Hugh Hefner: dirty old man or frontline warrior in the sexual revolution? Credit: Robert Mora/Getty Images
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Hark! Listen to the sound of no one sobbing. Playboy magazine published its last print edition this month and is now retreating online, blaming the pandemic.
The truth is, it’s hard to hold a wake for something most people felt died years ago. For me, the magazine was put on the funeral pyre with Hugh Hefner in 2017, sati style. The man and his mag were irrevocably entwined in a way that’s rare in journal-land, where even Anna Wintour is just one in a long line of well-known Vogue editors.
Hefner pretty much invented the concept of a playboy: he lived the lifestyle and then pumped air into its saggy carcass when it was sinking like a punctured Lilo on the Playboy Mansion pool. The death knell was sounded by middle-shelf men’s mags like Maxim and FHM in the late 90s, which saw the beer-loving lad boot the martini-loving playboy off the shelves.
Forty years of doughty campaigning by feminists had finally paid off; the presence of girlie mags on top selfs seemed like an anachronism. The lads’ mags, with their ribald humour and cool female contributors and interviewees, were placed on family-friendly shelves and given a veneer of respectability. But over the next decade, a flesh race started over which publication could showcase the most naked totty. In 2013 the Co-op asked the low-rent Nuts to put its issues in cover-concealing “modesty bags” and a year later it was dead, alongside most of its brethren. I’d like to say this was down to consumer pressure, but it’s equally true the internet with its unimaginable reserves of filth killed the soft-porn mag.
Yet as epitomised by Playboy, the girlie mag was the embodiment of intelligent sharp-edged masculine glamour — the sort of thing you expected to find on James Hunt’s or Jack Nicholson’s coffee table, beside a white tux. People (mostly men) read it for the car write-ups, interviews and travel as much as the pin-ups, and in 1975 its circulation per monthly copy peaked at 5.6 million.
In the mid-Seventies, the world was still giddy from the sexual revolution and the backlash was yet to properly kick off. Women wrote and featured in Playboy, the quality of writing was good and the nude pictures were often seen as liberating to the post-war generation. The magazine’s presence in a liberal household wasn’t unusual.
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SubscribeSo Heffner’s Playboy and Flemming’s Bond are from ’53 – A short time after the last global war – Wonder if we will get such a refreshing change of culture after this global panic pandemic – 1974 has been noted as the happiest year in the West just before the maximum circulation year…..interesting?
You should immediately get hold of copy of Lord Jonathan Sumption’s brilliant polemic on why we are committing national cultural and economic suicide, for no good reason. It was delivered on Monday, 30th March last, on Radio 4’s Word at One programme. The verbatim text can also be found on Lord Sumption’s Wikipedia page. I trust you will find it inspiring, as many of ‘us’ do.
In years to come, when archaeologists and historians (if there are any) come to discuss why the West committed suicide in 2020, Lord Sumption’s polemic will be the primary source, a sort of nano Thucydides.
Many Englishmen are astonished at the supine of behaviour of France. What has happened to the spirit of the Revolution and Mademoiselle de la Guillotine? Our own Churchillian spirit died years ago in an avalanche of political correctness, lack of moral fibre etc; But we did expect France to go berserk, particularly in view of the recent ‘yellow jackets’ protests.
It is time for you to get out the Guillotine, you haven’t used it publicly since 1939, so now is the time. To arms citizens! Courage!
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You have to wonder if we will from now on do this for every flu epedemic……our masters do intend to ‘lockdown’ again if this one erupts again in winter……so presumably yes we will……..Although once in the coming self inflicted economic depression that history shows can kill more than this flu our masters will think again?
Thank you for this; it needed saying. If this were anonymous, I’d say a lot more, but an other is involved. I’m 67 and have experienced the heights and depths of sexual love more intensely now than at any time in my life. That it’s ended and I’m heartbroken doesn’t make it a whit less beautiful and precious, and if Groundhog Day was real, I’d repeat the whole thing until it killed me.
Thank you James for sharing your analysis on Mr. Sanders. With all his finger-pointing and posturing as a savior, I’m always astonished by how popular he is among people my age. It’s time Americans let him go.
There is only one lesson to be learned for the Far Left like Bernie and Corbyn – You’re wrong!
What happened to the copy-editing for this article? Or are ‘Normal Mailer’ and ‘Better Friedan’ meant to be satire?
Irony:
Playboy epitomsies an age of innocence.
You want dirty ? Even the internet cannot begin to describe a gay sauna
“(Germaine Greer flashing her orifices for Suck magazine, then snarking about Suzanne Moore’s “f**k-me shoes” springs to mind). Above all, I’ve learned you’ve got to view most things pertaining to sex in the context of their times.”
How can the second sentence follow the first?!
The first time I saw Playboy magazine, I thought it was a joke.
The cover page had what I thought a caricature, of a typical All-American dream woman for some over sexed cowboy fantasy
Huge chest, big teeth, huge ass and almost naked ““ as I say a caricature and to make things worse, inside the magazine, she was completely naked ““ which made things even more grotesque!
In fact, it put me off women, because it was too much, too aggressive, too cartoonish, and was difficult to take seriously.
I saw another issue some years later and now, to give some sort of legitimacy I suppose, they had fancy articles written by what I can only describe as well-known nonentities, who were unknown to me. They all had a take on whatever they scribbled about that simply didn’t register in my own world.
Mr Heffner, who owned, ran this stuff, appeared to me to be some kind of weirdo who apparently was fixated by huge mammary glands and lived in a mansion, with bunnies ““ what can I say? Maybe it was a Mother thing? I don’t know or care.
Rather like my reaction to it’s passing.
And what did it do for women – a disservice I would think – rest in peace!
I don’t doubt that Hugh Hefner had a dark side and that not all that went on in his mansion would stand scrutiny but to somehow try to implicitly rope him in to association with sexual assault or worse because ‘the money, drugs and lure of fame were a form of coercion’ is grossly unfair. There is a very big difference between the carrot and the stick – between free will and coercion. And of course, many shades of grey in between. Nonetheless the claim that offering something (money, fame, carrot, whatever) to someone who wants it is coercion is dangerous nonsense if you want to live in a free society.
Hii
Had to look up “f******g” as I’d never heard of it – now feeling slightly nauseous 😀
Are you joking? “Tolerance isn’t much of a value when it’s women being required to do all the tolerating”.
Tolerating the constant barage and violation of my fundemental human right to be a man, have freedom of thought, freedom of speech and control of my reproduction makes your whole article comical.
But I don’t want to play a game where I claim we have it worse than you. I don’t. Men and women just have a different set of challanges. It requires both genders to constructively discuss desires and methods of change.
This cannot happen when “Men are Toxic” is the catch cry of the Neo-Marixt SJW Femanazi CULT. That CULT’s primary purpose is to destroy the traditional family. As such men who are violently assaulted by the draconian policies shift react to protect themselves. The consequence being less empathy toward women and dating. Wholesale abandonment of marriage and commitment. Increased grouping into sub-culture groups opting out of society. Actions have consequences and I increasing hear from women like you that the results are not favourable.
Perhaps Ghandi had some wisdom when he suggested that if you want to see a change in the world, first look at changing yourself. That is certainly the central theme of Joran Peterson’s book, which has been widely accepted by young men but rejected by Femanazi CULT members.
Honestly the majority of men don’t think about what “women think” enough to constrain you. It just isn’t on our to do list. I think your constraints come from what other women think of your thoughts.
Seems like a rather aggressive response to a well thought out piece of writing. Are you fulfilling a stereotype here or do you have a valid point. Careful please.