Now, I don't think that lots of folks are going to mourn the passing of Guccione's Penthouse Magazine any more than they'll bemoan the demise of the Roadster Oldsmobile. There are plenty of other cars on the market and there will always be plenty of smut available on newsstands as well as online.

And I can't forget the fact that I had some good times in an Oldsmobile I used to own and I had some good times, I admit, with Penthouse admiring the way that Penthouse has tried to convince American men that small-breasted "naughty" young ladies are sexy, too -- and that's quite a challenge in a culture where big boobs seem to be the primary sexual characteristic men look for in a woman.

And anyone who's ever toiled in the fertile fields of smut looks back with curiosity and even wonder at Guccione's success as a porno peddler and wonder even more at his decision to quit while he's ahead. Early in his artist's life (and he was and is today a talented artist, his paintings bringing him a handsome sum) he decided to give Hustler and Playboy a run for their money by putting out a quality porno mag (if there is such a thing) that would put both top selling girlie mags to shame. To top them, he had to go one step further and show it all and not show it all! He hit on the idea of using Vaseline -- not for any of its usual purposes but to smear on his camera lenses to keep those then-verboten female genitals out of focus. In fact, Larry Flynt's decision to "show pink," as we used to put it at Hustler, was also a groundbreaking move for men's magazines that were sold at newsstands and on liquor-store racks instead of at porn shops on the seedy side of town. Larry paid heavily for his porn pioneering both with merchants and distributors who refused to carry those explicit photographs and with cops and prosecutors convinced a peek at pink was literally going to send all us guys to hell in a hand basket. If you ask me, Guccione and Hefner owe Larry Flynt big-time for breaking those old barriers.

Penthouse and the Roadster Oldsmobile -- the passing of things of quality diminish our ability to choose and leads to the kind of homogenization that characterizes online pornography. Good Heavens, are we really so enriched by thousands of XXXXX-rated Web sites starring the same (so it seems) blonde bimbos fellating the same turgid male members? I thought variety was supposed to be the spice of life!

I should point out here and now that I have nothing against online porn. In fact, I'm all in favor of porn no matter where you find it. Porn, if done in good taste, is good -- healthy. It's safe sex and it provides an easy outlet for sexual release. And I don't for a minute believe that it exploits women. Rather, I think it exploits the men who'll plunk down five or 10 or 20 or 30 bucks to look at pictures of people fucking.

Of course, not all of the writing in those men's magazines was quite so high-class. I recall the time my colleague and I were guest speakers at a USC journalism class.

"What kind of writing are you looking for at porn magazines," one eager young student asked.

I looked her in the eye and replied, "I'm looking for writing like 'Steaming silver bullets of white-hot' -- well, and you know how to finish that sentence!"

I recall writing once in an article ion a porn mag about a fellow who "landed his throbbing 747 of lust in her velvet runway of love."

My then editor Ben pointed out that producing smut online relieves editors and publishers of worries about crossing that ever-changing "hardcore" boundary. Online it's always hardcore. "And," Ben noted, "online porn is vertically integrated. If you want to see pictures of 300-pound women doing all sorts of things, you just type in those descriptive words that are your fancy on Google. You don't have to page through all kinds of sexual activities that are not your cup of tea. (A recent Google search coupling the weirdest, sexual keywords I could think of turned up 52 hits).

I didn't check them out.