The Playboy Factor

(Or how America Got Porn Again). The New Republic posts a positive review (The Bunny Revolution) of Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America by Elizabeth Fraterrigo (Oxford University Press). I am supposed to applaud this magazine for being "at the forefront of many of this nation’s most important social upheavals and reconfigurations." The List:

The collapse of the U.S. Postal System’s de facto censorship apparatus? Playboy had a hand in that. Changing attitudes about sex outside of marriage? Playboy was part of this, too. The specious notion that a high-earning, free-spending bachelor is some kind of epicurean rebel? Playboy yet again. The feminist movement? Playboy “was partly responsible” for it, as Gloria Steinem once admitted. The now common glossy-magazine practice of advertising luxuries that readers cannot possibly afford? Thank you, Playboy. The idea that a man could have fine clothes, a sweet smell, an uncorked Bordeaux, and remain masculine? Yes, believe it or not, Playboy paved the way for metrosexuality, too.

If I think, rather shallowly it seems, that Playboy helped push women as sex objects, I am instructed:

It was Hefner’s great insight that girly pictures divorced from any kind of human individuality could not be anything except dirty. And so his Playmates had names, jobs, personalities, and fact sheets, however illusory these often were. In some crucial way, then, Playboy gave what was previously considered pornography a kind of dignity. It was a deeply limiting, dingbat dignity, to be sure, but to allow the mid-century American woman any identity beyond that of mother, virgin, or whore increased her available social options by 25 percent. Women would naturally revolt against this, and no one could blame them, but the fact remains that Playboy helped liberate female sexuality from a Bastille of iniquitous morality, in the long run surely doing more to help women than harm them.

I find this insulting to the women I know and love who were alive in the iniquitous mid-century.

Hefner described himself at the beginning of Playboy as Al Kinsey's "pamphleteer." He bunnied up Kinsey's hallucination of a free-sex world that would sever sexual restraints and eliminate deviance by redefintion. Yes, Hefner was indeed Kinsey's pamphleteer. Give him that--he wants it, he owns it.  And Kinsey? A first-class, world-class pseudo-scientist pervert, child-abuser, who helped pave the way for the acceptance of pedophilia. Dressed up in a bunny suit.

Comments

[David Wickert]

Playboy Enterprises is going under. It must be time for the next wave of the Atheistic menace to begin. I'm ready.

[Lars Walker]

Kinsey hath slain his thousands, and Hefner his ten thousands.

[Clifford Simon]

previously considered pornography?

[ralphg]

I recall reading an interview with Hefner in which he expressed his quest for The Ultimate Orgasm. I am not sure what that would consist of, but "ultimate" means "most extreme" and "final."

[Nick]

I have a hard time with Hefner. I don't believe he can be accused of being as crass as many in the porn industry. He wrongly argued that this was a "good" but did so fairly honestly. I think he honestly believed that women could be adored for their beauty and still be human. In that, I don't think many here would disagree. He just went, as all the worst sins do, that extra step too far. He isn't, for example, a Larry Flynt (sp?).

[Clifford Simon]

Nick says what we wish were true about Hefner. It is always a noble wish to wish that a deplorable person were good, so Nick must be commended for wishing it. That said, one wonders what to make of hatef--k fantasies (see here: http://www.nowpublic.com/world/playboy-conservative-women-top-10-list-hate-f-ck-hit-list) and whatnot from the actual pages. In other words, can the real Playboy be reconciled with the one of charitable wishes? Is Hefner just a modern-day Botticelli except with slight confusion about boundaries, or does that picture fall apart when confronted with his actual work?

[Nick]

But Hefner hasn't been directly involved with the magazine for what, over a decade? We have to remember he's old. Though I'm surprised I hadn't heard about that before.

[Ranee @ Arabian Knits]

The idea that a man could have fine clothes, a sweet smell, an uncorked Bordeaux, and remain masculine? Yes, believe it or not, Playboy paved the way for metrosexuality, too.

I find this somewhat comical. When was it that men stopped caring about how they dressed? Even through the 50s men cared about how they dressed at least as much as women. Can one look at the dashing suits of the past century, the great coats of the one before that, the cravats and trousers and haberdashery and think that it took pornography to bring men to care about how they looked.

I lament how little care men seem to have for their appearances now and wish men would reclaim an interest in it. When I see how young men in their primes dress, I am shocked that any young women can find them attractive. But then, virility and youth are attractive regardless of attire. It is in our current pornographic culture that men find they do not have to dress to impress women, prospective employers, anyone. I do not know that it is a result of the porn culture, but I do not see how the porn culture has improved the general state of men's dress.