucking. Nothing wrong with that...just not enough right with it."

Nobody ever said exercise was bad for you. And sex as exercise is considerably less painful than other varieties. But loveless sex...there's just so much missing there. 

Maybe it's just that I've never had it. I have to at least like somebody a whole lot (or fool myself into doing so)  to even allow a situation where sex could conceivably occur. I picture sex, robbed of love, to be a perfuctory (sorry), rather clinical thing, rather like...porn. Fake. Meaningless. Quite frankly, that may have been where the saying "boring as fuck" came from.  I try not to do anything involving another person from just one level of consciousness, much less the body level: that's for things like elimination and sneezing: two other things I think of when I imagine what sex without love must be like. Oh, wow, a genital sneeze, how...charming.

I submit that I may well be missing out somewhere on this, because sex for the sake of sex is intensely enjoyable for most men and more than a few women. And I would never judge, much less shame, someone for an act I don't even understand. But it's a game I'm not interested in playing. I'm not really a game-player.

And I live by a variant of Dan Savage's Campsite Rule: Leave each person in a better state than you found them. That's sometimes a serious challenge, and I don't always succeed. But I never stop trying.