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Huh. Now that I think about it, I'm even more surprised that there isn't a greater amount of scandal surrounding the magazine or Hefner. It all sounds like prime Me Too material, but either it was too early, or the literal playboy billionaire was squeaky clean(-ish).
The Playboy magazine had near mythical status in India in the early 2000s when I was a young boy. Everyone had heard about it, some boasted and claimed to own one, but I'll be damned if I ever saw one in the flesh. A few years later, with the increasing spread of the internet and mobile phones, nobody cared about porno mags any more.
I mean, have there been a rash of porn directors, strip club managers, etc getting excoriated in the public eye under metoo? There was Joe Francis, but that was more because of his antics after being accused than because the specifics of the accusation struck anyone as beyond the pale.
It seems like even wokes understand that ‘don’t consort with those sorts of men’ is a rule which punishes violations on its lonesome.
The number of specific cancellation incidents was fairly low compared to Hollywood and politics. But I do think that was the moment when the vibe turned against the industry. For the twenty years before that, the left basically gave pornography an indulgence to be a morality-free zone due to the industry’s valuable service to the left as a battering ram against Christian morality. Even stuff like extreme racist themes and violence against women was given a pass in the name of kink. The right mostly left the industry alone too because the right was trying to shed the Moral Majority fuddy-duddy image that was beginning to become a liability for them in the 80s. After 2016, suddenly both the left and the right decided they weren’t willing to tolerate all this skeezyness anymore. You never saw much direct action about this because the porn industry is very attuned to cultural vibes and it very quickly moved to internally clean up its own image a bit, comics-code authority style.
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There's been plenty over the years, but ultimately it's tough to get past the impression that when one dates Hugh Hefner one signs up for that sort of thing, so it never really stuck.
The documentary series on Lifetime went into a lot of smoke, but never had the smoking gun of Hef himself actually doing anything bad.
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Hef really dodged a bullet considering the stories I heard about what he got up to.
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