"When [Hugh Hefner] died of cardiac arrest at 91, [his last wife] at first protected his reputation."

"She writes about how, before he died, Mr. Hefner made her promise to 'only say good things.' Ms. Hefner’s resolve to keep that promise began fading in 2019, she said, when she started therapy after watching 'Leaving Neverland,' the documentary that details sexual-abuse allegations from two men who had long-running relationships with Michael Jackson. Looking back at their marriage now, Ms. Hefner said, evokes feelings of regret and disgust. She is still learning how to build healthy relationships and break the codependent tendencies she developed during her relationship with Mr. Hefner. 'When I started dating again, that was hard,' she said, 'because with Hef, he just wanted me by him all the time.' It was only recently, she said with a nervous laugh, that she learned the concept of setting boundaries. 'I didn’t have any when I was at the mansion,' she said. 'If you wanted to be there, you couldn’t have boundaries.'"

From a NYT article with such an off-putting headline that I almost avoided clicking, even though Hugh Hefner is a very longstanding interest of mine: "No More Bunny Business/In a tell-all memoir, Crystal Hefner recounts her former days as a Playboy model and the third (and last) wife of Hugh Hefner."

One of the boundaries you can set in your life is to see yourself as not bound by a promise you made to someone else. Another person can make you feel bound as he sets his boundaries to hold you in. She wanted to be inside that boundary. On balance, at the time, it felt worth it to her. But how can that bind her for life? He could have set it up with enough of a financial penalty that she would have chosen to keep quiet for the rest of her life, but it seems he just "made her promise to 'only say good things.'"

It's almost a generic death-bed wish: Speak well of me when I'm gone. Remember the good. It was good for you too, my darling, wasn't it?

"Her husband, whom she met when she was 21 and he was 81, dictated precisely what shade of nail polish she should wear (pink, pale and sheer, never matte)..."

"... and gently tapped her on the head when her roots were showing. When he was in residence, he issued a 6pm curfew ensuring his young wife was home to share his dinner (always chicken soup with cream cheese and crackers) and watch his favourite movies. Then, after dark, she was expected to participate in the group sex for which Hefner was famous. 'It was embarrassing. I don't know the most people there'd been in our bedroom at one time but – a lot. Pretty bad. We were like, "Oh, now it's your turn." Nobody really wanted to be there but I think in Hef's mind, he still thought he was in his 40s, and those nights, the people, the mansion, solidified that idea. He felt, "I've still got it."' There were also the famous 'Sunday Fundays' when 200 young women would descend on the Playboy mansion. Its octogenarian owner took so much Viagra that it made him lose his hearing on one side (a recognised side effect of the drug). 'Hef always said he'd rather be deaf and still able to have sex. Weird,' says Crystal...."

From "The hell of being married to Hugh Hefner by his Playboy Bunny third wife: Crystal Hefner, 37, describes how he took so much Viagra it made him deaf and imposed a 6pm curfew so she'd stay home and share his chicken soup" (Daily Mail).

Always chicken soup with cream cheese and crackers?

"This talk show was so elegant and respectful, that even the comment section of a video like this isn't infested by angry people shouting from both extremes of the issue."

A comment written one month ago on a video put up on YouTube a year ago: 

 

The show aired in 1970. Watch the whole thing. The person at the extreme left of the talk-show couch — who eventually pipes up — is Grace Slick. The host Dick Cavett engineers the mood — which is serious and comical, tense and relaxed. It's quite something. 

The 70s vibe is mesmerizing. Somehow the colors brown and orange dominated. And who remembers that there was once a feminist notion that women should travel in pairs so that no one becomes a celebrity?!

Hugh Hefner takes the position that maleness/femaleness is the very beginning of who you are as a person. He also attempts to bond with the feminists over his strong support for abortion rights. And he gets out his pipe and smokes up a storm. One of the feminists smokes a cigarette, and makes a theatrical point of lighting it for herself, rejecting Cavett's straight-man offer to play the old chivalrous role of cigarette lighter.

I cannot tolerate today's TV talk shows. The mood is so poisonous. One alternative is to watch half-century old talk shows on YouTube.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

Time for MSM at long last to get serious about Hillary Clinton's complicity in rape and sexual harassment.

Why now? Because she's gone out hounding publicity right before the midterm elections and it's the Democratic Party.

I'm reading, in the NYT, "Hillary Clinton’s Master Class in Distraction/Democrats need to be focused on the midterms." by Michelle Cottle. The headline makes no secret of the staunchly partisan reason for pushing back Hillary after giving her a pass all these years.

President Trump being a pig and an alleged sexual predator in no way excuses Bill Clinton from being a pig and an alleged sexual predator. In fact, by declining to re-examine her own husband’s acts, Mrs. Clinton only makes it easier for Mr. Trump’s defenders to ignore the current president’s. (Juanita Broaddrick’s accusation that she was raped by Mr. Clinton in 1978 can be revisited in a recent episode of the Slate podcast “Slow Burn.”)...

[I]t is no secret that Mr. Clinton’s response to sexual scandal was to try to trash the reputations of the women involved. And while the degree to which Mrs. Clinton joined in such efforts may remain in dispute — in the CBS interview, she denies having played any role — her fundamental complicity is beyond reasonable doubt.

You're referred over to Slate for the damning details, and it's significant that Slate is doing this now. But on a fundamental level, nothing new is happening. The top priority is Democratic Party power, and the sexual subordination of women matters when it serves that interest and gets brushed aside when it doesn't.

But why does Democratic Party power matter? The argument I've been hearing is that it matters because of the interests of women! Does that make sense? The interests of women are highlighted or hidden depending on whether it helps the Democratic Party amass power, and we're supposed to care about that party's power because it's for the good of women. It's laughable.

One way to attempt to make sense of it is that there are 2 different big women's issues at play. There are other issues that can be framed as woman-oriented, and just about anything can be reprocessed as gender politics. But there are 2 main issues: sexual subordination (rape, sexual harassment, etc.) and abortion. For as long as I can remember — at least 40 years — the Democratic Party has starkly distinguished itself from the Republican Party by supporting abortion, and — because no party is for rape and sexual harassment — the Democratic Party has given priority to abortion.

That priority was shown most memorably in the ludicrous, horrible case of Nina Burleigh:

In a 1998 essay for Mirabella, Burleigh described an occasion aboard Air Force One when she noticed President Bill Clinton apparently looking at her legs.... Approached by a Washington Post media reporter to discuss the Mirabella article, Burleigh stated, “I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”

I distanced myself from the Democratic Party during the Clinton impeachment, because I saw that the sexual harassment issues that had been so important in the Clarence Thomas hearings were turned into nothing when the party's own man was threatened. It's not a serious issue if it's only used selectively. It would be better to do nothing with it at all than to wheel it out when it works for your side and stow it away again when it doesn't. But if abortion is important enough to you, you might, like Burleigh, think it's worth it to turn sexual harassment and rape into nothing when it works to maintain access to abortion.

But what a kick in the head when it doesn't even work to keep your access to abortion! What if the Democratic Party is losing the midterms because the embodiment of its selective concern about rape and sexual harassment decides to go swanning about on the public stage 3 weeks before Election Day? Time for the liberal media to finally take her to task.

AND: 3 afterthoughts:

1. Male privilege can explain the priority of abortion over sexual harassment and rape. We see these as women's issues, and we might imagine that freedom from sexual harassment and rape is the stronger interest, because many women oppose abortion and only a minority want abortion completely legal. But men have an interest in abortion. Many men urge women to have abortions and pay for women's abortions. The availability of abortion is part of the agenda of sexual freedom. Hugh Hefner was a big supporter of the abortion rights movement. And the expanding definition of rape and increasing vigilance about sexual harassment in the workplace threaten the sexual freedom of men. Ask Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer. Gender politics-propaganda is designed to get women to vote for the party, so it's going to obscure the interests of men. But those interests are there, and they have their effect even — and especially — when they are not talked about.

2. Blowjobs deserve better than Nina Burleigh's famous quote. Her unstated proposition is that blowjobs are indeed jobs — work that you do for some sort of pay or because you owe a debt. It's not a pleasure for you, but a sacrifice. Worse than that, she's expressing the idea that women want something other than sex and they give sex to get those extraneous things. She's saying: Sex is not intrinsically valuable for a woman — it's a form of currency. We can buy what we want with it. In that construct, what's the sense of "buying" abortion rights? If you don't think sex is good in itself, don't have sex, and you won't ever need an abortion... unless you are raped. Which brings us back to the question which is the more important interest: access to abortion or freedom from rape and sexual harassment?

3. When I say that now is the time for liberal media to take Hillary Clinton to task over rape and sexual harassment, you might hear resonance with #TimesUp. I didn't intend that, and I want to stress how wrong it would be to make that connection. "Time's Up" means that in the past it was possible for men to get away with rape and sexual harassment. It was done in private spaces, hidden away, lied about. Women who objected were ignored, paid off,  suppressed. But that's all in the past. We don't do that anymore. That's what "Time's up" means. It's an idealistic assertion that embodies optimism. But when I say, now is the time for liberal media to take rape and sexual harassment seriously, I'm being sarcastic and cynical. I'm not saying the obscuring of the problem is a thing of the past and the future looks bright. I'm talking about party politics in the present, and I think the issue is forefronted in the run-up to the elections now because it seems useful. That's a transient and political motivation. Time isn't up. There's plenty of time in the future to do whatever people think works. I'm not a complete cynic: I'm saying these things harshly and openly because I think it can save people from getting taken in by political propaganda.

"The fundamental predatory nature of Hollywood is young, attractive people — largely females — putting themselves in front of men to be judged and appraised and chosen."

"It is a dark equation. From the moment the proverbial girl gets off the bus, the odds are stacked against her. In Hollywood, unlike at other Fortune 500 companies, the one-on-one meetings take place in hotel suites and bars. It’s an exploitative and oddly personal process."

Said Janice Min, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter (who also describes a media event that took place last April at which Barack Obama gives a speech and, immediately afterwards, "amid rapturous applause," walks "right over to Harvey Weinstein and gives Harvey a hug").

Quoted in "Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood’s Oldest Horror Story," by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

5 more things about this Dowd column:

1. She follows the now-standard script of dragging Trump into the story, but she keeps that scene short. She merely sticks a "Like Trump" onto the front end of one sentence about Weinstein:

Like Trump, that other self-professed predator, there were complaints that in business deals he stiffed people on bills (advertising and public relations payments), and he had a reputation for lying, cheating, taking advantage, acting like a thug.

2. She doesn't otherwise talk about the political world, except to pass along Min's idea that Weinstein was "a master at protecting himself... by the veneer of power he cultivated, by giving to liberal causes and cultivating friends in the media and politics." Here, another name is stuck in: "just as Hugh Hefner was."

3. There's something a little sleazy about slipping in other names — Trump and Hefner — without specifying the points of comparison. The charges against Weinstein are so awful, that this "like X" style of writing flaunts unfairness.

4. And note the unopened door: Calling Weinstein "a master at protecting himself... by giving to liberal causes and cultivating friends in the media and politics" makes it sound as though he was a genius and ignores the lameness of the journalists in allowing this obvious and simple ruse to give him cover. Shine some light on the weakness of your own profession, Ms. Dowd. You've been writing very extensively about the movie business for years. Why didn't you go after Weinstein? Were you and your colleagues bought off by his generosity to causes that you like?

5. Dowd often does clever things with language, but some of her efforts are strained, and sometimes an idea just does not work and should be abandoned:

He relished the nickname “Harvey Scissorhands,” given to him by filmmakers who did not like his domination in the editing room. But the nickname could work just as well for his octopus ways with women, which resulted in lots of hush money being paid out.

You just can't merge "octopus ways" with Scissorhands when you're talking about a man approaching a woman's body. Scissorhands cut and even if the cut is skillful, the presence of blades near vulnerable flesh is dangerous (erotically so, in the movie):



The octopus has soft suctioning parts, nothing like scissors, as most memorably depicted in the 1814 Hokusai woodcut print "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife":



These Scissorhands and octopus images are presented (by male artists) as powerfully erotic from the woman's point of view, but the eroticism is distinctly different and it doesn't helpfully connect up film editing with paying hush money. It's funny that Dowd was writing about editing when she let a stray octopus into that paragraph.

"Men attracted to men objectify other men, not because they are gay, but because they are men."

"This is how male sexuality works. We immediately respond to visual stimuli. The emotions often follow, but are not required to fuel our rich fantasy life... But the word ['objectification'] has taken on an ugly veneer, as if the object of desire is reduced to the status of thing. Not so fast. Gay men objectify other gay men, and let me tell you, those of us who have been objectified don’t mind it at all. In fact, we seek it out and enjoy it immensely. We don’t feel insulted — quite the opposite. When Hugh Hefner proposed that men stop feeling bad about the primacy of lust in their thought process, he may have been talking to heterosexual men, but gay men heard the message as well. It enabled us to grasp that whom we were attracted to, gender-wise, counted less, experientially speaking, than the way we were attracted to them...."

From "Hugh Hefner’s Legacy from a Gay Male Perspective," by Mark Olmsted (at HuffPo).

"Hugh Hefner was the original Pajama Boy."

Said Meade just now in a conversation we were having about Hugh Hefner.

I'd been going on about how Hugh Hefner wasn't very masculine: The image he created for himself — for viewers of the magazine to identify with — was as a man who spent all his time hanging around the house, listening to jazz, wearing pajamas. He didn't engage in traditional masculine activities like sports or working on the car. He hosted parties. Did he do anything outdoorsy? Was he ever outdoors in the daylight? I can only picture him outdoors after dark at his swimming pool, which was itself designed to have an indoors, a "grotto." That was some outré interior decoration — a grotto.

"Hefner re-imagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex."

"Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and with the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.... Hefner’s worldview was already dated by the explosion of the psychedelic 1960s. The anything-goes, free-love atmosphere — illustrated by all that hedonistic rolling around in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 — made the suave Hefner style seem old-fashioned and buttoned up. Nevertheless, I have always taken the position that the men's magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality.... Hefner’s bunnies were a major departure from female mythology, where women were often portrayed as animals of prey — tigresses and leopards. Woman as cozy, cuddly bunny is a perfectly legitimate modality of eroticism. Hefner was good-natured but rather abashed, diffident, and shy. So he recreated the image of women in palatable and manageable form. I don’t see anything misogynist in that. What I see is a frank acknowledgment of Hefner’s fear of women’s actual power."

Said Camille Paglia.

Much more at the link, including this, connecting Playboy and Trump:

I certainly saw in Trump the entire Playboy aesthetic, including the glitzy world of casinos and beauty pageants. It's a long passé world of confident male privilege that preceded the birth of second-wave feminism. There is no doubt that Trump strongly identified with it as he was growing up. It seems to be truly his worldview.

But it is categorically not a world of unwilling women. Nor is it driven by masculine abuse. It's a world of show girls, of flamboyant femaleness, a certain kind of strutting style that has its own intoxicating sexual allure — which most young people attending elite colleges today have had no contact with whatever.

I instantly recognized and understood it in Trump because I had always been an admirer of Hefner's sexual cosmos. I can certainly see how retrograde and nostalgic it is, but at the same time I maintain that even in the photos that The New York Times posted in trying to convict Trump of sexism, you can feel leaping from these pictures the intense sizzle of sexual polarization — in that long-ago time when men were men and women were women!

She also theorizes that as "the sexes have blended, " the sexes are less interested in each other, so "we’re now in a period of sexual boredom and inertia, complaint and dissatisfaction," and "all that's left are these feminist witch-hunts":

And meanwhile, men are shrinking. I see men turning away from women and simply being content with the world of fantasy because women have become too think-skinned, resentful and high maintenance.

Yes, "think-skinned" is a mistranscription, but however unintended, I'm interested in it as a concept.

The skin has the sense of touch, and the call to sexuality — from Playboy or hippies or whoever — is an invitation to be more in touch with touch. What happens to the skin goes to the brain, but if you are "think-skinned" — I'm inventing this concept!— the brain goes first and sends instructions to the skin. The order is reversed and you feel what you thought of feeling.

The think-skinned person may be numb or may be highly sexualized, but it all depends on what's going on in her head, so what goes in there really matters — pornography, feminism, the wit and wisdom of Camille Paglia, etc.

Or stop being so think-skinned and find out what you really feel.

"There are many pornographers, but what, within the realm of pornography, earns you a substantial obituary in The New York Times?"

"Some day we'll see how they treat Hugh Hefner, who made pornography clean, commercial and classy, but today we read about the death of Al Goldstein: '... The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue in 1968 was... 'We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ...'... Apart from Screw, Mr. Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser.... ' In later years, it became impossible to get famous for being a loud sleazy guy with a magazine, and the idea of anyone 'inking' out pubic hair seems mostly puzzling...."

So I wrote back in 2013, and now the day has come when I can read the substantial obituary for Hugh Hefner in the NYT. I've already written 2 posts, the first 2 of the day, on the death of the gargantuan cultural icon Hugh Hefner. Let me then, at long last, get to the NYT obituary:

Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative, and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from his emergence in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect.

He was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was his own production. He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie; it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket, hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.

The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27 years old, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.

He had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:

“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

A boy's fantasy of adulthood and sophistication.

Mr. Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code dictated separate beds for married couples. As the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs. You couldn’t talk politically.... You couldn’t use obscenities. What Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.”...

In “The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message was simple: Society was to blame. His causes — abortion rights, decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of 19th-century sex laws — were daring at the time. Ten years later, they would be unexceptional.

“Hefner won,” Mr. Gitlin said in a 2015 interview. “The prevailing values in the country now, for all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was. It’s laissez-faire. It’s anti-censorship. It’s consumerist: Let the buyer rule. It’s hedonistic. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.”

Born in 1926, he was raised "with a lot of repression" by Methodists, but he found his way through drawing comics, first as a child, in high school (where he "'I reinvented myself' as the suave, breezy 'Hef,"  and in college as the editor of the humor magazine. He came up with Playboy as "a vehicle for his slightly randy cartoons."

What did his cartoons like like? I found this (click to enlarge and read ("This is me, dreaming about women in general!"))

More here.

The NYT devotes the mid-section of the obituary to the feminist challenge. Gloria Steinem did undercover research as a "bunny" in the Playboy Club in 1963 and discovered that it's hard work, the outfits are uncomfortable, and the customers are (as the Times puts it) "vulgar."

Another feminist critic, Susan Brownmiller, debating Mr. Hefner on a television talk show, asserted, “The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings.” She continued: “The day you’re willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end. …”

Mr. Hefner responded in 1970 by ordering an article on the activists then called “women’s libbers.” In an internal memo, he wrote: “These chicks are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.”

The commissioned article, by Morton Hunt, ran with the headline “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig.” (The same issue contained an interview with William F. Buckley Jr., fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer and an article by a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana.)

Mr. Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy. “We are in the process of acquiring a new moral maturity and honesty,” he wrote in one installment, “in which man’s body, mind and soul are in harmony rather than in conflict.” Of Americans’ fright of anything “unsuitable for children,” he said, “Instead of raising children in an adult world, with adult tastes, interests and opinions prevailing, we prefer to live much of our lives in a make-believe children’s world.”

The 3 quoted sentences from that internal memo are fascinating. The first 2 talk tough, calling for a hard fight, but the third one makes an argument that belongs in a sweet, soft fight: The feminists want to say that we're alienating men and women — with domineering men and oppressed, insignificant women — but we're the ones who are for "the romantic boy-girl society." What do women want? A lot of us love the ideal of a romantic boy-girl society. It's interesting that Hef wrote "boy-girl" and yet later publicly talked about the "adult world" and rising above the "make-believe children’s world."

Marilyn Monroe appears twice in the obit, first as the nude model in the first issue of Playboy and second as the long dead body in a mausoleum next to which the newly dead body of Hugh Hefner will lie.

"I think the real question is why, after a sexual revolution began in the 50's, did the women's movement seize upon an anti-sexual theme."

"... A significant part of the hurtful side of feminism is failing to understand how a hurtful childhood can shape you, and instead trying to politicize all behavior. There's really no benefit to viewing sex as the enemy. The sex act is some of the best of what we are, as family, and as a civilization. The notion that sex and violence are connected like law and order is untrue. They are polar opposites. One is hurting; one is hugging."

Said Hugh Hefner back in 1992.

"What do you believe happens after death?"/"I haven't a clue. I'm always struck by the people who think they do have a clue."

"It's perfectly clear to me that religion is a myth. It's something we have invented to explain the inexplicable. My religion and the spiritual side of my life come from a sense of connection to the humankind and nature on this planet and in the universe. I am in overwhelming awe of it all: It is so fantastic, so complex, so beyond comprehension. What does it all mean -- if it has any meaning at all? But how can it all exist if it doesn't have some kind of meaning? I think anyone who suggests that they have the answer is motivated by the need to invent answers, because we have no such answers."

Said Hugh Hefner, who, after 91 years, has finally gotten a clue.

Good-bye to the long-lived satyr, the man who packaged and delivered sexual liberation to the masses. He had a mission in life, and he pursued it with great energy, imagination, and influence. He's beyond love and hate for me. I grew up in a secure, middle-class home with a father who had every issue (except, perhaps, the first issue), where the magazine was not hidden away, but on the coffee table next to Life and Look, and we did live and look. Nobody stopped us. I paged through Playboy before I could read. I was so young that topless women didn't even seem to me to be naked and only reacted to the nakedness when, after many pictures of breasts, I saw a photograph I can still see in my head: a woman, lying prone and wearing an amber-colored satin blouse, with what we would have called her heinie just out there, for all to see.

In high school, I enjoyed easy access to things about the parts of the culture I liked: an interview with The Beatles in 1965...

PLAYBOY: "Speaking of nutters, do you ever wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, 'My god, I'm a Beatle?'"

PAUL: "No, not quite."

(laughter)

JOHN: "Actually, we only do it in each other's company. I know I never do it alone."

RINGO: "We used to do it more. We'd get in the car. I'd look over at John and say, 'Christ, look at you; you're a bloody phenomenon!' and just laugh... 'cuz it was only him, you know. And a few old friends of ours done it, from Liverpool. I'd catch 'em looking at me, and I'd say, 'What's the matter with you?' It's just daft, them just screaming and laughing, thinking I'm one of them people."

PLAYBOY: "A Beatle?"

RINGO: "Yes."

... and with Bob Dylan in 1966.

PLAYBOY: Why do you think rock 'n' roll has become such an international phenomenon?

DYLAN: I can't really think that there is any rock 'n' roll. Actually, when you think about it, anything that has no real existence is bound to become an international phenomenon. Anyway, what does it mean, rock 'n' roll? Does it mean Beatles, does it mean John Lee Hooker, Bobby Vinton, Jerry Lewis' kid? What about Lawrence Welk? He must play a few rock-'n'-roll songs. Are all these people the same? Is Ricky Nelson like Otis Redding? Is Mick Jagger really Ma Rainey? I can tell by the way people hold their cigarettes if they like Ricky Nelson. I think it's fine to like Ricky Nelson: I couldn't care less if somebody likes Ricky Nelson. But I think we're getting off the track here. There isn't any Ricky Nelson. There isn't any Beatles; oh, I take that back: there are a lot of beetles. But there isn't any Bobby Vinton. Anyway, the word is not "international phenomenon"; the word is "parental nightmare."

By the time I went to college (in 1969), I viewed Playboy as a thing of the past, where my father lived, but irrelevant to the new generation. The culture had moved to a new place, and we had new viewing-and-reading material....

But Hugh Hefner lived on, selling his particular vision of the good life. The music was jazz, the smoke was tobacco pipe, the sex was glossy and clean, the mansion creepily dark and ornate. It would not die, and the vision got planted in who knows how many heads...

Without Hugh Hefner, where would we be today? Who would we be? The cultural influence is beyond calculation.

Donald Trump isn't a con man.

He's a huckster.

There's a difference.

I'm making the con man/huckster distinction.

He's not like Bernie Madoff. He's more like Hugh Hefner or Ron Popeil. Meade and I were talking about this idea and he challenged me to name someone else who fit my idea of Trump as the huckster. It took me a while, but I came up with Hugh Hefner. Then he revealed the name he had in mind: Ron Popeil.

Notice how both of those men put their brand on products and promoted them and — through their personality — made people feel an extra boost of positivity about products that were varied and real.

The history of the word "politicize" — from 1968 to 2015.

May 1968: "S.D.S. is out to politicize the campus."

September 1973:  "It was not simply a matter of increasing numbers, but of the highly politicized manner in which additional blacks found their way into Harvard — overcoming nearly a century of racial and sociological barriers to a sizable presence at Harvard. Militancy and political threats perpetrated by Negro students in 1968-70 paved the way for major alterations in Harvard's recruiting and admissions policies. This resulted in a fivefold increase in black enrollment, but the politization surrounding this development plagued virtually all aspects of black-white relationships, dividing blacks and whites in to mutually exclusive communities." From "The black experience at Harvard," by Martin Kilson.

August 1976: Back when Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer, was getting the Democratic nomination: "Planters [Peanuts] has been the focus of recent efforts to politicize peanuts, such as the recent Democratic National Convention to 'borrow' its Mr. Peanut mascot. 'Mr. Peanut is an apolitical figure'..."

January 1979: Pope John Paul II in Mexico City: "You know that liberation theology is a true theology... But perhaps it is also a false theology, because if one starts to politicize theology, apply doctrines of political systems, ways of analysis which are not Christian, then this is no longer theology."

September 1980: "On the Lower East Side in the late 60's, his aim was to politicize the hippies, not to make the larger world an adjunct to the counterculture." From a review of a new book by Abbie Hoffman.

December 1986: "In 1966, Mao turned to radical Shanghai students to trigger the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long upheaval intended to politicize every facet of Chinese life."
 
November 1992: Hugh Hefner is quoted: "I think the real question is why, after a sexual revolution began in the 50's, did the women's movement seize upon an anti-sexual theme.... A significant part of the hurtful side of feminism is failing to understand how a hurtful childhood can shape you, and instead trying to politicize all behavior. There's really no benefit to viewing sex as the enemy. The sex act is some of the best of what we are, as family, and as a civilization. The notion that sex and violence are connected like law and order is untrue. They are polar opposites. One is hurting; one is hugging."

January 1994: "Do you ever wonder if it was a mistake to politicize the private lives of politicians? Bill Clinton was rumored to have a Gary Hart-ish sexual life, yet he's turned out to be quite supportive of women's rights." From a Q&A with 3 female reporters.

May 1996: When Democratic Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts said that the Defense of Marriage bill was motivated by politics, he was accused of a "desperate attempt to politicize what is not a political issue."

September 1999: After shootings in a Fort Worth church, Texas Governor George W. Bush signed legislation permitting guns in churches, Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore started asking ''How can we allow guns in churches?'," and a Bush spokesman said: "Americans are tired of politicians trying to politicize every tragedy.'' 

December 1999: "Our political leaders must be judged on how they treat everyone, including the least fortunate. We must ask ourselves: do we solve problems or simply push them away, politicize them and criminalize them?'' said Hillary Clinton, about homeless people, whom Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was having arrested for sleeping on the streets.

April 2000: "Holding congressional hearings now would only further politicize this tragedy [of Elian Gonzalez], further inflame the passions, and do nothing to resolve the future of the child.... We should not allow this situation to degenerate further into which political party can benefit the most. Americans have made it clear that they do not want to see this issue politicized," wrote Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

October 2004: "There have been faith-based efforts in America for years and years. There hasn't always been an effort to politicize it," said presidential candidate John Kerry speaking to a group of black pastors.

February 2012: "I think there’s been a chord struck over this issue, this issue of political organizations who are trying to politicize women’s reproductive health," said Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.

October 2015: President Obama, after another mass shooting: "Somebody somewhere will comment and say, Obama politicized this issue. Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic."

"I like to think of this as all of their dreams coming true.”

Said Hugh Hefner, when one of his women said a new recruit deserved an allowance, he said he spent $2 million on his in-house girlfriends in the past few years, and the woman said, "She’s putting in all this time... and all she’s getting is a drink and a f–k!"

1. A drink and a fuck and all your dreams coming true!

2. When actual cash changes hands, it's more conspicuously prostitution/prostitution-y.

3. Holly Madison tries to look victimized even as she reveals that she intended to exploit the old man, and, with this book of hers, she's still wringing the last drop from the dessicated entity.

4. The book title is "Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny." I thought a Playboy Bunny was a waitress at the Playboy Club, not just any woman who falls within the Hefner domain. But she was a waitress at Hooters when Hefner's people discovered her. I don't like seeing these animal totems mixed up. You've got your Hooters owl and your Playboy bunny. Let's have some clarity!

5. Apparently, somebody got the idea to go with "Alice in Wonderland" terminology, with "Down the Rabbit Hole," perhaps because of the old man and the little girl connotations, what with Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, but that's a junkpile of imagery, and Madison doesn't come across as a curious little girl. She accepted the invitation to a glitzy mansion with a powerful media mogul, and she went there as an adult who lusted after "the glamorous life" and saw the place as "a stepping stone" and the  other women as "a fun little sorority." Motivations like that have nothing to do with Alice.

6. The bit about the allowance reminds me of the "wife bonus" in that much-discussed "anthropological memoir" "Primates of Park Avenue" — which, by the way, just got picked up by MGM.

"It’s not that I mind seeing breasts everywhere; after all, I have two of my own that I quite like."

"But it’s disheartening that breasts are often considered more interesting than the women they’re attached to – as if we’re an afterthought compared to our body parts. But now a bevy of women, in a matter of days, have taken back the tit. We’re reclaiming the rack, whether you like or not.... You don’t like it? Tough titties."

Writes Jessica Valenti in a Guardian column titled "Topless Keira Knightley is not alone: 2014 is the year women reclaimed our boobs."

For a prescient Althouse post — pinpointing 2006 as the year of "boob" reclamation — see "Let's take a closer look at those breasts."

(I put "boob" in quotes because that is not my style of slang. Nor is "tits," for that matter. I never use any word other than "breasts" (unless I'm quoting someone else).)

ADDED: 2 more things:

1. A "bevy of women"? I don't think I've ever seen the word "bevy" used outside of the trite phrase "bevy of beauties," where it seems old-fashioned and insufficiently attentive to the personhood of women but at least alliterates.

2. Why is it "disheartening that breasts are often considered more interesting than the women they’re attached to"? Lots of women aren't very interesting, whereas breasts have a base level of interestingness. If you're someone who believes you are regarded as less interesting than your breasts, become more interesting. I don't see how calling more attention to your breasts — in some sort of out-and-proud move like baring them in a magazine — is supposed to boost the relative interestingness of the aspects of you that are not your breasts. Do you imagine there's something especially feisty and feminist about posing with naked breasts that somehow transcends all those women in the past who thought they were baring their breasts in an exciting new way? I've heard this self-deception for at least 40 years. I'm sure Hugh Hefner has whispered it to bevies of beauties.

Responding to a mother who's upset to find that her 13-year-old daughter is reading sexually explicit fan fiction about a popular boy band....

... Slate's advice columnist Emily Yoffe begins:

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.

Happy birthday to Professor Irwin Corey. He's 100 years old today.

Here's video of him performing in 2011, when he was 97:



And the video below comes from way back in 2007, when the President of the United States was George Bush, and Professor Irwin Corey looked much more than 5 years younger. He criticizes the President in both videos, and perhaps the years weigh very heavily as you approach 100 — I'm saying "you," but do you really think you'll have the opportunity to feel the increasing weight of the years leading up to 100? — but perhaps for a true left-winger like Professor Irwin Corey, the experience of disappointment in Obama hurts far more than getting what you knew you were going to hate from George Bush.



From Wikipedia:

"The culture’s attitude is Hefnerism, basically, if less baldly chauvinistic than the original Playboy philosophy."

"Sexual fulfillment is treated as the source and summit of a life well lived, the thing without which nobody (from a carefree college student to a Cialis-taking senior) can be truly happy, enviable or free."

From Ross Douthat's meditation on the motives of the Santa Barbara murderer.

This tension between sexual expectations and social reality is a potential problem for both sexes, but for a variety of reasons — social, cultural and biological — it’s more likely to produce toxic reactions in the male of the species....

Contemporary feminism is very good — better than my fellow conservatives often acknowledge — at critiquing these pathologies. But feminism, too, is often a prisoner of Hefnerism, in the sense that it tends to prescribe more and more “sex positivity,” insisting that the only problem with contemporary sexual culture is that it’s imperfectly egalitarian, insufficiently celebratory of female agency and desire.

This means that the feminist prescription doesn’t supply what men slipping down into the darkness of misogyny most immediately need: not lectures on how they need to respect women as sexual beings, but reasons, despite their lack of sexual experience, to first respect themselves as men.

Should sex-positive feminism be equated with Hefnerism? Pre-Clinton Era feminism had indulged quite deeply in the critique of sex, but that got submerged in what may have been a realistic accommodation to the desire most people have for sexual relationships. The feminists who critiqued sex back in the 80s and early 90s thought that sex-positive feminists were enemies of feminism. (Here, read "Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism" (1990) if you don't believe me.)  These "sex-negative" feminists hated the Playboy philosophy, so it's... interesting to dump the sex-positive feminists in with Hugh Hefner.

A commenter over at Douthat's column says: "Good God, how did you manage to turn liberal attitudes towards sex into the motivations of a murdering lunatic? That is truly an act of ideological desperation."

But what ideology is Douthat pushing? I think he's saying that in our society a lot of people are going to miss out on the ideal of plentiful sex and we need some positive ways to think about that so we don't suffer excessively. It's not so much that an occasional crazed person commits murder as it is that millions of others feel bad that they are not living what seems to be the good life. In that view, whether or not it's good to be "sex positive," we need a way to find good in the absence of sex. What would the "celibacy positive" vision look like?

I assume there are many intelligent, happy individuals in America who are celibate and could express themselves in a positive way, but you have to invade your own privacy to tell others why you're not having sex, and it's a difficult writing assignment, with critics waiting to explain that you're only bullshitting defensiveness of your own failure and repression.

There are many pornographers, but what, within the realm of pornography, earns you a substantial obituary in The New York Times?

Some day we'll see how they treat Hugh Hefner, who made pornography clean, commercial and classy, but today we read about the death of Al Goldstein:

Mr. Goldstein did not invent the dirty magazine, but he was the first to present it to a wide audience without the slightest pretense of classiness or subtlety....

The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue in 1968 was... “We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ... We will apologize for nothing. We will uncover the entire world of sex. We will be the Consumer Reports of sex.”...

Apart from Screw, Mr. Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser....

“I’m infantile, compulsive, always acting out my fantasies,” he told Playboy in 1974. “There’s nothing I’ll inhibit myself from doing.”

In later years, it became impossible to get famous for being a loud sleazy guy with a magazine, and the idea of anyone "inking" out pubic hair seems mostly puzzling. Even if you know why it was done, how was it done? Ink? Wouldn't it need to be some carefully applied flesh-toned White-Out?

"I moved into the Mansion really young. I was 21 or 22... I needed to explore out there and take the time away."

"The time away really helped make me realize that where I'm meant to be is here with Hef..." 

It's practically a romance novel. Hugh Hefner marries Crystal Harris at the Playboy Mansion... I love the photographs, which make it seem like the Playboy Mansion has its own chapel. But I suspect Hugh Hefner is an atheist. Googling, I get here:

PLAYBOY: What do you believe happens after death?

HEFNER: I haven't a clue. I'm always struck by the people who think they do have a clue. It's perfectly clear to me that religion is a myth. It's something we have invented to explain the inexplicable. My religion and the spiritual side of my life come from a sense of connection to the humankind and nature on this planet and in the universe. I am in overwhelming awe of it all: It is so fantastic, so complex, so beyond comprehension. What does it all mean -- if it has any meaning at all? But how can it all exist if it doesn't have some kind of meaning? I think anyone who suggests that they have the answer is motivated by the need to invent answers, because we have no such answers.

Hef is 86, and Crystal is 26, but you never know who will go first. Hef appears to be in fine shape, and he's still cute, old man cute, not in denial of age. He seems smart and sane, and why wouldn't a woman find him attractive? Crystal on the other hand is bereft of the freshness of youth. She looks fake and drained of life, despite the big-lipped, plastered wedding-smile. What does he see in her?