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Playboy Was Never a Magazine, It Was a Breast Certification Organization
A Lot of Companies Aren’t What You Think They Are
Thesis: Playboy magazine has been iconic virtually from the first issue. But for almost all of its history, the Magazine was something between a loss-leader, a marketing expense, and a cherished tradition. While the magazine was occasionally profitable throughout its life, Playboy made most of its money from other ventures over the decades; running night clubs, casinos, television shows and networks, and selling branded retail merchandise. The iconic titty-mag was core to their branding, the product they were selling in the clubs, casinos, television shows was, in a sense, drawn from the imagination created by their magazine. The waitresses in the clubs were pretty young women who were implied to be hot enough to be in the magazine, even if the vast majority of them never appeared in the magazine, when you talked to them you were passing into the fantasy world of the centerfold, talking to a certified Playmate. Playboy magazine’s path to profit wasn’t selling subscriptions, it was setting the organization as a prestige knower of what made a hot woman hot, which it then as an organization certified and sold. The certification of a woman as Playmate Quality was irresistible to both male customers, and to female employees, and formed the basis for Playboy’s empire, and to the degenerate remnant of marketing that exists today.
My wife and I recently watched two separate docu-series on Hugh Hefner. [American Playboy], which was produced by Hef and his family as promotion for the company, and took a positive and mostly soft-focus view of the story of Hefner and Playboy; and Secrets of Playboy, a multi-part hit piece designed to undermine the Playboy legend and dredge up every grudge every woman has ever had against Playboy and Hefner from the first issue to last week. Neither was particularly journalistically rigorous, and our natural skepticism lead us both to come out of each series with the opposite of the directorial intent. After Hefner’s self-aggrandizing autobiopic, I found myself thinking that there was probably a lot of bad stuff he was sweeping under the rug, and that Bobbie Arnstein was probably smuggling drugs for Hef. When I turned to the angry-women’s-greatest-hits, I found myself defending Hef in my mind, because the charges leveled became increasingly absurd, I half expected to have girls talking about how Jimmy Hoffa got drunk at the mansion and that was the last time they ever saw him, or that Lee Harvey Oswald was often seen going upstairs with Hef. They threw the kitchen sink at him, but somehow never actually got Hef doing anything all that bad. He was always a step removed, someone else was asking on Hef’s behalf but Hef himself said no anyway, Hef was close friends with a guy who was a creep, bad things happened at a friend’s house that was built in imitation of the mansion. But anyway, this story isn’t about any of that, rather what fascinated me were all the things they agreed on about Playboy.
Growing up, I was aware of Playboy the magazine. I arrived just at the end of the golden age of magazines, and of porno mags in particular. A couple kids I knew had old Playboys, and they featured prominently in older media, but they were rapidly being outmoded by internet porn (and blogs, for everything other than the tits). Despite the decline of the magazine, Hugh Hefner remained a media icon in the early 2000s. The Girls Next Door was one of the early hit reality shows, my wife and many of her friends remember watching it when it aired. Sex and the City, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Entourage all featured Hef in prominent cameos during Playboy Mansion themed episodes where the gang all winds up at one of Hefner’s parties. He was a cultural eminence grise, one of those figures you were just aware was important, and had made all this money selling softcore porn magazines. Playboy magazine seemed iconic, the Playmates seemed hot, even though I never stole one or looked at one in earnest, only as a vintage curiosity more recently as a middle aged man.
I was vaguely aware that once there had been Playboy Clubs*, night clubs where the waitresses dressed up like bunnies, featured in Mad Men most recently. But what I never realized until watching the competing docu-series, was that the Clubs were the core of Playboy’s business almost from the start. Hefner was a marketing genius much moreso than he was an editorial genius. While he obsessively built his magazine, personally approving layouts and choices of material, he started expanding the brand nearly immediately. The magazine was launched as a mildly profitable periodical by the famous photos of Marilyn Monroe** in 1953, and by 1959 Hefner had moved to a late night variety show Playboy’s Penthouse featuring Hef and various guests and various beautiful women implied to be (and sometimes being) the women featured in the magazine (dressed, at the time). In 1960, the first Playboy Club would open in Chicago and rapidly chained across the nation and world. The Playboy Clubs were member’s only night clubs, where guests could enjoy drinks and entertainment (the first club opening featured a teenage Aretha Franklin), while being served by beautiful waitresses in the famous Playboy Bunny outfits.
What made the clubs so popular and profitable, was the slippery equivalence of the Playboy playmate (a woman who appeared in the magazine as a model) and the Playboy Club bunnies (the waitresses at the clubs), and Hef’s legendary Playboy Mansion with the Playboy Club itself. Playmates often appeared, and sometimes worked, at the clubs. And bunnies occasionally found their way up the ladder into the magazine. For the most part, the girls serving you drinks in the clubs were not the girls who appeared in the magazine. But, it felt that way. The bunnies were screened rigorously for appearance, and when Gloria Steinem went undercover as a bunny she reported that they had to maintain a certain weight and bust size or face termination. But of course breastaurants have come and gone throughout the past hundred years, what made the Playboy Clubs special was the idea that these weren’t just hot waitresses, they were waitresses hot enough to be employed by Playboy, they were waitresses who occupied the fantasy space of the centerfolds.
And in turn, the club itself became the mythical sexual Shangri-La of the Playboy Mansion, Hef’s playground for him and his famous and lascivious friends. Just as Playmates from the magazine occasionally found their way into the clubs, and waitresses occasionally worked their way into the magazine; the famous guests at the Mansion often hung out at the clubs, and big spenders at the clubs or especially the casinos might eventually earn an invite to the Mansion.
Tim Allen talks about this in an oddly poignant passage discussing the first time he saw a Playboy centerfold as a boomer child, which has stuck with me since reading his comedian memoir at the beach in 2004, where he talks about how he has never been the same age as the Centerfold Girl: first he was a young teen and the Centerfold was like his friend's older sister or a younger teacher, then suddenly one day they were the age of a younger sister or a new employee or eventually (gulp) a daughter. There was a never a moment where the fantasy crossed over into reality, where he felt like a direct peer to the Centerfold Girl.
What Playboy sold, at its peak of clubs and Casinos, was that liminality between Fantasy and Reality. Hooters and the Tilted Kilt, for all the endowments they had, never had that. A Playboy club, or a Playboy Reality Show, or Playboy merchandise, offered a thin place between fantasy and reality. A moment where you might just break through the veil, and enter your fantasy, if things went just right. When you could suddenly become a peer of the Playmates and of Hef, if only for a moment.
I realize this might be a complete piece of trivia, but it kind of fascinated me when I realized it.
*My dad, coincidentally, had a Playboy Club membership key card. My wife uses it to fold letters for her office, she says the metal card is the perfect tool for the job and she uses it every day.
**The provenance of this photograph is itself interesting: Marilyn didn’t pose for Playboy, she did a nude photoshoot for some calendar before she ever hit it big, which Hef then bought from the original publisher and splashed across the country.
What Hefner was doing was trying to take porn mainstream. The jokes about "I only read Playboy for the articles" riffed off that; he was presenting an entire package for the sophisticated (or wannabe-sophisticate) man. This wasn't porn, it was erotica. You weren't reading Playboy to get your rocks off (was the pretence), the Playmates were part of the ensemble of what an intelligent, worldly-wise man experienced. That was also the point of the clubs, there were "gentleman's clubs", with keys for members, and the image again was of the worldly, sophisticated man - a roué perhaps, but not a guy in a raincoat in a seedy porn cinema jerking off. Selling the "James Bond" image, which is why the mansion and Hef in his smoking jacket was also an important part of the image: this was what ambitious young men in the 60s and 70s USA were aiming for, with the booming post-war economy and possibilities of all sorts opening up and the Sexual Revolution at hand, or could be persuaded into thinking they were all part of, as Playboy consumers: taste, wealth, an urbane lifestyle their parents didn't have, and hot young women willing to be friendly and sexually available but not as hookers or paid escorts. You were all liberated and rewriting the conventions of society.
Of course, the seedy porn cinemas had never gone away and the likes of Hustler came along with a completely different and more cynical, more pragmatic philosophy: no pretence about art or erotica, more graphic and hardcore, to eat Playboy's lunch, and nowadays you can get anything you want on the Internet.
But as you say, for a while there it was the point where fantasy was presented in an attainable form.
See that's where I think the framing confuses us, Hustler and Penthouse and Playboy fought wars over pubic hair and hardcore porn, but that didn't ultimately impact Playboy's empire overly much, because Playboy's real money came from the clubs and the casinos. The decline and fall of the brand had more to do with changing tastes in night clubs (I know almost no men my age who belong to private membership clubs with bars, that was far more common in the 60s), the failed Atlantic City Casino venture, and the nature of overexposing a brand by licensing your logo plastered on every shitty T shirt and cheap silver necklace for sale on any New Jersey boardwalk.
Playboy magazine was a modest business without the accoutrement that actually brought in revenue. Hustler and Penthouse never compared by that metric.
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It's rather amazing how successful Hef was at this. Even women that don't like their husbands' porn consumption find Playboy's brand tolerable, maybe even civilizing.
A GF bought me a subscription to Playboy for my birthday actually, back when it was a thing.
My wife actually has more love for the Playboy mystique than I do. She grew up watching The Girls Next Door reality show, and being that hot, having one's breasts Certified, was a kind of mark of honor. Not one that she actually aspired to, but it had a certain cache to it.
I think most women consider the idea of various forms of sex work as a fantasy in much the same way that most men vaguely fantasize about violent crime, or of running off to work on an oil rig.
Whoa
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It's interesting how fully Playboy has shifted from "softcore porn for the discerning man" to "women's fashion and lifestyle brand." The only people I've ever met who have spent money on Playboy products are women. When was the last time the majority of their revenue was generated by male consumers?
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