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Urge: Naked World
Busted
Rosemeri da Costa emerges as Brazil's bare-breasted folk hero after spending eight hours in jail for slipping off her top.
By Hank Hyena
[02/11/00]

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Like a precious gem
Watching David Bowie pretend to smoke is a sensual experience.
By Lesley Stern
[02/11/00]

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You don't even need to light up!
Smoking rooms at airports are pretty ugly, but soon they'll be attractive and filled with food.
By Mary Roach
[02/11/00]

Marlboro Man lives
Big Tobacco money is being spent differently than before, but it's still targeting our youth.
By Alex Salkever
[02/10/00]

Urge: Naked World
The truth about vaginas
After playing God in the film "Dogma," rock's goddess of angst will star in an off-Broadway play about female genitalia.
By Hank Hyena
[02/10/00]

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Packaged and sold by weight, those candy hearts are a thrifty way to go when compared with dating services and personals ads. A 20-ounce bag bought at Walgreen's for $1.99 contains about 614 valentines. At which cost, one can afford to proposition every woman, or man, in this country for the price of a new sports car.

A drugstore like Walgreen's is a singularly appropriate place to purchase candy hearts: St. Valentine was an epileptic third century Roman priest who began his afterlife as patron to the sick.

In fact, if ever there was any romance to Valentine's Day, history bears no record of it. On the contrary, Feb. 14, 270, was the day pagans stoned and beheaded the priest for preaching the gospel truth.

The story was good enough to make the Roman martyrology, and according to Frank Staff's "The Valentine and Its Origins," epilepsy for centuries bore the name Veltins-Dance in his honor; supplication to the saint was its only known cure. The ill flocked to churches across Europe to be near his sacred remains, housed in glass reliquaries as large as medicine chests. By a miracle of supply and demand to this day quite ignored by science and economics alike, he had attributed to him by the Middle Ages enough bones for eight bodies and three heads.

In life, Valentine could merely comfort the ill individually; in death, he was franchised. Needless to say, treatments have since changed. Rather than faith we have Walgreen's, where we can buy chemical remedies for virtually every ailment. But while we no longer use Valentine's bones as a cure for his dance, to this day Valentine's Day remains a pretext for romantic posturing: a placebo overture to love.

Even centuries before Valentine had his first fit, February was a month for questionable fertility rites. In the beginning, Roman boys were greased and sent running naked through the streets with whips made from the hide of freshly slaughtered goats. Others, especially women, would gather to watch the spectacle, edging close to be struck -- a whipping was a certain sign of impending pregnancy and easy childbirth.

As Rome evolved scientifically, people figured out a way to make the correlation between February and pregnancy even more certain. Rather than greasing those pubescent boys, the emperor had them draw lots. Each lot bore the name of a girl, to whom the boy was bound for the next year in what amounted to a do-it-yourself crash course in sex ed. Marriage was optional.

Useful as these unions proved from the standpoint of population growth and social stability, the system was too carnal for God's proto-Victorian tastes. So when the church took control of Rome, it also took it upon itself to replace the names of girls to be deflowered with those of saints to be venerated. Which is how celibate St. Valentine got entangled in the sordid affair.

To preempt the dirty pagan lottery that fell on Feb. 15, the church cleverly created one of its own, one day early, in honor of Valentine.

The strategy worked for many of the same reasons New Hampshire manages to decide presidential elections by keeping its primary first. And so St. Valentine, the write-in, won the campaign against Juno, the pagan, for the holiday's name, even if she did wind up, over the centuries, with all the popular appeal.

It took merely a few hundred years, in fact, for the church to lose its stranglehold on coupling, and for Valentine's Day to fall back on its origins as love's placebo. In its newest incarnation, particularly popular in France, the system was more practical-minded than ever. Whereas the old courtship procedure demanded the construction of wooden ballot boxes and the convergence of the whole town to oversee the drawing of lots, now your valentine for the year was simply whomever you happened first to set eyes upon on the 14th of February. By the miracle of societal pressure, most of the new couples ended up respectably wed, freeing them to make more important decisions such as: Who shall be my mistress?

Next page | Today Cupid has given way to Snoopy and Teenage Mutant Turtles