Hitting bottom: custody of the eyes in New York.

In April, New York City started getting fid of the blowzy advertising posters that have long adorned the inside of its subway cars. "Brand train oriented" advertising, where the space on each subway car is dedicated to just one client, is being sold by the revenue-starved city to large corporations. The quaint, crudely designed notices for local podiatrists, furniture stores, and cosmetic surgeons that have played such a large role in the subliminal lives of New Yorkers will eventually go the way of the Edsel and David Dinkins. Figures of local mythology, such as the ill-fated "Dr. Tush," the world's most euphonious proctologist, and the black-and-white cartoon chronicle of Julio and Marisol, an interminable AIDS soap opera, will be lost to history. The costs of progress are high indeed.

Certainly the loss of these promises of consumer bliss and cheap medical miracles will be a considerable deprivation of my already meager fantasy life. Descending into the subway I leave behind a world of mere status anxiety to enter an alternative universe of ubiquitous sexual and physical menace. I'm talking about genital warts, here. Posters also warn me of bunions, herpes, and pickpockets, the deadly allure of drugs, and the metaphysical abomination of an unwanted pregnancy. More prosaically, I am urged to pursue my education, get a new pair of eyeglasses, raise my SAT scores, remove my tattoos, and visit the Transit Museum. In short, I am the object of unending solicitousness and selfless concern.

I will miss all this eccentric exhortation. But I will especially miss the efforts of the New York State Health Department to dissuade the young from, as it is so delicately put, "doin' it." In a touching display of Gradgrind-like faith in the magical powers of "facts, facts, facts," the Health Department recently put up an eye-catching poster. "Everybody's not doin' it," the poster announces in big bold red letters. Below that, in more somber hues, we get the epidemiology: "Sex is risky. It can lead to unwanted pregnancy, AIDS, or other STDS." Below that comes the kicker, a diagram of compromise from the culture wars. "Condoms help ... but not doin' it is 100% protection."

To hold the attention of its intended audience, the ad uses a picture. For my own part, the picture provoked, if not thoughts about sexual continence, then certainly about sexual politics. The picture is of a young lady's rear end, a rear end so snugly packed into a pair of blue jeans that no fleshly contour goes unamplified or unappreciated. This denim-draped Aphrodite beckons us to the higher morality of protected sex, or the even more heroic discipline of abstinence.

Chastity, I confess, was not what immediately leaped into my loathsome little mind when I first studied the poster. I do not consider myself exceptionally libidinal, but like most men I have upon occasion noticed a woman from the reverse angle. I think I can say, without fear of contradiction or infection, that someone in the New York State Health Department has done the same, for the department's poster child boasts as voluptuous a form as has been seen since the heroic Mamie Van Doren.

Catholics used to preach (about the time of Mamie Van Doren), and even occasionally practice, something called "custody of the eyes." When first confronted with the conundrum of the "not doin' it" poster, I tried to summon those archaic instincts. Averting my eyes from the state's salacious encouragements, I set my face toward the next poster. It read: "Feel the Passion of Leather." This offered little respite. I looked farther afield. "Designer Braces" and an ad for a miraculous allergy remedy came into focus. I took this personally. I have built a life of sexual timidity and resentment around my crooked teeth, bleary eyes, and runny nose. I would not be mocked. My gaze returned to the undebauched haunches before me.

As a frustrated copywriter, I tried to imagine how I might recast the Health Department ad to better focus the prurient mind on public health concerns. "Everybody's not doin' it. Those who do do it are liable to criminal penalities up to and including an eternity in bell." Such sentiments were surprisingly effective in their day, if somewhat unenlightened. "Everybody's not doin' it. Look around." Well, in New York that might not be the case. "Everybody's not doin' it. As improbable as that sounds...."

Trying to practice 100-percent protection, let alone custody of the eyes, in New York City is a bit like working for Ben and Jerry's add trying to swear off fat and sugar. The spirit is dithering, the flesh is weak, the free market scantily clad and never sleeps--or never sleeps alone. The enterprising proprietor of my local newsstand displays his girlie magazines at precisely eye level. I can report that Playboy's April cover featured an impossibly lissome young woman whose splendidly shaped, flawlessly tanned (how? where?), and coyly presented gluteus maximus is unlikely to prove a spur to self-denial. But who knows, given the logic of the state Health Department, maybe Playboy's cover girl will launch a new age of sexual renunciation, if not faith.

Not everything posted in the subways is asinine. The Transit system also offers "Poetry in Motion," which has featured the work of Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, and Seamus Heaney, among others. I wonder if preachment on the eternal question of doin' or not doin' it might not benefit from the use of a vocabulary that transcends the acronym-driven abstractions of the clinic and the bureaucratic state. Might not the key to effective prophylactics--namely, human motivation--lie in cherishing the beloved rather than girding one's loins against the microbes?

"Poetry in Motion" recently featured Richard Wilbur's "Transit." The poem describes a woman, observed silently from a distance, stepping onto a sidewalk, pulling on her gloves, and walking away. This seemingly unexceptional moment is charged with the fierce longing for connection and meaning that any sense of sexual responsibility must build upon. Seeing her, "A phantom heraldry of all the loves/Blares from the lintel?" Wilbur suggests. Her "perfect feet" take her down the street, "Leaving the stations of her body there/ As a whip maps the countries of the air."

Mapping the countries of the air lacks the misleading urgency of the state's doggerel about condoms, sexually transmitted diseases, and fetishized body parts. But such spiritual cartography does have the immense virtue of describing recognizable human behavior. The vocabulary of the Health Department is better suited to controlling the breeding habits of livestock.

And what if the Health Department is given a "brand" train of its own? Well. not readin' it is 100-percent protection.