In its heyday, Smooth was probably the most widely read magazine in the treehouses of America. A generation of men remember the magic that the magazine brought into their lives. Now they are heads of corporations, respected scholars, political leaders, scientists, directors of major humanitarian organizations... but all carry within them cherished memories of what would transpire when each month's edition arrived in the mail. They had anticipated it with cheerful, almost desperate innocence. With the cherished prize in curled in their hands, they savored a few moments of anticipation, struggling with the impulse to tear it open. Then they raced across their carefully manicured lawns to call their friends together, and retreated to the sanctity of someone's treehouse or basement. In those hideouts, the first harbingers of their eventual emancipation, the boys flung themselves into the magazine with the kind of eagerness usually reserved for sled runs in the winter's first snowfall. It was a particularly prestigious moment for the boys who subscribed, because they got to decide when the page could be turned, and they arbitrated any disputes over the relative merits of the various tits, asses and pussies that were the meat of Smooth magazine.

Their fathers, of course, had felt a surge of pride when it came time to give their sons a subscription to Smooth. This was a milestone, the first step towards a more sophisticated appetite for pornography. The fathers themselves never peered into their sons' issues of Smooth, as it featured mostly softcore come-hither shots, simplistic fare for their tastes. Their own magazines offered more mature pleasures, ones that would make a young lad blanch with shock and perplexity. Some wonders would have to wait for adulthood. But Smooth offered a steady diet of proffered breasts and plaintively exposed genitalia, good early education for the young male. It was necessary that boys get over their fascination with the mere presentation of the sexualized female form in order to develop a hunger for more advanced pursuits that were the hallmark of the connoisseur.

Smooth was something of a victim of its own success. As the boys who loved it moved into adulthood, they demanded ever more titillating mysteries of the flesh from the pornography industry. They grew frustrated as progressively less was left to the imagination, having been raised on the notion that sexuality was an unending series of veils that would fall aside before their astounded and eager eyes.

Meanwhile, progressively younger boys subscribed to Smooth, until it became practically an early primer of sexual geography. Tastes advanced to the point that Smooth, with its happily inviting young models, seemed hopelessly out of date. Smooth did not tend to acknowledge the subtle exploitation of its models; it presented them as willing accomplices, opening the gates of their sexuality to the eager boy. But while the magazine kept to this tradition, society moved on. People realized that pornography was exploitative, so it became popular to acknowledge the debasement of the model by visibly demonstrating her humiliation and misery on-camera. Scatology and vicious masochism became the norm among pornographic magazines geared for the 10-16 year-old market. Compared to this new, more complex vision of sexuality, Smooth seemed quaint and feeble. With circulation dwindling, the magazine published a final edition containing some of readers' favorite pictorials from its twenty-two years of business, then closed forever.

Now, of course, that issue is a collectors' item, a glimpse into the simplicity and childish eros of an earlier time. Our sexuality is so advanced that such magazines now generally provoke either affectionate reminiscence or mockery. To think that twelve year old boys were sufficiently titillated by glimpses of taut nipples, a close-up of vulva! One marvels at the progress that has been made since that time.

Smooth failed because, at heart, it aimed to introduce boys to the mysteries of sensuality. As we've since understood, calling something mysterious is simply a means of allowing it power over us. In removing the mystery from sex, supplanting the boyish anticipation and fumbling discovery of pleasure, we finally took possession of what was ours: self-determination. Sex is ours to use for its logical ends. It no longer possesses us, clasps us in its thrall and victimizes us through our own desperate inclinations. We know everything there is to know. We experience near omnipotence in the use of our bodies.

We still occasionally come across old copies of Smooth magazine -- in auctions, yard sales, and our own attics. You may grin at the magazine's clumsy graphics and smiling nude forms, remembering an age in which you lived in such blind innocence. You may feel a surge of relief that your son will never have to go through what you did -- he will know the sweetest bursts and most excruciating exposures that human bodies can offer, even before he can walk. Pause for a moment to consider how Smooth readied you for the explosive self-knowledge that your generation contributed to the relentless flow of human growth. When you were ignorant, Smooth enlightened you. You took its Promethean fire and placed it beneath the institutions that clothed your society in false modesty. They caught flame with a surge of heat that surprised you, and burned away everything that you had covered out of fear, exposing all that was hidden, until it lay naked and spread open to your understanding.