Secrets of Playboy (Parts 1&2).*
Hugh Hefner sold himself as a champion of free speech who created the Playboy brand to set off a sexual revolution that would liberate men and women alike, but over the years he used Playboy to manipulate women to compete for his favor and silenced whistleblowers
I frankly wouldn't normally bother to watch this show, but I did, in part because of my opinion on Hefner and in part because my wife was watching it. Her interest was sparked because she had been a follower of the "real life" show that followed Hefner and three of his later prostitutes, and let's be blunt, that's what they are, which was a fairly popular show at one time. Indeed, this documentary includes the last three notables of that lamentable group among those interviewed, with Holly Madison, the principal one, being a major, and very damaged, personality in the show.
Let me be start by being blunt. Hugh Hefner is one of the worst and most despicable figures of the 20th Century.
I know that's making quite a statement for a century that included among its notables such individuals as Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Mussolini, but it's true. Just as those figures were dedicated enemies of Western civilization and values abroad, Hefner was at home. In the end, the West prevailed over all of these political figures, but it didn't prevail against Hefner. The destruction he caused is vast and ongoing.
I'm not going to give a full biography of Hefner as I don't know it, and I'm not going to bother to look it up. What I can relate is that he was from the Midwest, served stateside in the U.S. Army during World War Two, and then went to work for one of the then existing girly mags after the war. Apparently according to his own recollection and that of his friends, he was jilted by a girl while in high school (with there being video footage of her, she was quite attractive and very intelligent looking), and then reformed his central personality into the early Playboy image as a result.[1] There's more than a little room to doubt that, but what seems clear is that he was a man who was essentially devoid of morals and driven principally by lust and its monetization, although what came about first is questionable. The love of money is indeed the root of all evil, and it's possible that he loved money first and came into lust as a result.
Anyhow, in the early 1950s he went out on his own with a brilliant marketing idea that became Playboy magazine
Dirty magazines of all sorts had existed for a while, and indeed, while I haven't published on it, it's pretty clear that there was a trend towards more and more risqué treatment of women in print starting wth the advancement of photography in the first quarter of the 20th Century. It was still the case well into the first 1/3d of the century that illustrations, rather than photographs, dominated magazines, but even by the 1920s black and white salacious magazines existed. By the 1930s, trends overlapping from the 1920s were such that magazines of all types were more and more willing to take risks with female figures for magazines and magazine covers. By the late 1930s the female figure with a tight sweater was a pretty common feature on magazines of all types and one of the major magazines featured Rita Hayworth in 1940 in a pose so risqué that it rivaled anything put on the cover of Playboy early on. So the trend was on.
At the same time, this trend also started, and indeed was much advanced, in the movie industry, until the Hays Production Code put the brakes on it in 1922.
Something happened in the World War Two timeframe that's really not terribly clear to me, other than it seems to me that it was there. At one time, I would have been inclined to attribute the 1953 introduction of Playboy nearly entirely to the Second World War, but that's unfair. Going into the war, it was already the case that pinups were around.
During the war, however, millions of unattached young men spent years away from home at a time when that was quite uncommon, and that had some sort of accelerating impact. Keep in mind that an unmarried man in his 20s or even 30s likely lived at home, with his parents, prior to the war, and indeed again after the war. During the war, this wasn't true at all.
As a result, during the war, the girly mag and related publications received a big unrestrained boost. So did prostitution and other sexual vices as well. And the seeping of sex into things in general, at least in the service, did. Quite a few U.S. Army Air Corps crewmen flew into combat in World War Two in bombers with paintings of top heavy naked women on the fuselages of their planes, or painted on their flight jackets.
The genie might not have been fully out of the bottle by war's end, but the cork was loosened. At the same time, a famous study by Kinsey was conducted during the war, which ostensibly revealed that the average sexual conduct of American men was libertine. It's now known that Kinsey himself was plagued with sexual oddities, and like a lot of people in such a position, he sought to justify them. His study, as it turned out, largely focused on the incarcerated, hardly a representative slice of American men, and it went so far as to essentially force some minor males into sexual acts. It's flaws, to say the least, and was perverted to say more.
That study, however, was released after the war and formed an inaccurate pseudo-scientific basis to challenge Western sexual morality. And that's where we get back to Hefner. Unlike the girly mags that had come before Playboy, Hefner's rag was able to claim to be mainstream.
Slickly published with high production values, Hefner took the pinup of the 1940s and published her in centerfold form, starting with purchased photos of Marilyn Monroe for the introductory issue. It was an incredibly misogynistic publication, darned near outright hating women while celebrating an extremely exaggerated example of the female form. Like nose art on World War Two bombers, all the 1950s examples of Playboy centerfolds were hugely top-heavy. They were also all young, and portrayed as blisteringly stupid and willing and eager to engage in unmarried sex. They were also all sterile. Playboy didn't run articles on young women getting pregnant.[2]
In the climate of the time, just out of the Second World War, just following Kinsey's study, and in the midst of the Korean War, the magazine was an instant hit. It began to immediately impact American culture and became accepted, if still regarded as dirty, as a publication. It crept into male dominated settings of all types, there virtually not being a barbershop in the United States that didn't have it. Women in popular media came to rapidly resemble, to some degree, the centerfolds who appeared in the magazines, and by the late 1950s the US was in the era of large boobed, blond haired, probably dumb (in presentation) starlets.
Playboy had this field all to itself for quite some time and in the 1960s it really expanded. While the early magazine was sort of weirdly conservative in away, the explosion of the counterculture and the introduction of the pill were tailor-made for its expansion. While in the 50s, the suggestion was that the Playboy man could have all of these big breasted girls next door for himself, by the 60s it was an outright free for all.
Around that time, Hefner himself began to essentially live that way. By the 70s it was completely open, with the Playboy Mansion His big, and creepy, parties were a cause célèbre in the entertainment community. It meant you were somebody to be invited, and many such celebrated figures of the era were, such as Bill Cosby. . . .
Yeah. . .
Well, anyhow, in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s being invited to the party of a pornographer wouldn't have been something a person wanting a public career would want. By the 70s, the opposite was true.
And that meant, in essence, the new sexual libertineism advocated by Playboy was essentially the American, and indeed Wester World, standard. Even where not outright accepted, it seeped into being. The magazine was everywhere, including in many middle class homes, sending the message to boys that lusting after big chested girls was not only normal, but desirable.
It's been a disaster.
Now we're reaping what Playboy helped sew, although the entertainment industry still hasn't quite figured that out. Women want out of the sex object status that Playboy foisted on them but don't quite know how to get there. The "Me Too" movement is part of that.
Part of things being corrosive is that they corrode. You can't just corrode a little bit. That's happened to society, and as we are now being told, a little late in the day, that happened to Hefner.
As this series reveals, all things Playboy were gross. The life inside the Playboy Mansion as one of Hefner's concubines was controlled, gross and revolting, including to at least some of the subjects of his loveless attention. One resident, whose father lived there, and who practically grew up in the mansion, not too surprisingly had turned to teenage lesbian sex with one of the female inhabitants and later tried to write a book about what she'd experienced in her early years. It was pretty clearly suppressed, once released, by the declining Playboy empire. Another former male employee was basically threatened if he went public with what he knew.
Suicides of Playboy models were a feature of its earliest days, with at least one of its most famous centerfolds (already a teenaged wife by the time she posed) being one example. According to this show, however, other suicides featured among the women of Playboy with the news being hushed. At least one well known centerfold was the victim of a murder, and a murder was referenced in the show without it being clear to me if that was the same figure or not, as I don't know the names of the characters involved.
Playboy was declining by the early 80s, a victim of its own success. Penthouse came in, and started to erode its market share by being grosser. Hustler came in and was grosser yet. A race to the bottom ensued. Then the Internet arrived, and they all rocketed into the gutter. People weren't willing to pay for the smut they could access for free.
At the same time, however, it seems like there's some effort to crawl back out of the gutter. The Me Too movement is part of that. Its members are clear that they know that they're being treated wrongly, if they can't quite figure out how to define why they're being treated wrongly, and what the origin of the standard they are grasping for is. And the depths of the salacious portrayal of women on magazine covers arrested in the 1970s. At that time, the nearly bare breast of a model could appear on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, and Farah Fawcett could be seen nearly falling out of her swimsuit on the cover of Time. Advertisements in magazines don't feature minors in nearly pornographic poses anymore. That era is over.
What isn't over is the decline of television, however and movies, which remain sex fixated. They may be behind the curve on this, or not. Having embraced the descent, however, they can't get out of it as easily as print can and has. The Me Too movement might be helping it to do so, however, as now actresses are expressing regret over nude scenes they've done in conventional films, and some are clear that they outright will not do them.
What also isn't over is the sex fixated nature of certain aspects of Americans culture, even while it is over in other areas. It's interesting. We see both sides at the same time, with part of the American left simply defining itself by sexual desires in a literal sense, while at the same time, posts like this have become amazingly common on Twitter.
if someone could marry me that would be great thx
That girl isn't looking for the Playboy man, and she sure isn't the Playboy "Playmate" bimbo.
So how do you undo six decades of destruction.
Well, it probably won't be easy, but if Playboy's story teaches us anything, it seems that at certain tipping points things can and do happen quickly. Playboy wouldn't have been a success in 1943, but in 1953 it suddenly became one, and it changed views pretty quickly. That came in the wake of two world wars, a smaller hot war in the Cold War, nearly universal male conscription, and the flooding of the universities with a massive number of young unattached people. It also came just before a massive cultural rejection by one generation of the values of prior ones, and a massive infusion of money into society at an unheard of level. And it followed a bogus scientific revelation followed by a genuine scientific pharmaceutical introduction.
But there was some tipping point that was reached before the wave started to crest. Another one seemingly might be getting reached now.
We haven't fought a big war for a long time, even though we've fought some smaller ones. Our military is at its smallest level since 1939. A lot of the glamour of university life has worn off, and the post Boomer generations face economic realities that resemble the pre-1940 situation more than the post 1945 one.
A seeming rediscovery of values is going on as part of that.
Footnotes
*It's admittedly unusual for us to start a review of any kind prior to a series being completed, but here we've done so as the points made, and the horrors revealed, are sufficient to do so. Additionally, given schedules and what not, its very possible that we may not view the reamining parts of the series.
On this topic, it could legitimately be asked why review this documentary at all, on this site. Actually, however, its one of the very sorts of things this blog was designed to examine.
The very first entry here claimed the purpose of the blog as follows:
Lex Anteinternet?
The Consolidated Royalty Building, where I work, back when it was new.What the heck is this blog about?The intent of this blog is to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?Part of the reason for this, quite frankly, has something to do with minor research for a very slow moving book I've been pondering. And part of it is just because I'm curious. Hopefully it'll generate enough minor interest so that anyone who stops by might find something of interest, once it begins to develop a bit.
How does this to comport?
Well, the blog has clearly gone beyond "the practice of law prior to the current era" and, as noted before, it theoretically is a sort of blog based research for a very slow moving novel I'm theoretically writing.
Part of that research has been to take a close look at how life really was in the 1910s, and that's expanded out to how life really was in prior eras. And part of that is social history.
That's why this topic is very relevant.
All too often, portrayals of the past are based on our concepts of values and outlooks of today, which are very often wildly off base. For this reason, particularly for badly based historical depictions, social views are expressed from a fully current. . . I wouldn't call them modern, point of view. As modern in the Western world are blisteringly fascinated by sex, and frankly a pornographic concept of sex, this sort of view is extremely common in works that are ostensibly works of historical fiction. It isn't limited to this, however. This also tends to be the case with other common aspects of society, ranging from the roles of women in society, the attitudes towards that, and frequently matters of religion as well.
As somewhat minor examples, just recently I was flipping through the channels and one of the more modern Westerns was on, complete with a female gunfighter wearing trousers. Well, not very likely. When women started to actually wear trousers, right around 1900 or so, it was somewhat of a controversial matter, and it required, to put it delicately, an evolution of undergarments.
To give another example, there is a popular television show on Vikings where they are the celebrated protagonists. To the extremely limited extent I've seen it, which is extremely limited, it not only is completely historically inaccurate, but it's also somewhat hostile to religion, by which would have to mean Catholicism as there was only one Christian Church at the time, divided into east and west though it was. In reality, the Viking era was heroically Christian and obviously so, so much so that the Vikings themselves, by the end of the Viking age, were Latin Rite Catholics.
On the topic at hand, television and Hollywood have really endorsed a sort of combined Cosmopolitan/Playboy view of women in recent historical dramas, or tend to. The women tend to libertine and more often than not sterile, in an era when neither was anywhere near true. Indeed, the irony is that many of our ancestors would regard our current conduct in this arena as not only shocking, but appalling. The further irony is that in large part the Me Too movement seeks to reach back into this prior era, where the standards they're reaching for were the social standard, even if widely ignored.
1. It's interesting that to be a "playboy" was originally a type of insult, and remained so to some degree when I was young. In its original sense it meant a superficial male who played women. It was sort of a nicer and more superficial way of saying that somebody was a womanizer.
2. Prior magazines were pretty clearly depictions of prostitutes, with all the nasty vice and lack of personal knowledge that goes with that, or of what were essentially burlesque models, whom the vieweres knew that they could look at, but never touch.
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