Reflections on Playboy: A Halloween rerun that has stood the test of time, if I say so myself

ANNUIT
COEPTIS

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.

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ISFP “Composer Artisan.” Culturally and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. The rabbit in the avatar is not mine. I stole the image from the House Rabbit Society home page. Favorite activities: reading, writing, crosswords, Jeopardy!, 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.

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The Playboy Forum (official).
The Playboy Blogger by DigiHef.
Playboy Critic’s Corner.
The Blog About Nothing: Sudheer of Hyderabad, India, is a big fan of Playboy and an even bigger fan of Seinfeld. In this blog, he composes humorous dialogues for the show’s characters.
Confessions of a Female Misogynist: A Feminist Critique of My Personal Hypocrisy.
Eros Philia Agape: TerraPraeta seeks “the true nature of people, society and the world.”
Ethan Lee Vita: Philosopher and Writer. Ethan is a fellow libertarian.
Finding Salihah: the journal of a Muslim woman in Minneapolis.
The Gnooze: The G is silent. Marta Costello does a Jon Stewart–Stephen Colbert type of thing on the news of the day—and she’s prettier than either of those guys to boot. Watch her mention Reflections on Playboy in gratitude for my positive review.
Hit & Run: the official blog of my other favorite magazine, Reason: Free Minds and Free Markets; winner of the 2005 Weblog Award for Best Group Blog; “the best libertarian blog” according to the October 2005 issue of Playboy.
Islam vs. Liberty? On Islam and on Liberty.
Jamie Malanowski: by day, managing editor of Playboy; by night, a talented, intelligent novelist.
Jetting Through Life: “Jet” is loads of fun and she lives in Ohio.
Playboy model Terri Lynn Farrow at MySpace: in my opinion, a worthy candidate for Playmate.
Queen of Spain Blog: “tabloid mommy blogging at its best” according to the author.
Real-World Spirituality by Shantra: along with her husband, this blogger is a real-world friend as well as an Internet friend.
Scoobie Davis Online: a self-described “filmmaker, surfer, and party crasher” in southern California. He’s also a Playboy fan, a left-leaning political gadfly, and a connoisseur of Jack T. Chick religious tracts.
The Search for Health in Decadence: poetry and philosophical writings of Will, who has engaged me in lengthy, good-natured debate through comments on my blog.
South Side Of The 5: Robert Paulson is another Playboy aficionado.
Up the Tao Staircase: self-deprecating wit and wisdom from a Taoist perspective.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. With stylistic flair, a Harvard cognitive scientist refutes myths about human nature underlying a multitude of political beliefs—including many of those that would either favor or oppose the sexual revolution.
Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition by Richard Keller Simon. Professor Simon makes an impressive case for the essential similarity of “high” and “low” culture. The chapter on Playboy is thoughtful and valuable.
The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness by Virginia Postrel. There is nothing inherently shallow or frivolous about spending time and money on beauty in one’s environment, possessions, or body.
God in Popular Culture by Andrew M. Greeley. A liberal Catholic priest sees quasi-Christian messages of grace abounding in the allegedly soulless realm of commercial pop culture. For all I know, Greeley is not necessarily a Playboy fan. But his interpretation of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin”—more plausible than the interpretation in Reservoir Dogs—has influenced my impression of Playboy. (In case anyone wonders, my religious heritage is German-Hungarian Lutheran on my father’s side and Anglo-Scots-Irish secularist on my mother’s.)
We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse by James Hillman and Michael Ventura. I reject the left-wing gloom that inspired the title—I think the world is generally getting better—but this book is a gold mine of exciting new ideas about whatever it is we call mental health.
The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn. She trusts Jean-Jacques Rousseau more than she should, but she has the right idea about America’s tyrannical public schools.
The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an Act of Love by Thomas Moore. With his remarkably nuanced and unprejudiced mind, Moore ponders human sexuality as an expression of soul.

October 31, 2007

A Halloween rerun that has stood the test of time, if I say so myself

I was relatively green as a writer back then, but in two years, I’ve seen the need for only two minor corrections to my post for Halloween 2005—and one of those was before Reflections on Playboy was a month old. I hope you find it very ~~scary~~ sexy, kids.

But whatever you might do to get scared this Halloween, kids, don’t frighten yourself into a moral panic. The best part of the intellectual dimension of Playboy’s legacy will surely be a tendency to resist moral panic. But at the time I write this, not one single post at the official Playboy Blog mentions moral panic at all. Through Google, I found precisely one comment on the subject—and that was me under a pseudonym. You’re welcome, salaried keepers of the Playboy legacy.

Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy” [not work-safe; online transcription not yet complete] of the 1960s predates the sociological term “moral panic” (coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972, the year I was born). But as a phenomenon, moral panic goes at least as far back as circa 428 B.C.: the date of the first production of the Greek tragedy Hippolytus (stress the second syllable, so that it almost rhymes with “hippopotamus”), by Euripides. Since Euripides must have seen self-righteousness around him to be inspired to write it, and since Plato was born around the same time as the first production, we know we can’t blame Platonism—for example—for self-righteousness in general. Since Euripides lived in a polytheistic society, we can’t honestly scapegoat monotheism, as the Sam Harris types do. Blaming either of them for a perennial human tendency is—guess what?—just another moral panic.

By the way, whether you leave a comment at the 2005 post or this one, I’ll read it promptly through my automated email notification and publish it. Note also that a Blogger.com account is completely optional—even if you want to leave a URL with your name. After all, there’s nothing scarier than giving up a little of your privacy forever, kids! Ah-ooo, or whatever a vampire is supposed to say, I guess.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:11 PM

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