"You're never more alone than when you're coupling," reads the introduction to a feature in December's Playboy by "Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler." Of course, nobody knows loneliness better than R.O.B.—he's the one whose wife left him for Ted Turner, prompting him to write one of the craziest emails we've ever seen about how happy he is for them and how he totally understands why his wife would want to be with an older man since her childhood abuser was one and you, you, you, oughta know! Anyway, Playboy has given him the task of imagining what's going on in the minds of, among others, Santa and an elf, young Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton, and present-day George and Laura Bush. The results might be the unsexiest thing in Playboy, and that is saying a lot.

For one thing, the female halves of these couples are all comically (well, "comically") disinterested in what their partners are doing to them. "Though you are a kindly one and you are a merry one and you are a droll one, these are trivial things to me, I am an elf, I am of forest duff and I am of tree-bark dew and I am of quaking top-leaves and I am always of this trembling yearning body and I can dance a man to death, but you are managed now and you are spun and you think too much, and all I really want from you, dear Santa, is a Dirty Decadence 12-Speed Rabbit-Want Double-Dip Flex-o-Pulse Vibrator."

Ouch. Also: Pulitzer.

"The personal is political all right," thinks Hillary. "At least I did get her to shave her legs pretty quick," thinks Bill. Har. Did you know Playboy pays like $10 a word?

Oh and here's Marcus Antonius boning Cleopatra: "The sucking sound of sword in flesh, and this sound is the same, inside me and out: that soft sucking sound, now beneath me, my mansword and the flesh of a queen ..."

It seems possible that Robert Olen Butler still has some issues with women that he's working through.

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