“Finally, Playboy is back in Italy!” was plastered at
the top of a large provocative advertisement leaned up against a trash can next
to the newsstand near my apartment. It caught my attention. In the ad, there
were two men, one young and one older, dangling the latest issue of Playboy
by the centerfold cleverly covering up their faces. The slogan at the bottom of
the ad reads, “Talks about everything. Speaks to everyone.” As I walked away
from the newsstand, I wondered to myself two things: 1) Playboy is back?!
I never knew it was gone;  and 2) Why
does a romantic place like Italy need to advertise for Playboy?

As I walked down the cobbled street, I began to think, “What
message is being sent here, and why?” After living here for a few years, and
getting to know Italians as people, I’ve begun to see the cracks in the
mythical nature of the romantic in their country. The romantic is always
fleeting and never sustainable. In Italy, you only think about getting married
only after you have a solid job (which you won’t get while you’re living
with your parents until you’re 40), been (or lived) with someone for roughly 10
years (ironically, this does not presume that you’ve moved out from under your
parents roof). In the meantime, if you find a fling, go for it. Who knows, it
could be what your life has been missing.

I’ve also been reading a great book recently by David Matzko
McCarthy called Sex and Love in the Home: A Theology of the Household
which got me thinking about how our culture embeds and expresses messages
through things like images and implied narratives.  McCarthy says that, “the sexual landscape of
contemporary culture is a market, for entertainment and consumption, pleasure
and play. Although popular culture is just a market and not necessarily
true to what people do or believe about sex, the market is shaped by a public
grammar of sexual desire that taps basic modern truths: sex is exciting, good,
fun, healthy, ephemeral, and elusive. Sex dies in the routines of home” (40).

So it’s no wonder, that in a (sexually?) frustrated culture,
people have to be sold into what their lives have been missing. This is the
whole point of ads (like the one I came across today) which “evoke a code of
desire where feelings of longing and impulses of unfulfilled desire are transferable
… [and] the ads create a sense that we are missing something we could have”
(33). In this case, the point of the ad is not, “Buy the mag, bag the girl” but
instead, “You lack the mag and you lack the girl.” Most of the advertising
world profits off of manufacturing an unfulfilled desire.

My point here in mentioning all of this, is not to conjure
up the Church to shut down these newsstands. But instead, I ask myself, what kinds
of households exist in this city that offers a contrasting story of desire? The
story of marriage tends to be balked at for being impractical and only for the
brave or the stupid. The story of abstinence makes us cringe as we see elderly
nuns or priests walking down the street. On the surface, it would appear that
the story of indulgence (not the kind that the Church used to sell back in the medieval
times) is held out to the city as the only viable story to live by. My worry is
that the city has bought into the wrong story. The crazy thing is that the
Church inhabits the city and tells a story as well.  But my question is, has the Church bought into
the same manufactured story of unfulfilled desire? What has the Church done (or not done) in promoting and perpetuating this bankrupt story of manufactured desire? Has the Church been reading Playboy?
Maybe just for the articles…