Does anyone know how one goes about embarking on a career as "Hugh Hefner"?

But the magazine also elevated women’s struggles and our fight for empowerment, even if that empowerment was ultimately male-centered. It created a forum to discuss women’s sexuality, even though that sexuality was packaged for male consumption and only applied to women most men wanted to see naked. It at least gave those women the option to control a little bit of that consumption and to expand that control as time went on.

I dunno feels like some weak fuckin sauce to me

"Probably also a lot to be said about an image of sexual plenty and freedom which yet does not include male homsexuality."

yes. paul preciadio's /pornotopia/ is a must-read on this --- hef's "revolution" amounted to the active and anxious exclusion of marriage/family responsibilities on the one side, and gayness on the other, with women existing to the extent that they supported this delimited straight male universe.

dude knew how to bottle aspiration to other dudes. he's certainly not alone there. fine wine, fine women, fine cigars, fine loafers. like GQ with a bigger airbrushing department. even fine social causes. i feel like people like hefner and larry flynt ended up freedom fighters because they got sued so much.

also, lots of empire talk, but i feel like i've been reading about Playboy money troubles for decades. and they were always trying to get into other stuff that would tank. kinda like Trump. the brand was the money maker. also, one of the worst record labels of all time. the Brownstone album and the Tim Rose album two highlights in a steady stream of duds. the label might have just been a tax write-off though. they did sell millions of VHS tapes. but anything not bunny-related was kind of dumb or a money loser.

anyway, who cares. he was really old. and probably still stuffed full of viagra. in his soiled pajamas. its cool that people with tons of money could afford to hire talented people once upon a time and pay for good writing. LOTS of magazines did that when magazines made money. even sub-Playboy men's mags did that.

i feel like i've been reading about Playboy money troubles for decades.

I know some people in lol magazine distribution, and the recent failed "No Nudes" rebranding was attempt to hone in on shelf space alongside Maxim & their ilk in major chains who ultimately didn't bite.

people think they are going to run the world because they make a ton of cash selling saul bellow and boobies. they don't get how hard running the world is.

Some good stuff in here:

https://pictorial.jezebel.com/up-against-the-centerfold-what-it-was-like-to-report-o-1762716355/amp

The context for the following is she'd written an article about feminism for Playboy, when she got to the office they tried to twist it, this is one of the editors:

Lehrman was angry. He tossed me a reprint of a Playboy interview he’d conducted with Masters and Johnson. He said it proved “women’s libbers” had misinterpreted the experts. He then directed his secretary to get him “Bill” on the telephone, and while looking at me out of the corner of his eye to make sure I was impressed, he let me know “Bill” was Dr. William Masters.

I sweetly said I was impressed.

His secretary got “Bill” on the telephone. Before they spoke I took out a cigarette and tried to conciliate, using the Hugh Hefner matchbook I’d gotten earlier that day. Lehrman shook his head, and tossed me his own matchbook.

Women were not supposed to win arguments about masturbation when fighting with Playboy sex experts. But I did. First Masters spoke to Lehrman, then Masters deferred to Johnson for a woman’s view. She concurred: women who masturbated to clitoral orgasm registered more intense orgasms than they did with vaginal orgasms achieved during intercourse.

I felt uncomfortable during the short silence that followed the call. I knew I shouldn’t claim victory with a great shout. I guess I was what some of my feminist subjects called “Aunt Tomming.” “Pretty weird,” I said, nodding my head a few times.

Hef had not liked her original article and sent this memo:

The women’s movement is rejecting the overall roles that men and women play in our society—the notion that there should be any differences between the sexes whatever other than the physiological ones. It is an extremely anti-sexual unnatural thing they are reaching for. It is now up to us to do a really expert, personal demolition job. Clearly if you analyze all of the most basic premises of the extreme new form of feminism, you will find them unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that PLAYBOY promotes. Doing a rather neutral piece on the pros and cons of feminism strikes me as being rather pointless for PLAYBOY. What I’m interested in is the highly irrational, emotional, kookie trend that feminism has taken. These chicks are our natural enemy — and there is, incidentally, nothing that we can say in the pages of PLAYBOY that will convince them that we are not.

Probably also a lot to be said about an image of sexual plenty and freedom which yet does not include male homsexuality.

― Never changed username before (cardamon), Thursday, 28 September 2017 21:53

When and how should they have done this? Did other men's girlie magazines do it differently? Was Playboy pushing a purposefully homophobic stance at some point?

Personally I think it's a mistake for girlie magazines to aim specifically at men.

the point is that Hefner/Playboy, unlike other "men's girlie magazines," gets misplaced credit (which he devoted considerable energy to securing) for helping bring about a liberated sexual culture and yadda yadda. it wasn't just some pinups and some articles, it was a magazine with a whole culture it was hyping up and selling you on, this playboy lifestyle that he was modeling as not only desirable but possible, already being practiced by hugh hefner and really every bachelor could be doing it! so let's hold him accountable for what he was actually doing discursively. the straight playboy has the whole world revolving around him, with women coming and going at push-button request and fired if they're insufficiently pneumatic BUT DON'T WORRY CENSORS THERE ARE NO GAYS IN THIS WORLD PLEASE DON'T SHUT DOWN MY MAGAZINE. from Preciado, p. 40:

Hefner, an assiduous reader of Alfred Kinsey, introduced the ideal of psychosocial health into popular discourse on sexuality, pitting 'healthy sexuality' against what Playboy called 'pious pornographers': the 'sick' and 'perverted' sex of 'virginal wives,' 'jealousy,' 'child-molesters,' and 'homosexuality.' Playboy drew a line between what it called 'healthy heterosexuality' and the rigid gender division encouraged by the morality of the 1950s, which, the magazine claimed, incited homosexuality: the men who leave women at home while they 'hunted, drank beer and bonded with other men.' 'On a Freudian level,' the magazine claimed, 'you could consider them blatantly homosexual.' This kind of pop psychology allowed Playboy to define a new spectrum of normal and deviant sexualities, in which both monogamous heterosexual marriage and homosexuality were considered to be perverse. In contrast to both of these, Playboy offered its 'clean,' 'healthy,' 'rational' heterosexuality as a new model of psychosocial health: monogamous marriage and homosexuality were linked to repression and guilt, while the new, healthy heterosexuality was characterized by freedom and pleasure.

So they did have an anti-gay stance then. This is all a lot stranger than I imagined with the anti-marriage thing.