"I'm going to start referring to Donald Trump as the thinking man's President."

Overheard at Meadehouse.

I'd asked Meade (and Grok) about the adjectival phrase "thinking man's," which came up this morning in the comments on the post about Donald Trump's pardoning of Pete Rose, baseball being, some say, "the thinking man's sport."

Googling jogged my memory: "The Thinking Man's" is a Playboy phrase (apparently, you need to think to deal with women):

"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?

Branding.

pic.twitter.com/JRebl653BP

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2023

ADDED: I was going to create a new tag for Musk's new AI project, but typing in the letters, I saw that I already had a tag "grok" — lower case "g" — so I just used that, even though I knew the existing posts with that tag had to be just about the word "grok." I wasn't going to create a second "grok" tag, with an upper case "G." I don't like tag proliferation, but — more important — I wanted to publish this post with the old tag so I could click on it and see what I'd done in the past.

I see that last January I used "grok" in a post about an article about thinking about thinking:

"To instill an understanding of consent and body autonomy, we should also let our kids make their own decisions about who they touch (and are touched by)."

"Avoid instructing children to give their friends hugs at the end of each play date, for example, and make sure they understand that they don’t have to be embraced if they don’t want to be, said Emily Rothman, a community health scientist at the Boston University School of Public Health. It’s also wise to talk to kids about pornography from a young age — even as young as kindergarten, Dr. Rothman suggested. You can frame these early discussions as being more about nakedness than about sex, though. 'You can say, "Sometimes grown-ups like to look at naked photos or movies of other grown-ups, and they do it because it’s fun for them and makes them feel good, but we don’t think it’s that good for kids’ brains,"' she said."

From "'Sex Talks' Should Start Earlier Than You Think/Some parents feel awkward and reluctant to discuss bodies, consent and sexuality; their kids pay the price." That's written by Melinda Wenner Moyer, who is "a science journalist and the author of 'How To Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes.'"

If because it’s fun and it feels good is the reason to do something, why wouldn't the kid proceed to do whatever seems fun or as if it might feel good?! A silly answer would be: Because it might not be "good for [my] brain." What kid could possibly think: My brain is still developing, so I need to avoid doing the things that adults do for fun and pleasure. They'd have to think it with their incomplete brain. How is that supposed to work?

As for pornography, I should disclose once again that in my childhood home, in the 1950s and 1960s, the new issue of Playboy Magazine was always on the living room coffee table — alongside Life and Look — and we kids, at any age, were completely free to look at it as much as we wanted.

"So as Spiegelman read the record from the board’s meeting, he focused on their stated issues with stark imagery, as well as strong language."

"Spiegelman’s mother died by suicide when he was 20, and in 'Maus,' he depicts how his father discovered her lifeless body, unclothed in a bathtub. Spiegelman also laughs in reaction to a board member bringing up the author’s past comics contributions to Playboy magazine when assessing the anthropomorphic nudity in 'Maus,' which includes stripped-down concentration camp prisoners. Spiegelman acknowledges that the voices who spoke at the meeting weren’t 'monolithic by any means.' One instructional supervisor spoke of “Maus” as an anchor book to begin teaching the Holocaust to children: 'I am very passionate about history, and I would hate to rob our kids of this opportunity.' The member also noted: 'Mr. Spiegelman did his very best to depict his mother passing away.'"

From "Art Spiegelman sees the new ban of his book ‘Maus’ as a ‘red alert’" (WaPo).

Background: "A school district in Tennessee banned the use of 'Maus,' a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, in its middle school classes, citing the work’s profanity and nudity in a 10-to-0 vote. As leaders in conservative areas across the country push for more control over the way history is taught, the McMinn County school board expressed concern that the expletives in 'Maus' were inappropriate for eighth-graders. Members also said Art Spiegelman’s illustrations showing nudity — which depict Holocaust victims forced to strip during their internment in Nazi concentration camps — were improper."

"During a trip to Italy, [his wife] gets behind the wheel of a Renault and speeds along a mountainside road outside of Siena."

"Suddenly, like Nicole in 'Tender Is the Night,' she declares, 'I’m going to kill both of us!' Roth grabs the wheel, and they continue on to the Rhône Valley. Roth started seeing Hans Kleinschmidt, an eccentric name-dropping psychoanalyst, three or four days a week. Asked later how he could justify the expense ($27.50 a session), Roth said, 'It kept me from killing my first wife.' He told Kleinschmidt that he fantasized about dropping into the Hoffritz store on Madison Avenue and buying a knife. 'Philip, you didn’t like the Army that much,' Kleinschmidt told him. 'How will you enjoy prison?'... Roth has a fling with Alice Denham, Playboy’s Miss July, 1956, who, as her cheerfully unapologetic memoir 'Sleeping with Bad Boys' revealed, also slept with Nelson Algren, James Jones, Joseph Heller, and William Gaddis. 'Manhattan was a river of men flowing past my door, and when I was thirsty I drank,' she wrote. So did Roth. Roth and [his first wife] finally split up in 1963."

From "The Secrets Philip Roth Didn’t Keep/Roth revealed himself to his biographer as he once revealed himself on the page, reckoning with both the pure and the perverse" (The New Yorker).

Here's Denham's rather decorous Playboy centerfold from 1956, when sex, apparently, entailed pillow fights, with feathers flying, and a big fluffy feather was always right there as an impromptu pastie, lest you see too much. 

I had to look up "pastie," because... is it "pasty" or "pastie"? Don't want any mixup with the meat pie. Turns out it's either "pasty" or "pastie," and, really, how often do you need the singular? But I did get to while away a few moments — disrupting my contemplation of the "a river of men" that was Manhattan in the 50s — with the Wikipedia article "Pasties". 

There, I encountered this photograph — cc by Mark Lidikay — captioned "A group of women protesting for the right to go topless anywhere a man could. Venice Beach California. The demonstrator with the microphone is wearing a pastie in the shape of a nipple":

Can you tell whether it's elevating and not racist to compare Black Lives Matter artists to cavemen?

I'm trying to read "New York’s Sidewalk Prophets Are Heirs of the Lascaux Cave Artisans/What street art adorning boarded-up storefronts tells us about our shared political realities and the ways our stories are connected. A critic’s tour deciphers the signs and symbols" in the New York Times.

Maybe to answer my question you need to know more about the racial identification of the writer, whose name is Seph Rodney. I'm just going to give you a sample of the prose:

What became apparent to me is that in the intervening millenniums between those cave paintings and the killing of George Floyd, the messages we share, like the sociopolitical circumstance that impel them, have become more complex. Now street artists take account of the qualified legal immunity protecting police officers, the Black Lives Matter movement and the ramifications of a dysfunctional democracy, among other realities, using a well-developed visual language of cultural memes that illustrate the ideological battles among regional, racial and cultural factions. When we see the image of thin, green-skinned, bipedal beings with teardrop-shaped black apertures for eyes, we typically read “alien.” But when I see the image of such a creature holding a sign that reads “I can’t breathe,” I grok an urgent message: Even aliens visiting from light years away understand the plight of Black people in the United States because this situation is so obviously dire.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jamie said:

I stopped processing his prose before he said "grok," but woke back up when I got there. I hate when people who aren't Heinlein use "grok" to connote their deep understanding... Those people almost invariably missed the point of Stranger In a Strange Land.

The OED has an entry for "grok" — U.S. slang, "arbitrary formation" by Robert A. Heinlein, from 1961. It is defined as "To understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with" or " To empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment." The 2 quotes from the book that are in the OED are: "Smith had been aware of the doctors but had grokked that their intentions were benign" and "Now that he knew himself to be self he was free to grok ever closer to his brothers." The OED also gives these quotes:

1968 Playboy June 80 He met her at an acid-rock ball and she grokked him, this ultracool miss loaded with experience and bereft of emotion.

I didn't notice that Playboy changed its motto from "Entertainment for Men" to "Entertainment for All."

That happened over a year ago, I'm reading "As Men Are Canceled, So Too Their Magazine Subscriptions/The boys’ club of glossy publishing confronts an identity crisis" by Alex Williams (NYT).

It’s an open question whether the men who now turn to Pornhub and its ilk for the kind of “entertainment” that Playboy built an empire on even noticed....

Did the women (and others) who frowned on the magazine notice?

The magazine’s new leadership team consists of a gay man (the executive editor Shane Singh) and two women (the creative director Erica Loewy and Anna Wilson, who is in charge of photography and multimedia), all millennials. Recent feature articles include profiles of Andrea Drummer, a female African-American chef who runs a cannabis-centric restaurant in Los Angeles, and King Princess, a genderqueer pop singer who is as a symbol of self-acceptance to young L.G.B.T.Q. fans....

This reminds me of the sort of protest where there's a takeover of a space and an attempt to repurpose the space for the protesters' cause. I can't think of a good example of that tactic working, but I do remember protests in Ann Arbor, circa 1970, where a part of campus called Regents Plaza was renamed "People's Plaza."

And of course, I remember the Wisconsin protests of 2011, where protesters who were very unhappy about the GOP sweep of both houses of the legislature and the governorship filled up the state capitol and had the chant "Whose house?/Our house!"

So the erstwhile protesters have taken over Playboy. It wasn't just an attempt. It was successful. But now what? If the protested-against oppressors cede the space, does the space matter anymore? I suppose it matters that the institution is shut down, but when you talk about continuing it, according to the ideology that motivated you to oust the old guard, you've got to make the institution function in some way that is appealing to somebody other than you, the people who took over the place.

"... Playboy was quietly relaunched this year — this time as a thick-stock, matte-paper, ad-free quarterly. It is edited by a millennial triumvirate..."

"... the openly gay Mr. Singh, 31; Erica Loewy, 26, the creative director; and Anna Wilson, 29, who oversees photography and multimedia.... The summer issue, out now, features an interview with Tarana Burke, the activist who founded the MeToo movement, conducted by Dream Hampton, whose documentary about R. Kelly led to multiple charges against the singer. There is a queer cartoon and a feature on gender-neutral sex toys. The fall issue will feature a photo feature by the artist Marilyn Minter celebrating female pubic hair. 'We have red hair, blond hair, black hair — it’s basically every color of the rainbow,' said Liz Suman, 35, the magazine’s arts editor. She added that elsewhere in the publication, 'I’ve been sneaking in some penises, too.'....  In the office, members of the staff use terms like 'intersectionality,' 'sex positivity,' 'privileging' and 'lived experience' to describe their editorial vision — and tout their feminist credentials. Two editors are former employees of Ms.... 'We talk a lot about what’s the Playboy gaze and how we need to diversify that,' said Rachel Webber, 37, the chief marketing officer.... 'It’s a little like being in a gender studies class,' she added."

From "Can the Millennials Save Playboy?/The Hefners are gone, and so is the magazine’s short-lived ban on nudity — as well as virtually anyone on the staff over 35" (NYT).

Playboy is just a brand name. You can completely change a product under a name. Will it work? Was there enough value in the old version of the product that it's not good business to repurpose the name? Look at this big NYT article they got out of it!

Remember Cosmopolitan magazine?



It had been around since 1886 when Helen Gurley Brown took over in 1965. Originally, it was introduced as a "first-class family magazine" with articles on fashion, interior decoration, childcare, and cooking. In 1905, William Randolph Hearst took over and changed it into a place with articles like "The Growth of Caste in America" and writers including George Bernard Shaw and Upton Sinclair, and Ida Tarbell. By the 1950s, the circulation was way down and it was considered very dull.
Helen Gurley Brown took over and completely changed it into an active promotion of sex for the single woman.

In Brown's early years as editor, the magazine received heavy criticism. In 1968 at the feminist Miss America protest, protestors symbolically threw a number of feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can." These included copies of Cosmopolitan and Playboy magazines. Cosmopolitan also ran a near-nude centerfold of actor Burt Reynolds in April 1972, causing great controversy and attracting much attention....

Victoria Hearst, a granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst..., has lent her support to a campaign which seeks to classify Cosmopolitan as harmful under the guidelines of "Material Harmful to Minors" laws. Hearst, the founder of an evangelical Colorado church called Praise Him Ministries, states that "the magazine promotes a lifestyle that can be dangerous to women's emotional and physical well being. It should never be sold to anyone under 18."... 

ADDED: One nice thing about the new Playboy website is access to old Playboy interviews. I once subscribed to Playboy, the website, just because I wanted to read the Allen Ginsberg interview (from 1969). But here it is now, free: "A poet, a mystic, a homosexual, a psychedelic proselyte, a revolutionary, a bearded prophet of doom for what he considers society's 'sick' values, he is among the most famous and certainly the most controversial of living poets." There was plenty of detail about homosexuality in that interview (which I read when I was 18, in my family home, where Playboy was always openly available):

Would you explain what you mean when you say there's a natural element of homosexuality in every man?

There's homosexuality in every Playboy reader. To say that in a Playboy Interview is interesting because obviously every Playboy reader expects me to say that; so I'll say it and liberate him from his fear that somebody will say it sooner or later.

"I'd like to think that sometime, maybe 10 or 20 years from now... there'd be something I could laugh at... anything."

Said Spencer Tracy, as the thoroughly disgraced Captain T. G. Culpepper, encased in a body cast, at the end of "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World," which I watched — all 2 hours and 39 minutes of it — as the 1963 entry in my imaginary movie project. This is a movie I saw in the theater when it came out. I was 12, and I didn't know much about gigantic epic comedy chase movies. In fact, I still don't. It's been more than 50 years since then, and I've found any number of things to laugh at along my way, but I can't say I laughed much rewatching this sprawling, raucous monster. I wasn't in a theater full of people who'd assembled to enjoy the hell out of themselves, as I was back in 1963. I'm sure I laughed a lot back then, but I only half-laughed twice in the present-day rewatch.

Tracy, musing about ever laughing again, in fact gets to laugh almost immediately. Buddy Hackett (also in a full body cast) peels a banana, throws the peel on the floor, and Ethel Merman, who's been yelling at everyone throughout the film, comes strutting in, yelling at everyone, and she slips on the banana peel and falls hard on her ass. Do we really want to see a woman get hurt? Yes, in this case, we've been conditioned to wish harm on her, because she's been the loud-mouth mother-in-law visiting aural pain on all the men (except her beloved son Dick Shawn) for the entirety of the movie.

I get it. And yet, I do not get it. And I did not get it the first time around. Yes, I understand the old comic convention of The Mother-in-Law — specifically the mother-in-law to a man. She's got her daughter's devotion and she's going after the daughter's husband, crushing his masculine pride at every turn. You don't ask why these people are like this. They just are. They're characters. They're assigned these positions. Do not pause to reflect or all is lost. That is, nothing is funny. It's just loud. And — oh! — Ethel Merman is loud. Did you know her original last name is Zimmerman — just like Bob Dylan? She lopped off the "Zim." Why not lop off the "man" — it would be more castrating-y — and be Zimmer?

"How a girl disposes her legs when seated can instantly signal your most effective approach."

"Of the prevalent leg positions displayed on these pages, pay particular attention to the Schemer and the Philanthropist...."

From "The Language of Legs" in the April 1969 issue of Playboy:



I'm just flipping through this issue of Playboy because it contains the interview with Allen Ginsberg that I'd read at the time and wanted so much to be able to reread again that I subscribed to Playboy. I chose 1-month of unlimited access to the archive, which cost $8.

Sample from the Ginsburg interview:

Why I subscribed to Playboy.

For the interviews!

Specifically, I wanted to read the interview with Allen Ginsberg in the April 1969 issue, and that's something I'm doing right now. But I also loved the idea of getting access to all of the back issues, including all the issues that were available to me to read (or otherwise gaze upon) when I was growing up in Delaware and New Jersey in the 1950s and 60s.

I love the old ads too:

Contemplating the shrine to the mid-60s.

Detail of the display, from the LBJ library,  under the 1964-1966 sign:



The model on the cover of Playboy looks kind of like Ann Margret, but it's Venita Wolf, She was a minor actress who lived from 1945 to 2014 — not too minor to have a Wikipedia article:

Venita Wolf... appeared in the Star Trek episode "The Squire of Gothos" (1967) as Yeoman Teresa Ross.



Other than that, she had only a short stint on popular television from 1966 to 1969, including guest roles in The Flying Nun, The Monkees, Gunsmoke and The Beverly Hillbillies, among others. She appeared unbilled in The Oscar (1966) but her only feature film credit was a supporting role in the beach movie Catalina Caper (1967)...

"Arabesque" was a 1966 movie. It was, like "Charade," one of those Hitchcock movies not by Hitchcock but by Stanley Donen.

"The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" is a Tom Wolfe book from 1965. Here's its Wikipedia article:

Many versions of the book are headed by an incomplete quotation from Kurt Vonnegut: "Verdict: Excellent book by a genius." Vonnegut's full quotation was "Verdict: Excellent book by a genius who will do anything to get attention." 

Speaking of orangeness, there's Tang. And that grand triad of mid-60s fun: the Spirograph, the Frisbee, and Operation.

"For the first time in its 64-year history, Playboy magazine will feature a transgender Playmate..."

"... a decision that Cooper Hefner, a top executive at the magazine, said on Thursday was in keeping with its founding mission of embracing changing attitudes about sex," the NYT reports.

Selecting [Ines] Rau “very much speaks to the brand’s philosophy,” said Mr. Hefner, 26, Playboy’s chief creative officer. “It’s the right thing to do. We’re at a moment where gender roles are evolving.”

Mr. Hefner said he selected Ms. Rau to be a Playmate two months ago because she’s “lovely” and has “a remarkable personality,” but also to resolidify the magazine’s voice. “This is really a moment for us to take a step back and say that so much of what the brand stood for in the early years is very much still alive in culture.”

Resolidify. I didn't know what to do, so I looked up "resolidify" in the Oxford English Dictionary, where I go to resolidify. It means "To make (something, esp. a melted substance) solid again; to solidify (something) again."

In other words — to speak more Playboyesquely — to get hard again.

Speaking of stiff... Hugh's dead.

Not even one "Weekend Update" joke about Harvey Weinstein on last night's "SNL."

The Daily Mail observes, in "'Where's Harvey Weinstein?' SNL stays SILENT on sexual abuse allegations against movie mogul much to the anger of social media who accuse the show of liberal hypocrisy."

ADDED: After writing this post, I watched about half of last night's "SNL" (which I had on the DVR). Not only was there nothing about Harvey Weinstein, but it was full of sexism. Nearly everything involving women was about women's bodies. Despite all the female performers on the show (including the guest host "Wonder Woman" Gal Gadot). roles for women were all Women as Sex Object, including Gal Gadot — wearing a black bra under a tight white tank top — doing a sexy dancing move involving holding lemons in front of her breasts and Kate McKinnon as a highly sexualized Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly dancing in glee at insults about things like penis size. Women are only funny as sex objects — that seems to be the "SNL" theory. Here, check it out:



By the way, the "horny granny" character was a longtime meme in Playboy as a cartoon character drawn by Buck Brown:

"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.

"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.

"Well, he’s huge. And he — I don’t mean to be unkind, but he’s so unattractive it’s unbelievable.”

"Did you see the picture of him in his pajamas next to this Playboy bunny?"

Said Senator Susan Collins, caught on a hot microphone. (WaPo has the quote with the recording.)

She was talking about Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.), who deserved her ire for saying something that had me calling him "a loser" the other day.

Here's the photograph Senator Collins was talking about:

This is the photo Sen. Susan Collins was referring to when she commented on Rep. Blake Farenthold wearing pajamas in 2010. pic.twitter.com/jZYCPC4FYW

— Beatrice-Elizabeth (@MissBeaE) July 25, 2017

Let's be clear. Collins didn't call him "fat." She used the ambiguous euphemism "huge" — Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime was huge — and the generalization "unattractive." And she softened it with the silly denial "I don’t mean to be unkind." It's silly because it means the exact opposite: I do mean to be unkind. If you didn't mean to be unkind, you'd stop at the point where you're conscious of and confessing that what is about to come is unkind. Like this:

"I’ll be the first to admit that the way in which the magazine portrayed nudity was dated, but removing it entirely was a mistake."

"Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem. Today we’re taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are."

Said Cooper Hefner, dressing Playboy magazine's commercial decision in fine words.