Does ‘Smile and Say Cheesecake’ Really Mean ‘Grin and Bear It’?

“Y ou know,” she says with sudden inspiration, “I don’t think I’ll get my husband that baseball autographed by everyone on the ’63 Dodgers after all! I’ll get him a cheesecake picture of me! Sure! I’ll blow a wad at Frederick’s of Hollywood and drape myself across a bearskin rug and pout lasciviously at the camera and, boy, will he love it!”

Our by-now obvious question: Is this woman crazy, or does she know something we don’t?

HE: Well, there’s one thing she ought to know: If she goes for the boudoir photo, her spouse will profess to really, really, really love it, but inwardly his brain will be frying. First, he’ll be fretting about where to hang the thing (“Say, Phil, that big picture over your desk . . . Is that your wife in that scarlet merry widow with the riding crop?”), and he’ll be thinking, “She had a chance at a ’63 Dodgers baseball and she didn’t buy it?????”

Let’s reverse roles for perspective. No guy in the world, for instance, would make this proposal to his wife: “Say, honey, instead of that month in Barbados I promised you for Christmas, how about a really big photo of me mooning around in a loin cloth?”

SHE: I know a few guys who have begged their wives to pose for these shots. One commissioned a New York artist to do a nude portrait. The painting hangs in their boudoir. He says he’s made plans to be buried with it!

Another man I know keeps a picture of his wife--posing bare under a full length lynx coat--in the couples’ master bath. And then there’s the couple who has a stairway lined with photographs of the wife in glamour poses.

You’re right. I’ll take Barbados over any guy in a loin cloth.

HE: Maybe I just like to throw parties too much. When people come over to my place, it’s mi casa es su casa. If they want to prowl all over the place, including the bedroom and bathroom, I take it as a compliment, a sign of easy familiarity. But let’s face it--if a member of the family is going to show up in a steamy cheesecake shot over the bed or the tub, this could stir some intriguing emotions in the house guests, not to mention the subject in the photo who’s slinging all that flesh and lingerie around.

SHE: You could hide it in the closet while company is present (a trick employed by one couple I know).

I can see the attraction of boudoir photos for couples. Let’s face it--most of the time, she’s whipping up bologna sandwiches wearing sweats and tennies. Or climbing out of bed in a granny gown and his socks. An ultra-feminine photograph--her face artfully made up, her hair wispily arranged, her body clothed in something modestly frothy--might be the thing that keeps the spark alive.

HE: Yeah, I can see it: She comes slouching out of the bathroom in a shapeless set of flannels, flops into bed, grunts a perfunctory ‘good night’ and there sits her husband, looking alternately at the airbrushed, artfully augmented, gauzy-focused bundle of lasciviousness on the wall and the bleary form lying next to him, and a deep, rattling sigh wells up from somewhere around his heels. His face sags, and he wonders absently whatever became of the tomato in the black lace lounging on the Victorian sofa.

I don’t get it. Women complain that the Playboy centerfold is an impossible physical ideal to live up to, and then they pose for boudoir photos that put them in a position of having to live up to it every day? Am I missing something?

SHE: It’s not that the Playboy centerfold is an impossible physical ideal--just about any woman can jog herself into smooth curves. And, with a little help from a good cameraman, look like a million bucks. We complain because we feel women are exploited by those photographs (well, some of us do).

A woman posing in something frilly for her sweetie is a lot different than a woman baring it all for millions of drooling strangers.

There’s a Theda Bara burning inside of every woman. A boudoir photograph gives her the chance to document it.

HE: Understandable. Guys aren’t that different in their vanities. We like to occasionally look at pictures of ourselves in our youthful glory--looking cocky in a favorite baseball uniform, say, or in the yearbook track team photo.

But we aging Adonises eventually realize that those photos will haunt us if we’re confronted by them every day. I used to have a photo hanging in the bathroom picturing me standing in front of the dining car of the Orient Express--grinning, lean, chestnut-haired, a bit aggressive, 21. Now, 20 years later, it mocks me, and I’ve taken it down.

SHE: Wow. I love your candor. That reminds me of the time I visited Academy Award winner Rita Moreno--who was in her mid-’50s at the time--in her Los Angeles home. I expected to see dozens of photographs of the young, gorgeous, fiery Rita all over her house.

There wasn’t one. And, after I visited with her, I understood why. Here was a woman who was so ecstatic about the present she didn’t need reminders of her youthful past.

Maybe boudoir-photo lovers can learn something from Moreno. In other words, when you start looking like the mother of the woman on the wall, it’s time to put the picture under the bed.