Michael ffolkes's 1970 Playboy cartoon depicts a lifestyle of casual sex that was surely more male fantasy than reality. The mistletoe looks to be patched on by the artist; hence the slight irregularity in the thickness of the string where the white and yellow meet. Having mistletoe hung over the bed is a stretch, but it's the basic assumption of the cartoon.
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| "Why, Mr. Bernstein, you didn't remember to kiss me." Michael ffolkes Playboy, January 1970, p. 258 |
The lit cigarette in bed was an old cliche even then, obviously intended to tell us this is a postcoital scene. Like many Playboy cartoons, it's conceived for what is today often referred to as the male gaze, he in pajamas and she with her gravity-defying breasts exposed. This cartoon raises a number of questions I don't have the answers to. Did Mr. Bernstein in fact bother to undress for sex, or did he put the pajamas on afterwards? Is she an employee of his? Is it his bed? Hers? Why give him a Jewish surname if there is mistletoe hung over the bed—or does that explain why he didn't know to kiss her? The humor hangs on a very sad, to me, assumption that both parties were willing to have sex without kissing. The Playboy lifestyle indeed!
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