is for Zipper. Until 1966 when sexually explicit literature was finally
legalized, the authors of soft pornography often represented sex through
an anticlimactic use of ellipsis. The novelist brought the reader
to the very brink of intercourse and then, just as his characters began
to fumble with their zippers to release "tumescent manhood[s]" and "miasma[s]
of maleness," suddenly cut away to the postcoital cigarette or the embarrassed
adjustment of rumpled clothing.