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A couple of months ago we discussed the cultural legacy of the Playboy mag of all things under an effort post by @FiveHourMarathon. I was reminded of this by a recent lame-ass political scandal in Hungary in which a local/district volunteer coordinator of the main opposition party and apparently a single(?) mom was doxxed by some pro-government journos as a former porner / sex worker. Technically I’m supposed to call her a former porn actress, but the actual level of ‘acting’ that is involved in all of this makes me decide against doing so; supposedly she also appeared in a grand total of one casting video only (by Pierre Woodman) so calling her an actress would be a big stretch either way. Pretty much the only factor fueling this whole thing was that the party leader and MEP was pictured shaking hands with the ‘lady’ during some public events.
What does Playboy have anything to do with this, you might ask? Well, said party leader decided it’d be a swell idea to reverse the accusation of sleaziness and would also be some sort of clever gotcha to point out that a 51-year-old woman who’s a government commissioner and a former ‘Secretary of State for Sports’ (if you’re one of the few female politicians in Eastern Europe, it’s the sort of government position of lesser importance you can ever hope to fulfill, I guess) appeared in a photoshoot in the local edition of Playboy ages ago.
Anyway, I’m aware that culture wars are waged with maximal cynicism, dishonesty and opportunism, and this is a case of culture-warring alright; no need to remind me of that. Still, I found myself asking the rhetorical question: who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?
Given that she likely appeared when she was a bit younger than 50, I do not think that what playboy eventually shifted to is all that relevant.
If you want to play purer-than-thou, I think appearing in a magazine which is famously providing jerk-off material is not very pure even if you don't have your tits out. If you are posing for underwear, you can always say "the main motivation is to sell a product by appearing sexy to customers (mostly women), and if the odd pervert uses the ads as visual aid for masturbation, that it entirely incidental". Appear in playboy, and it becomes much harder to argue that guys becoming aroused by your picture was just an unintended side effect.
Personally, I do not believe that sex work should matter for politics. If a male politician paid a hooker for a blowjob I do not care. If he paid a domina for getting his hole fisted, as you might phrase it, I don't care. If some politician of either gender appeared as the centerpiece of a gangbang video, I do not care.
Of course, the other aspect is hypocrisy. If you have a party which is very much into sexual purity, then at some point the opposition is might point out the difference in what you preach and what you practice. If you or your mistress had an abortion, that is fair to point out when you are running an anti-abortion campaign. If your party is very anti-gay, then you visiting gay nightclubs might suddenly become newsworthy.
I am not knowledgeable enough about Hungarian politics to say how much either party is into sexual purity. I know that Orban is socially conservative and anti-LGBT, which will likely not make him enthusiastic about titty mags, but likely not to the point where they would outlaw them. The MEP leader of that opposition party was formerly in Orban's party and seems to be more pro-EU, while avoiding any CW issues. I do not think he is campaigning against porn videos.
Playboy tried really hard to make itself seem much more classy than that. I recall one author (Isaac Asimov?) explaining submitting a story there as simply "they paid twice as much", but to a great extent it worked. Fahrenheit 451 was serialized in Playboy the year after it was first published. Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Ian Fleming, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer ... and big-name non-authors did long interviews to be published there: Schweitzer, MLK, Malcolm X, Sartre, Welles, Kubrick, Toynbee, Carter...
Jimmy Carter might be the best example to consider: he didn't think of himself as pure, because (as he tried to explain to Playboy, which hurt his candidacy) he was the sort of serious strait-laced Christian to take "I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery" as a straightforward explanation of a sin he had needed forgiveness for, but he was basically as pure as it gets for the 1970s, and although he never got his tits or anything else out for the camera, he literally had his photo published in Playboy.
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You'd be right. It's his half-hearted attempt at reverse Uno which I find curious. And while avoiding any CW issues i.e. trying not to antagonize the normies, he made a social media post where he implicitly called the woman's former antics 'sinful' which as you can imagine didn't win the approval of local Blue Tribers.
Do you? Most people aren't pop history nerds, and considering that the local edition of the mag folded in 2019, it's all bygone history anyway, and to the extent that people still remember what it was, they remember it as the slick, high-end mainstream mag. (The photoshoot appeared in 2003.)
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