It’s worth noting that much more has been done by women, POC, and LGBT activists to further their own causes, and none it required capitalizing on the objectification of women, non-whites, or queerness.
ETA: POC.
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My first husband had a subscription to Playboy.
I read the articles.
And the fiction - great stories by great writers.
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Right? I mean fine if he helped get some writing published that had more cultural benefit than his centerfold pictures. But giving him kudos for making what were plainly profitable business decisions as though he was some trailblazer of civil rights? No, just no.
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You know never once did I hear a story about finding a Popular Mechanics or Smithsonian in the woods.
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So who was dropping of Playboys in the woods? Like are there little Gnomes in the forest? If so, what is their purpose?
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The figurehead of Hugh Hefner was a pop culture icon and clearly had an impact on multiple generations and parts of our pop culture. So it is news and note worthy to mark his passing.
Beyond that, I feel the same as @Melizmatic about not really caring one way or another.
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I don’t know about geographic demographics for the rest of you, but the woodland stashes I was finding were Penthouse, Oui, and Hustler. I knew about Annie Sprinkle before ninth grade.
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Penthouse had the best letter, and Hustler the best porn. Playboy actually had good articles.
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I remember a couple of stashes that were mostly Penthouse, but also an issue of Genesis. There were also a couple of digest-sized magazines that I guess were swingers’ magazines – like the personal ads, but with photos. One stash was at the edge of some woods while the other was semi-protected in a burned-out farmhouse.
If it weren’t for Penthouse I wouldn’t know (at least, not until much later) about Arthur Blythe or William O. Douglas – the latter article was written by Nat Hentoff, who previously I only knew as the author of 1 or 2 teen novels I had read.
Haha! Very true!
As far as I’m concerned, this wins The Internet for the day.
At least Heff didn’t have to watch Playboy finish it’s death spiral
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sigh. nice work, HR.
Well, The Illuminatus! Trilogy would have never happened without him, so that’s something.
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If it wasn’t in his self-interest to publish Margaret Atwood, he wouldn’t have. If it wasn’t in hers to use his platform, she wouldn’t have. At that time publishing was very regimented, and he broke that mold, at least parts of it.
From where we are now, he looks meh. From where we were then, he sorta was a countercultural cornerstone. As a person, I didn’t know him but he sure seemed to want to, or just not mind, looking like a pig.
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It’s a wonder that Cardinal Douthat procreated, given his extreme horror of ladyparts. I’d imagine that a tricky combination of numbing agents, a blindfold, noseplugs, and perhaps a pulley-and-sling system were used when he had to do his dreadful marital duty for Ratzinger.
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"But it’s also worth pointing out, in the spirit of the sort of open cultural dialogue he worked his whole life to encourage, that Hefner’s egalitarian society was one largely envisioned and created for men.
The terms of his rebellion undeniably depended on putting women in a second-class role. It was the women, after all, whose sexuality was on display on the covers and in the centerfolds of his magazine, not to mention hanging on his shoulder, practically until the day he died.
Hef’s notion of the freedom to express sexuality translated largely into freedom to express men’s desire for women, and the fantasy that those women would be always ready and eager to comply.
And it wasn’t just about business: Hefner himself bragged about sleeping with more than a thousand women. In her 2015 memoir, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” former Playmate and Hef girlfriend Holly Madison described the Playboy Mansion as a place where Hef would encourage competition – and body image issues --between his multiple live-in girlfriends. His legacy is full of evidence of the exploitation of women for professional gain. In creating Playboy, and maintaining its brand over six decades, Hef championed a world in which women serve to delight and entertain men, where their bodies are objects, where modification to appeal to male senses often took precedence over comfort (because who really wants DDDs?).
Women were bunnies – the “lucky ones,” anyway. The smart pieces by well-known journalists that he ran in his magazine – even female journalists, like Margaret Atwood – were designed to enrich the intellect of the magazine’s male readers."
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