I remember the thrilling times at my friend Paula's house when I was about your daughter's age when Paula would abscond with her father's Playboy as soon as it hit the mail slot, surgically remove it from its plain brown wrapper, and we would gleefully laugh over every page. You may have put parental controls on her reading, but I assume she has friends, and will simply swallow these unexpurgated tales of male bonding at their houses.Emily Yoffe was born in 1955, by the way. I was born in 1951. Playboy was born in 1953. Longtime readers of the blog, close readers anyway, know, when I was growing up, in a middle class suburban home in Delaware, the latest issue of Playboy was always available on the coffee table in the living room, and anyone could pick it up and read it or look at the pictures. Nothing was said about it one way or the other. I'm sure I looked at the pictures before I could read, and when I could read, I puzzled over what the words referred to. I remember disappointment at the cartoons. These were cartoons, like in the newspaper, except the words weren't funny and someone was always naked.
Was it better to leave the magazine out where it could be perused than to leave those the girls to sneak around, slipping it out and back into its brown paper wrapper? Whatever the answer to that question, a parent today has a different problem, pornography and the internet being what they are. You can't choose the 1950s Althouse family method. That's a lost world.
Looking in Wikipedia to get Playboy's birthdate, I was interested in this quote from Hugh Hefner, from 1967:
Consider the girl we made popular: the Playmate of the Month. She is never sophisticated, a girl you cannot really have. She is a young, healthy, simple girl — the girl next door . . . we are not interested in the mysterious, difficult woman, the femme fatale, who wears elegant underwear, with lace, and she is sad, and somehow mentally filthy. The Playboy girl has no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy.A lost world.
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30 comments:
"And I'm guessing that the writers of this series didn't think their most avid fans would be teenage girls!"
That's Yoffe's last sentence....
Ha!
When I was about 9 years old, I broke into my mom's stash of romance novels.
I still remember one of them was about some American G.I. in Japan who has sex with a local girl and then leaves. ("Will he ever come back, mama-san?")
Barbi Benton, Sacramento California.
My Town, My Age, Never Met, the story of my life :)
The internet makes it easier for boys to get through puberty.
Larry Flynt reports lots of thanks for the help from guys with that message, for Hustler.
Playboy tippy-toed around genitals too much to really help, but the postal code prevented doing more.
The Salt and Pepper cartoon in the WSJ is never, ever, funny. It's a formal presentation of a cartoon only, part of the logo.
All screens are in public view in our home, no one brings 'a screen' upstairs in a bedroom.
I'm the only woman I know who hasn't read 50 shades of grey....
I wonder what our kids will think of us later on in life, not having that around.
BTW. I'm not sheltering my children, I just don't have any interest in it.
Sex or Slender Man?
Just make sure you have those "talks" with your children. There is a lot of "stuff" out there that kids don't understand and it the job of the parents to teach them YOUR understanding of that "stuff" and YOUR values surrounding that "stuff".
Renee: I have not read 50 Shades either. No desire to. (Pun intended!)
No Playboys in our house growing up, but lots of art books. No holds barred on those.
Who needs Hugh Hefner when you have Man Ray?
I use to sneak romance novels from the woman I babysat for when I was about thirteen. They seemed steamy at the time, but todays romance novels are positively pornographic. I'm not complaining mind you.
RE: "Barbi Benton, Sacramento California.
My Town, My Age, Never Met, the story of my life :)"
Also: Kristine Hanson, former Playmate and Weatherperson on the Sacramento KCRA (?)TV news at 5:00. Older than me, but remember going with friends to a downtown used bookstore that had old magazines, looking for her issue. Sacramento wasn't all bad.
I'd prefer my daughter to be reading, or preferably writing, fan fiction rather than looking at her dad's porn, but that's just me.
Speaking of boy bands,what IS the proper age for a young girl to learn Fivesome Etiquette?
There is a big drive to normalize porn and all that goes with it. That is a huge mistake in my opinion as it further erodes the bonds that hold a family together. I remember sneaking looks at the Playboy magazines that my brother hid under his mattress. I think that it is good for kids to sneak around to view stuff like that because it makes them understand that it is something that they shouldn't be doing and hopefully that makes it easier for them to stop. But porn on the internet is hard to handle. As a parent, you can get software that blocks it--we have this on our computer and you can track the attempts to access blocked sites so I know that it worked. However, when my son went off to college and had his own computer I suggested that he put the blocking software on his computer to help him stay away from that stuff and he refused. I haven't read 50 shades of grey either.
When I was 12 it was the book "Forever" by Judy Blume. Lots of sex and the male character named his penis. Ralph, I think. We rode our bikes to the next town to find the sole copy available within reach in the county. Dog-eared, we read all of the good parts together in front of the library.
I saw Playboys, and read Cosmo babysitting. Cosmo had plenty of explicit material.
We weren't bombarded with images at all times like the kids are today. No one was famous because of a sex tape.
I suppose that eroticism and pornography are like everything else. In moderation, they can stimulate your appetite. It excess, they can leave you morbidly obese and dysfunctional. Still, the corruption of relationships was not achieved through consumption of explicit material alone. Modern culture is suffering a comprehensive, congestive failure. The distorted perspective of quality and purpose of relationships (e.g. marriage) and family (e.g. reproduction) is exemplary and typical of the systemic corruption suffered in an intemperate society.
I also haven't read 50 shades. I guess the whole phenom reminds me of the moms reading Erica Jong , the joy of sex, and various playboy forums (all written from ppl in various states of incarceration, iirc) when I was a child. We, of course, read it all when they weren't looking.
I thought it was tragic that these parents were only now trying to get their thing on and vowed to deal with that earlier in my life so that I wouldn't suddenly be getting all flustered in middle age. (Probably wasn't middle age, but that's how I saw it then.)
It seemed to be indicative of the death throes before many of them got divorced...like how they used to have a sitcom cast take a tv vacation somewhere after the writing had gotten stale, yet before they cancelled the show.
Fan fiction is creepy-cute, but also quite creative. I've just finished up the BBC's "sherlock" which has a huge fan fiction female following largely centered on a romance between Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock and Martin Freeman's Watson. Then there was "the borgias" whose fans were so demanding in their shipping of cesare/lucrezia that the writers went there in season 3 after vowing they wouldn't. ( 50 Shades was originally Twilight fan-fic for those who don't know.)
I remember when the girl next door got her first set of breast implants ...
What I remember most clearly about Playboy is the smell.
Re: "What I remember most clearly about Playboy is the smell."
And the crust.
When I was in high school, I had a summer job in a building across the street from the original Playboy offices. Sometimes I would see the girls waiting for a bus. I don't know if they were the models but they were pretty and, I noticed, rather plump. Janice Pilgrim, the first centerfold, was a secretary in the Playboy office.
It was Janet Pilgrim
From Wiki on Teri Weigel: "She appeared on the cover of the November 1985 issue of Playboy, and then was the Playboy Playmate for April 1986... ...Though she was the first Playboy among the 450 who have appeared in the magazine to cross over into porn the publisher terminated its relationship with her, as Playmates who do porn are no longer allowed to represent the company."
I propose Ms. Weigel as the representation of the turning point in media sexual culture, from the relative innocence of the Playboy era to the mainstreaming of hardcore porn. She bit the VHS apple, and was cast out of the Garden of Hefner: now the Girl Next Door was doing porn. End of one era, beginning of the next.
I think deep thoughts.
I never got the innocent vibe off of playboy even as a kid, so I'm afraid I don't know what all of you are talking about. Playboy always seemed creepy, manipulative, and dishonest - Hugh Hefner being the perfect example. The moms of the kids whose dads had open Playboy always seemed a bit harsh and unhappy - like they were engaged in "managing" their husbands.
I found early internet porn to be the most relatively innocent. Action was involved, but the resolution was still low. (To me, actual fucking is more innocent than voyeurism of an image.) The combination seemed to be the materialization of a day-to-day male or female thought stream.
Now it's so ubiquitous that it's gotten more specialized, harder core and (ironically?) heading back into the realm of the antisocial again.
I don't think girls under eighteen should do porn.
I got a chuckle out of that "somehow mentally filthy". A touch of that Freudian-flavored crypto-grundy-ism that always seemed to me to be lurking in the psyches of our mid-century purveyors of sexual liberation.
Renee: I'm the only woman I know who hasn't read 50 shades of grey....
I was sitting in the local Panera the other day, next to a table of stereotypical nice middle-aged church ladies (I knew they were a gang of church friends from their conversation): overweight if not quite obese, with those too-short, sensible haircuts, tunic tops, and capri pants that indicate someone who's not a slob, but has otherwise given up on her appearance. At some point among the bits of church gossip they started tittering about that book, "so erotic!"
I don't know why (maybe sheer snobbery?), but I found the whole scenario hilarious. "Fifty Shades of Grey" - the Thomas Kinkade of porn.
I was raised in a culture which tried to teach me that "the World" was too focused on sexual pleasure, and not focused enough on other elements relationship.
Another part of this culture was very little tolerance for nudity in-print or on-film.
Thus, Playboy was not even available as a hidden-somewhere-in-the-house thing.
Maybe one of those artistic-photography magazines should have been allowed. I don't know.
Among people I know, very few came out of that culture with a desperate desire to partake in "forbidden" magazines/movies/websites. But I did come out with such an obsession. The obsession made some relationships with women hard, because they didn't want to deal with a man who was obsessed with sexual pleasure (to the exclusion of everything else). I have learned, under pastoral counseling, how to let go of that obsession.
I think of it in the way that members of Alcoholics Anonymous deal with alcohol.
Many people can drink without turning into alcoholics. Some people can't touch alcohol, because they can't avoid alcoholism.
Similarly: some people are prone to obsession with things sexual, whether or not their parents try to teach them otherwise.
In both cases, if the entire culture seems to be celebrating sexual pleasure (or lustful looking at nudity, or binge-drinking), then it is much harder for these people who struggle to live normal lives. It is harder for those who are harmed by these social forces to find support in avoiding or un-doing the harm.
Should the leading forces of culture try to accommodate such things?
The thing that had me shaking my head a few years ago was the uproar over Barbie Doll's voluptuous measurements. (As a child of the 60's) I never for a minute thought that I was supposed to look like her, because clearly, she was a doll. Now, actresses and the occasional very curious glances into the Playboy magazine (always hidden, but I found it) taught me what women were supposed to look like--because they were real people!
I guess I was 14 (started school young) and a freshman in high school when someone brought "The Happy Hooker" into study hall to share the (excuse me) juicy parts. We were in every other seat in the auditorium....now, that book was an education!
Out of curiosity as to what all of the hubbub was about, I tried to read a few pages from "50 Shades of Grey" when I was in the bookstore. I couldn't get past how truly poorly written it was...even if I was interested, I never would be able to stand reading it! My sister gave me a cookbook, "Fifty Shades of Chicken", a spoof with recipes, which was much better written.
...Spatchcock
To be fair, the cartoons back then were funnier.
Never read 50 Shades either. Screens are all in open areas too.
The advice was actually quite sound. You don't want to shame the girl, but you want her to stop.
It is harder to keep a nice lid on pornography with the internet. At some point, your kids are going to see it, even with a filter. So you've got to make sure they can come to you and talk to you about it so it doesn't become an obsession. I know of a ten year old boy (friend of a family member) that has a huge porn addiction. We're talking therapy level addiction--the mom even found child porn on the computer. That's the problem with not monitoring your kids' internet usage and either being way too permissive or way too secretive about sex. Yikes.
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