Craig McNamara writes

Running alongside an article on Mr. Sheen and his recent...happenings, I noticed this promotional image for his CBS sitcom. Look familiar: Yes, it's another example of that popular comedic image we were discussing just a couple weeks back, Bickering-Parties-On-Either-Side-Of-A-Door . I also stumbled on this other example recently... More proof that what the exposed brick wall is to comedians, the multi-paneled door is to comedies.

You combine with the loosening sexual mores of 1972 with the mainstreaming of the "male centerfold" (following movie star/sex symbol Burt Reynolds appearing au natural in Cosmopolitan that same year) and this -- unfortunately -- is what you get: Real socks appeal, fellas. Yes, what better way to show off your socks than by removing all those other distracting clothes? Or, more to the point, what better way to draw attention to your ad than by highlighting it in context of one of the most provocative images allowed in mainstream media of the era? (Showing women nude or with implied nudity had been fairly common in advertising since at least the '50s .) But back to the Cosmo influence: After some 80 years as a family magazine, then-new editor Helen Gurley Brown reoriented the magazine in the early 1970s, to a focus on the interests of sexually liberated young women. Women finally get equal rights to objectify the opposite sex. Probably nothing epitomized the magazine...