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Brian Sorgatz
(rhymes with “cats”)
Arcata, Humboldt County, California, United States
What sort of man blogs about Playboy? I flatter myself to think that Kendra Wilkinson might call this blog intellectual pimping.
ISFP “Composer Artisan.” Socially and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. Favorite activities: reading, writing, moviegoing, television (and proud of it), piano, didgeridoo, foreign languages (currently Spanish), light hiking, spiritual practice, friendship, sex.
Hollywood, California, is my spiritual hometown. I actually grew up in three other communities in California, but it hardly seems to matter which three. How could my heart take root anywhere under the tyranny of American public schooling?
I don’t have to work for a living. After my father died in December 1997, my family and I won a legal settlement.
Looking back, I realize it’s not only the clothes that make me laugh. The restaurants we went to were “classy” at best. And none of us particularly enjoyed those New Orleans strippers (one looked like a rheumy sharecropper’s daughter). But there was, in all of it, a deliberate effort at contemporary maturity, an effort that was encouraged by Playboy magazine. Maturity was the key to that great Playboy Club of life—your all-access pass to the jumping realm of adult pleasures and preoccupations. We may have come of age clumsily, but no one doubted that it was the thing to do.One need not be clairvoyant or trained in counseling to suspect him of misremembering those days. If the clothes, restaurants, and strippers were really as unimpressive then as he now says they were, why didn’t he ditch that scene immediately? Zobenica’s boomer exceptionalism makes Playboy a lonely voice for the inherent moral superiority of “commitment” in a lad-mag wilderness of Peter Pan complexes. He scolds an article in FHM for urging its readers to stay single, naïvely thinking that this message distinguishes the magazine from Playboy. I’m no fan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s crypto-Marxist feminism, but I give her credit for documenting Playboy’s original concept as the Maxim of the 1950s in her book The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Although I’ve found more aesthetic value in Playboy than in Maxim or FHM, I cannot honestly claim moral superiority for it as a consequence. Oscar Wilde warned against conflating aesthetics with ethics. To paraphrase that brilliant aesthetician, there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral men’s magazine. Men’s magazines are well published, or badly published. That is all. However sincere and deeply felt, my wish for Playboy to outsell the competition has no more ethical weight than my support for any given sports team.
Where did those days go?
Well, you took away from it something a little different than we did (we see it as a nod to our more-mature approach to being a man vs. the frat boys of Maxim/FHM/Stuff, etc.), but hey, any way to get more people to read it is fine with us!
Thanks, Brian.
Matt
Labels: AesthEth, ArtEnt, ArtPic, BGC, Femi, Lib, Lit, MorPa, MR, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:52 PM
Marie left this comment at February 3, 2007 9:36 PM
Marie left this comment at February 3, 2007 9:36 PM
jamie berger left this comment at February 28, 2007 1:52 PM
Brian Sorgatz left this comment at February 28, 2007 1:56 PM