Nice job Steven Hunter, it isn’t everyday a Washington Post editorial can make a man who covers the adult industry for a living feel dirty. Gram the man in his own words:

There are creepy people in porn, to be sure – I’m thinking of some now – and, while it is certain that their creepiness has adverse effects on, say, people attending the consumer-based adult conventions and/or award shows they run, their range is limited. It is not often that one encounters such mass-market perviness as what I saw in the Washington Post yesterday.

In a piece titled “Farewell to Arms (…and Legs and Ankles and Toes and Shoulders and Necks and…)”, Baby-Boomer Stephen Hunter laments the arrival of autumn and the disappearance of female flesh from public places.

Brother, sister, child and pet, do I mean the taut glory of the outer thigh? Do I mean the curves where it’s all streamline and suggestion, where the promise is the faintest vapor on the air? Do I mean a neck? Take it from me, brother, necks are okay. Oh, and what about that meadowlike expanse across the back, from the shoulder line down, with its muscular tides, its shallows, its occasional pools of limpid viscosity. Do I mean that?

At least if a woman were reading this in the pages of an old man’s porn mag like Nugget, that paid $10 for such eloquent masturbation fantasies, she would feel that the sentiment had found its perfect medium. But this is the paper that brought Nixon down.

Yeah. I’d have to agree, but what’s worse is Hunter’s creepy screed is a perverted ode to voyeurism with a tedious overlay of baby boomer angst:

You young guys, you see a beautiful woman — young, old, fat, slim, tall, short, green, white, yellow, black, brown, who really cares? — walking across the street in a sleeveless shift on a summer’s day, her hair possibly ponytailed back carelessly, her limbs sleek, hairless, her dainty toes displayed, her careless look utterly, sublimely, tragically perfect! Do you understand how grateful you should be? Why, son, in my day, all the women pranced about like Knights in Shining Elastic, not a human quiver anywhere under their perfect clothes. Before you marches Lady Godiva but for a few loose patches of material, and you have no big response. You might not even notice. The woman isn’t a treasure to you, a glimpse of paradise; she’s just a gal in a summer dress, ho-hum. You saw it all two minutes ago, you’ll see it in two more minutes.

But think of yourself some half-century ago, growing up in a magic land called ’50s America, which lasted until the double hits of Oswald’s trigger work and the Beatles’ invasion changed the place forever. Was it great back them? Er, yes and no. I think of it as a frozen Arctic of repression and superstition — but also of confidence, security, unlocked doors, Rules to Be Obeyed. It was where my generation’s wiring was soldered into place. In that era, benighted or not, the one thing we guys all knew about, all suffered from, all regretted, all raged, raged, raged — do you hear me? — raged against the dying of the light, was a thing called the panty girdle.

Dude. I’ve met plenty of boomers and none of them sound like they’re reading lines cut out of an episode of Law and Order: SVU. He sounds less like the victim of 50s repression (although the 50s had its share of sex) and more like someone who just got out of prison. And it pretty much gets worse from there.

So what’s the deal? Hunter’s not the first boomer to ejaculate the details of his twisted inner fantasy life onto the bosom of society, and by the gods, I’m sure he won’t be the last, but why? Why the hell does everyone over 45 think the world needs to know every minute detail of their often troubling inner life? Why do we need to know that Steven Hunter spends his free time staring at the bare arms and “dainty toes” of women young enough to be his granddaughter with an expression reminiscent of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs?

Baby boomers are so desperate to be hip, relevant and most of all remembered that they’ll do anything to make a splash, including vomit forth a supposedly humorous essay that makes people who watch gang bang videos for a living uncomfortable.

Way to go Wapo, and you stay classy.