Althouse: "He observes that the country has been reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkable in its similarity to the Eisenhower years when Playboy was founded."

August 24, 2017

"He observes that the country has been reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkable in its similarity to the Eisenhower years when Playboy was founded."

"(President Trump is widely known to have venerated Hugh, but the feeling isn't mutual: 'We don't respect the guy,' says Cooper [Hefner]. 'There's a personal embarrassment because Trump is somebody who has been on our cover.') Cooper, sounding a lot like Dad, explains, 'Yes, there are lifestyle components to Playboy, but it's really a philosophy about freedom. And right now, as history is repeating itself in real time, I want Playboy to be central to that conversation.'"

From "The Next Hef: Hugh's 25-Year-Old Son Reveals Plan to Remake Playboy 'For My Generation'" (in Hollywood Reporter).

I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years. I don't know if Playboy can help. It seems absurd. And yet Playboy had a role to play back then.

228 comments:

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Rick said...: I went to a few yoga parties there.

That really doesn't sound like much fun.; 8/24/17, 6:43 PM
mockturtle said...: I had teachers who had 'live-in companions', too. They may or may not have had sexual relationships but we didn't have to know that, did we? Some of my best teachers were single women committed to their profession.; 8/24/17, 6:44 PM
exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...: " I went to a few yoga parties there"

I know you mean "toga parties" but your typo made me chuckle because I immediately pictured Belushi in a bedsheet, leering at chicks while trying to get into the downward dog position.; 8/24/17, 6:45 PM
SukieTawdry said...: rcocean said...Gays were tolerated in the 50s as long as they didn't scare the horses. There were plenty of "confirmed bachelors".

My piano teacher was a "confirmed bachelor." Mr. Rado. He had flowing gray hair, a florid style and lived in a big old Victorian with his mother. Of course by then it was the early 60's.; 8/24/17, 6:46 PM
Michael K said...: "Or Animal House. Cornell had an "animal house" frat (I suppose they all do--or did). "

The guy who did the band in the movie was putting on parties all over colleges in the 80s when my son was at SC.

He must have made a fortune just on revival parties.

They are still going after 40 years.

Good for them. A lot smarter than those NFL players. You got a good thing. Hang onto it.; 8/24/17, 6:46 PM
SukieTawdry said...: Yes, I did mean toga and it is a funny typo.; 8/24/17, 6:47 PM
SukieTawdry said...: exiledonmainstreet said...BTW, Sukie, I have long suspected that the reason for the Millenials prudishness about things we in the '70's didn't bat an eye over is because they (or their elders) realized that the no-holds-bared atmosphere of that era led to a lot of bad things, like the AIDS epidemic, for instance. They want to reestablish a sexual moral code but one without reference to the older Judeo-Christian one. In other words, they're reinventing the wheel and not doing a very good job of it.

That's an excellent observation. The AIDS epidemic knocked everyone for a loop and "free love" didn't seem like such a bargain anymore. I fortunately was in an entirely monogamous relationship with my future husband by that time so it was never a personal concern. It will be interesting to see what their wheel ends up looking like.; 8/24/17, 7:02 PM
exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...: The upper classes, bohemian types in enclaves like the Left Bank and Greenwich Village, and criminals have always had pretty flexible sexual morals. Among the aristos, people got away with a lot, even during the Victorian era. Many of those Great Homes in the UK have interconnecting bedrooms, which made nocturnal visits to the mistress easy and discreet. It was lack of discretion, more than anything, that sunk Wilde. Hiring rent boys was one thing - taking them to the Savoy for champagne was another.

The sexual revolution took the mores of aristos and artists and made them widespread among the middle and lower classes as well - and the results were disastrous for the family, especially since the divorce laws were loosened as well. (After all, one of the drivers behind aristocratic dalliances was the fact that those marriages were strategic, not romantic, and divorce was next to impossible. If you married your husband in order to get a title and he married you to get your dowry, you could probably adjust to the fact that he was banging Lady So-and-So, as long as he didn't flaunt it and humiliate you. It's a different thing when you're a middle class secretary who married for love in 1963 and now its 1973 and your husband wants to go to Plato's Retreat and wife swap.)

A Hollywood actress can have kids out of wedlock and those kids will still end up going to expensive schools and having important connections. A inner city teen who does the same makes a mess of her life and the lives of her kids and stays mired in poverty. A middle class "swinger" couple who fuck around like decadent 18th century French aristos or 20th century beatniks will end up miserable and divorced. Those sexual mores applied to relatively small outliers for a reason - because they don't work well applied to society as a whole.; 8/24/17, 7:15 PM
J. Farmer said...: @exiledonmainstreet:

The upper classes, bohemian types in enclaves like the Left Bank and Greenwich Village, and criminals have always had pretty flexible sexual morals.

This actually is not entirely accurate. As Charles Murray demonstrated in Coming Apart, marriage rates among the "new upper class" are about 84% (they were 94% in 1960), while among the working classes it is less than 50% (they were 83% in 1960). As Amy Wax once pithily remarked, elites like to "talk the 60s but live the 50s."; 8/24/17, 7:36 PM
SukieTawdry said...: When I was in high school and college, I spent a fair amount of time in the Village. The exposure to the Beats (who were well on their way out by then and soon would be replaced by a different type of hipster), same-sex couples, drag queens, unisex bathrooms and so forth kind of inured me to future shock.

The change from Life As We Know It that began in the late 60's proceeded at an astonishing pace. It really hit home for me because my parents were divorced while I was in college. It was one of the first divorces in my circle, but others followed fast and hard.

I wonder if any generation will ever get it right.; 8/24/17, 7:39 PM
mockturtle said...: Exiled at 7:15: Yes! Exactly!; 8/24/17, 7:43 PM
Michael K said...: "Many of those Great Homes in the UK have interconnecting bedrooms, which made nocturnal visits to the mistress easy and discreet."

Have you looked at Prince Harry and the riding instructor together ?

Perfect match,; 8/24/17, 7:59 PM
exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...: "This actually is not entirely accurate. As Charles Murray demonstrated in Coming Apart, marriage rates among the "new upper class" are about 84%"

J. Farmer, I think Murray's right, but I was talking about the "old upper class." Whether high marriage rates translates into greater fidelity I do not know, because I do not pretend to be familiar with the inner workings of the upper classes. Of course, it doesn't in Hollywood but nothing much has changed there since the 20's - movie people were using the casting couch and taking drugs and having orgies back in the Silent Era. Actors have never been known for their upstanding moral character.; 8/24/17, 8:12 PM
Sebastian said...: "the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism." Sure, because the racist, sexist progressivism of the modern left, in control of the media, the universities, and most public spaces, is indeed reactionary, aims to conserve the worst elements of a long tradition, and reverts nakedly to the left's original will to power.

Of course, it is very clever trolling to associate the reversion with Eisenhower, but that culture is well and truly gone, in the era of mass abortion, mandated SSM, and secularization, of mass immigration and "diversity."

Snark aside, while part of the upper class may want to "revert" to actual heterosexual marriage, among big swaths of the population there is nothing cultural to conserve--one of Murray's points.; 8/24/17, 8:17 PM
J. Farmer said...: @exiledonmainstreet:

Actors have never been known for their upstanding moral character.

Oh, I agree. They're just a very small component of the upper classes.

It is similar to the whole Murphy Brown kerfuffle. The notion that a wealthy, privileged woman could likely have a child out of wedlock and that child not suffer much if any adverse effects is completely different from the life of a child born out-of-wedlock to a more typical American mother. Essentially the argument you made. And that I do agree with.; 8/24/17, 8:47 PM
mockturtle said...: "They weren't exactly thrilled when I married a black guy in the 60's but they got over it."

Yeah, sure. Who are you again?

Oh that's right "unknown".

No I'm not 'unknown'. Unknown quoted me.; 8/24/17, 9:04 PM
grackle said...: I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years.

Eisenhower had to send the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to enforce the decision of the SCOTUS to integrate the public schools. Those days are gone. The Left controls public education these days (and we see the results).

And lunch counters won’t be closed to African-Americans, either – like they were during the Eisenhower era. Likewise any retail outlet, whether it be a restaurant, theater, nightclub, grocery store, department store, etc. Institutionalized racism is gone.

And the Left controls the MSM, academia, the “intelligentsia” and all the “arts,” which seems VERY unlike the Eisenhower years to me.

Some folks these days are questioning the value of having the Left dominate everything and this is “reactionary?” What we are witnessing is a swing toward the middle, which I guess seems reactionary to anyone living in one of the cultural bubbles I mentioned above.; 8/24/17, 9:08 PM
mockturtle said...: What we are witnessing is a swing toward the middle, which I guess seems reactionary to anyone living in one of the cultural bubbles I mentioned above.

I agree, Grackle.; 8/24/17, 9:15 PM
JMW Turner said...: I grew up in Atlanta, and, in the late 60s, my father built a house in the North East side. Our somewhat upper middle class neighborhood attracted people from the North, who could feel comfortable to let their masks slip and make derogatory comments about African Americans because, you know, all white Southerners think this way. As a kid I came to realize that as guilty as the South has been with institutional racism, the rest of the rest of the white society practice a very insidious form of repressed bigotry.; 8/24/17, 9:16 PM
grackle said...: While all history writers have an agenda, the best ones at least try to be objective in their approach.

If the commentor is referring to a political agenda – it’s a fairly recent phenomenon. Before the sixties the political agenda was mostly kept out of history books. If it was there it was openly and obviously there. After the sixties politics was injected into everything. For an objective, agenda-free look at history try any of the Will and Ariel Durant books.; 8/24/17, 9:26 PM
Todd Roberson said...: Dear Forum -

I'm a student at a large Midwestern Unversity and I never thought this would happen to guy like me ...

(sorry ... Wrong magazine); 8/24/17, 9:31 PM
grackle said...: Another way to put this is that all history is revisionism.

In the sense of coherently incorporating newly discovered artifacts, objects and documents – yes, of course.

In the sense that real historical events are lied about, purposefully misinterpreted or ignored to suit a political narrative – an emphatic “no.” That’s not history – that’s propaganda.; 8/24/17, 9:34 PM
Earnest Prole said...: The guy who did the band in the movie was putting on parties all over colleges in the 80s

The Animal House band also included Robert Cray, who had nothing to do with the guy who played Otis Day; Cray just happened to be one of the few black men living in Eugene, Oregon, where the movie was filmed.; 8/24/17, 9:48 PM
traditionalguy said...: Gingrich the Historian has been pointing out how similar the reaction to Trump's election has been to Lincoln's election. Immediate civil war.The power of the Clinton Globalists to leave the traditional American ways for wealth has caused them to attempt to secede and defeat the election results. Newt says he got that from a friend who teaches history at Gettysburg College.; 8/24/17, 9:52 PM
Gahrie said...: The guy who did the band in the movie was putting on parties all over colleges in the 80s when my son was at SC.

My freshman year at SC They blocked off the road for fraternity row, drove in some beer trucks, hired Otis(The guy from Animal House) and had a two block long toga party.

I believe it was the last wet rush at USC.; 8/24/17, 10:33 PM
mockturtle said...: If the commentor is referring to a political agenda – it’s a fairly recent phenomenon. Before the sixties the political agenda was mostly kept out of history books. If it was there it was openly and obviously there. After the sixties politics was injected into everything. For an objective, agenda-free look at history try any of the Will and Ariel Durant books.

Actually, Grackle, I wasn't referring specifically to political agenda. I have read history books, old and new, written with the goal of idealizing a leader or movement and some who are bent on discrediting the same. But you are right, the 1960's ushered in the political agenda which has made objectivity all but impossible. If a historian dares to offer an objective account based on facts and with the values of the era considered they will be subject to the PC 'Whatabouts'.

I have a very old, small volume on Lord Kitchener which still stands as the best-written historical biography I have ever read and I've read a lot.; 8/24/17, 10:41 PM
Lost My Cookies said...: They don't respect the guy? They're embarassed? Has this douche ever met his own father?; 8/25/17, 8:34 AM
damikesc said...: JMW, I've long argued that the South had to deal with their history and problems while the rest of the country did not. It's not that they didn't have tons of issues...They just used the South to say "well, we are better than that".

Which is why race relations in the South are better than in other areas.; 8/25/17, 8:52 AM