“Composer Artisan” ISFP. Socially and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. Current fields of study:Playboy, A Course in Miracles, building a new life in Humboldt County.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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” has
influenced my impression of Playboy. (In case anyone wonders, my religious heritage is Lutheran on my father’s side and secularist on my mother’s.)
A 1999 article at Salon.com credits Hugh Hefner with “a Dickensian grasp of archetypes.” With this gift, he has imbued himself and his enterprise with an enduring sense of wonder and mystery. I like to think of myself as a skeptical guy, but I can’t help being as starry-eyed as the final paragraph of the AskMen piece:
Hefner is in his twilight years and, although plenty has been written about him, his true legacy and an untold number of secrets that are just aching to see print have yet to be fully explored.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain is superficially charming, and he showed admirable courage in his ordeal as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Other than that, don’t expect to hear a good word about him from me. If you like the military misadventures of George W. Bush, you’d love a McCain presidency. Mr. “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran” believes so firmly in preemptive war that this video exaggerates only a little comparing him to the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:
The essential problem with McCain’s philosophy of government is that he loves his country fanatically while failing to understand his country’s distinct virtues. He loves the power of the government, through either military force or the force of law, to muscle its way to public virtue and “national greatness.” But individual liberty, the idea that made the United States a truly grand experiment in world political history, is always expendable for the sake of those goals. In 2006, for the Los Angeles Times, Matt Welch did the research on McCain that most journalists have shirked:
Liberals and conservatives alike fail to truly reflect his views, McCain writes, because “neither emphasizes the obligations of a free people to the nation.” His main governmental inspiration is Teddy Roosevelt, the “Eastern swell who became a man of the people,” whose great accomplishment was “to summon the American people to greatness.” In Roosevelt’s code, McCain writes approvingly, it was “absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country’s sake.” This is an essentially militaristic view of citizenship, one that explains many of McCain’s departures from partisan orthodoxy. Unlike traditional Republicans, he will gladly butt into the affairs of private industry if he perceives them to be undermining Americans’ faith in government; unlike Democrats, he thinks the executive branch generally needs more power, not less.
“Our greatness,” he wrote in Worth the Fighting For, “depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions.” So, because steroids might be damaging the faith of young baseball fans, drug testing becomes a “transcendent issue,” requiring threats of federal intervention unless pro sports leagues shape up. Hollywood’s voluntary movie-rating system? A “smoke screen to provide cover for immoral and unconscionable business practices.” Ultimate Fighting on Indian reservations? “Barbaric” and worthy of government pressure on cable TV companies. Negative political ads by citizen groups? They “do little to further beneficial debate and healthy political dialogue” and so must be banned for 60 days before an election if they mention a candidate by name.
If his issues line up with yours, and if you’re not overly concerned by an activist federal government, McCain can be a great and sympathetic ally. But chances are he will eventually see a grave national threat in what you consider harmless, or he’ll prescribe a remedy that you consider unconscionable.
McCain is arguably even less libertarian than Hillary Clinton. That’s impressive, but not in a good way.
Welch has done it again for today’s LAT, saying, “The most pro-war presidential candidate in a decade is winning the 2008 GOP nomination thanks to the antiwar vote.”
Six degrees of Playboy: One of the Turner TV networks once had a series called Our Favorite Movies. Various celebrities hosted movies, periodically interrupting them to explain what they especially like about them. If I recall correctly, Hugh Hefner hosted Dr. Strangelove (in which one character is seen gazing at a Playboy centerfold). I wish I hadn’t missed that presentation. Does anyone have a video bootleg?
Thanks to Pot TV, I can direct you to something beautiful that YouTube won’t allow me to embed here: Hugh Hefner’s statements about marijuana policy from March 30, 2006. (By the way, I also attended the same event in 2007.)
I’ll admit that this is species lookism on my part, but don’t judge me before viewing the CNN video. Beavis and Butt-head never jumped the proverbial shark by turning nice, and even they would have said, “Awww.”
Hypothetical date of a lifetime (in a good way) Katherine Mangu-Ward will eat anything—except for these cuties.
In related news, an endangered wild rabbit of Florida, Sylvilagus palustris hefneri, was named after you-know-who.
No major “Bollywood” production from India’s feature film industry will be freeze-framed in Playboy’s annual “Sex in Cinema” pictorial for some time yet. Only a few years ago have the gorgeous male and female leads in these elaborate song-and-dance melodramas been allowed to kiss on screen for the first time since the nation’s independence (60 years ago tomorrow). But I still think that the 2001 blockbuster Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India could be a hit at one of Hugh Hefner’s movie parties.
Bollywood style is sometimes said to parallel the musical extravaganzas of American cinema of the 1930s, part of the cultural environment of Hefner’s childhood. The music itself sounds vastly different, but anyone who can learn to enjoy the Beatles’ tribute to Indian music from Sgt. Pepper’s can love the crowd-pleasing tunes of the best of Bollywood. Lagaan takes place in a remote district of British-occupied India in 1893. Indian farmers are threatened with hunger because of drought and the lagaan (Hindi for land tax) they have to pay every year: a portion of their harvest to the British government. Naturally, Indian audiences love to hate the smug, vicious colonial racism of the tax-collecting villain, Captain Russell. Audiences from every country on earth will cheerfully boo and hiss along. The farmers notice that the game the Englishmen call cricket looks like a “boys’ game” native to India. Out of desperation, they goad Russell into betting the lagaan on the outcome of a cricket match between the Indians and the Englishmen. If the Indians lose, they pay triple. If they win, they pay nothing for three years.
This is not only an engaging sports movie but also a romance with remarkable sex appeal. Pay attention to the subtitles in the video clip below. Surely, the song’s Hindi lyrics describe part of the eternal game of human mating all over the world. Only a little grounding in Hinduism is needed: The occasion is the religious festival of the god Krishna’s birthday. In his reckless youth, Krishna is said to have had many pretty young cowherdesses, Gopis, as playmates. But the main goddess in his life is his consort, Radha. The rest will sound all too familiar.
2001 Playmate of the Year Brande Roderick is the leading lady in the recent Bollywood production Out of Control. But I can’t lie. Lagaan is a much better movie.
Extra-credit question: How much would you pay to see a Mel Brooks tribute to Bollywood?
As a kind of disciple of a kind of rabbit totem, I’m especially delighted to share this satire with you:
I reported on Jessica Alba back in ye olden days of March 2006. Before that, I had explained why a relatively small market for male nudity is not prima facie evidence of patriarchal oppression. Hugh Hefner has since formally apologized to Alba. I don’t believe he was morally obligated to do that. But it may have shown class, nonetheless.
Researching this post today, I’ve rediscovered leftist feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte’s complicated relationship to reality. But that’s a subject for a future post.
Update, July 23, 2007, 9:38 a.m.: Better late than never, I credit Rabbit Bites with creating the video and Salon.com’s Video Dog for making me aware of it.
The big day is April 23, but the partial blogging hiatus starts now and may continue for another month after that date. I want to emphasize some other areas of my life besides this blog for a little while. Tonight, my stream of consciousness runs quickly from one Playboy-related April birthday to another:
Hugh Hefner turns 81 on April 9. Congratulations and best wishes in advance.
“This is a good birthday present for Playboy,” said Erwin Arnada, speaking of an Indonesian court’s decision to throw out charges of indecency against that country’s year-old version of the magazine, which Arnada edits. (Hat tip.) I’m happy to see Islamic fundamentalism lose some of its coercive power over the people of Indonesia—for all the same reasons I like to see Christian fundamentalism lose power in my country. Even without nudity, Indonesian Playboy symbolizes more freedom and pleasure than some wish to allow. Personally, I think God appreciates those who lighten up and mind their own business.
It’s recently done this at least two ways—one intentional, the other unintentional. An April article by gossip columnist Deborah Schoeneman, “L.A. Confidential 2007,” explains how the rise of celebrity gossip blogs has changed journalism in Hollywood. (For instance, publicists have less and less power to use access to parties and events as a bargaining chip when more and more information comes through channels like YouTube.) The unintentional way has been the magazine’s own official blog so far, which has missed opportunities to write interesting posts that only it could have written.
Hugh Hefner played himself on a recent episode of the animated sitcom Family Guy, whose writers’ studio was visited for an article in the February Playboy. Why didn’t the official blog, taking advantage of inside information and the speed of the Internet, publish a post about the making of that episode shortly before its airing? I’m starting to make friends among the co-writers of that blog. I hope they accept my public criticism graciously—however arrogant it may be.
Hugh Hefner will reportedly marry Holly Madison, one of the “girls next door” on the reality television show of that name, before the end of the year. Researching the story at Technorati, I stumbled on another blogger who relies on evolutionary psychology to understand the Playboy phenomenon. In her blog for The Sydney Morning Herald, Sam and the City, Samantha Brett suggests that Hefner may be motivated by a male biological clock:
Now before you snort on your cornflakes at the thought of a men’s version of the internal timebomb (which forces single gals way into their 30s and 40s to become a little more desperate than their younger counterparts), let’s take a moment to look at the male side of the commitment coin...
Scientifically speaking, research has proven that men do in fact suffer from a ticking clock. According to Dr. Harry Fisch, director of the Male Reproductive Center at Columbia University in New York City and author of The Male Biological Clock, after men turn thirty, their testosterone levels decline at a rate of around 1 per cent per year. Fisch also reckons that men older than 35 are twice as likely to be infertile as men 25 and younger!
While other experts surmise that a more accurate age is around 40-50 years old, either way, confirmed bachelors with birthdays around the corner should start scouting around.
Yet despite the warnings, many men still prefer to continue on with a lifestyle of barhopping, bedhopping and boozing over leaving it all behind for a life of potty training and nappy changing. (Who wouldn’t?)
So what makes men change?
I still wasn’t sure. Yet I was almost knocked off my seat when my phone snorted the arrival of a text message the other day from a girlfriend telling me that her 30-something ex-commitment-phobic-boyfriend had finally gotten engaged. [ellipsis in the original]
The Playboy Blog has recently implied some other questions for EP. The magazine’s staffers in Santa Monica, just down the hall from studios where Playmates and celebrities pose naked, spend most of their free time gathered around a high-tech ant farm. Is the sort of man who reads Playboy usually a dork posing as a smooth operator? Or will female beauty always tend to scare men a little, like a bigger-than-expected bong hit? Maybe it’s a question for economics instead: did the same Hayekian spontaneous order that created Playboy also build a firewall around the hotties? Enquiring minds like mine want to know.
On March 30 of this year, I attended a benefit party for the Marijuana Policy Project at the Mansion in Los Angeles. If I recall correctly, I got an early-bird discount and paid $500 for admission. Also, I seem to remember reading in a letter from the MPP that it will be a recurring event. Bookmark the MPP site and check it regularly for the next Mansion fundraiser. This post, dear readers, is the only notification you’ll get from me. All of you are potential competitors for a limited guest roster. I missed out on Hef’s brief appearance by choosing the wrong time to use the bathroom, and it made me very sad. I won’t make that mistake twice.
For 90 solid minutes of gloriously filthy humor, see last year’s documentary film The Aristocrats. A hundred or so professional comedians tell numerous versions of a joke they’ve traditionally told only each other since the days of vaudeville. Told competently, it’s an improvisational tour de force of every disgusting abomination you can imagine. Three fourths into the film, Gilbert Gottfried is seen telling it at the New York Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner on September 29, 2001. Having alienated his audience with ill-timed jokes about 9/11, Gottfried redeems himself by choosing to offend in a different way. Some of his fellow comedians fall on the floor laughing. But not Hefner, according to Steven Winn’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle:
As the camera flips back and forth from Gottfried at the Friars Club podium and an audience ecstatically unhinged by his delivery, it keeps catching a stony-faced Hefner on the dais. There he is, the man who rode the First Amendment to a fortune with his Playboy philosophy and anything-goes centerfolds, profoundly unamused. It’s a telling juxtaposition and a perfect coda for The Aristocrats. Free speech isn’t easy and it isn’t comfortable. It may not make you smile. It can certainly make you squirm. It’s dangerous and risky, and it sure doesn’t give a fig about bad taste. That’s what makes it matter and what makes it free.
Hefner doesn’t exactly do the Queen Victoria impression that Winn suggests—he’s a good sport, chuckling a bit in spite of himself—but he is visibly shocked. And why not? Thomas Moore’s 1998 book The Soul of Sex identifies the comically grotesque phallic god Priapus as the ruling spirit of dirty jokes:
...Anyone who has ever heard a stand-up comic knows something about the way Priapic humor pokes fun at high-minded society: pratfalls, crotch grabbing, mooning, and jokes about the sex organs. Some people are entertained by such bawdy humor and some are offended, and both are proper responses to this divine freak....
The soul of sex reaches beyond the taste of any one of us, and so we have to enter what may be unfamiliar and uncomfortable ground if we are going to get a sense of it. The rigid moralist has to relax his habit of judging, and the libertine has to find it in himself to be offended. One gets the sense sometimes that sex educators would like to enlighten us so thoroughly that shame would disappear and we would become completely comfortable with every aspect of sex. Maybe sex should always be uncomfortable in some areas. Like religion, sex is tremendum et fascinans, incredibly alluring and yet at the same time overwhelming in its sheer vitality and emotional power. Sometimes it may offend our dignity because it is more than human, not less. (p. 118-120)
If you’ve seen the movie, I invite you to write your own version of the joke as a comment on this post. Let the filth fly.
Hugh Marston Hefner was born 80 years ago today in Chicago, Illinois. During a recent television interview session, the cameraman asked him to remove a statue of Barbi Benton from the shot because of its bare breasts. From the AP story: “‘As much as things change, they stay the same,’ Hefner remarks, disappointment in his voice. ‘There is still controversy about, maybe even more than before, not just nudity—a nude statue.’”
With all due respect to the big man on his big day, maybe he doesn’t need to experience so much disappointment. Although I wish the Federal CommunicationsCommunist Commission didn’t have the power to force TV stations to act this way, I’m actually grateful that somebody somewhere wants the statue’s breasts to be concealed. Eroticism and shame are two sides of the same coin. In their mission statement, the editors of the online sexuality magazine Nerve.com identify their purpose as “less to celebrate the gymnastics of sex than to appreciate the way it humbles us, renders us blushing teenagers....[W]e think shame (in small doses) is to be cherished—it makes us honest and human and trims our paunchy egos.” I might humbly suggest that, if he accepted the fact that sexual shame may never die, Hef could have a deeper and more cheerful appreciation of his own legacy. All utopian dreams lead to disappointment, but a somewhat tragic view of the human condition can paradoxically lighten us up.
In any case, I wish Hugh Hefner and his magazine many more happy birthdays.
At about 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 30, I was in a chartered shuttle bus traveling from one of the parking lots at UCLA to the residence at 10236 Charing Cross Road. We twisted and turned through the narrow, dark, tree-lined roads of the exclusive neighborhood for a few minutes. Then there was a gap between the trees through which I saw the distinctly Tudor architecture of a certain rooftop. I gasped in amazement. It was the Playboy Mansion.
We, the guests of a benefit party for the Marijuana Policy Project, stepped off the bus and were led through a doorway in an open-air wall on the Mansion grounds. On the other side was the swimming pool area, where a bar and a small stage for music and comedy had been set up. On each side of a very short staircase descending towards the pool stood a row of three or four gorgeous young women in black dresses. As each of us passed, they would say, “Welcome to the Playboy Mansion.” I studied their faces for a few seconds and, sure enough, I recognized them from their centerfolds. Playmates!
Finally seeing these icons in person was something like getting to see the dinosaurs for the first time in Jurassic Park (the friendly herbivores, mind you, not the predators). As a paleontologist catching his first glimpse of living dinosaurs, Sam Neill says, “They’re moving in herds. They do move in herds.” The moment held something of that Spielbergian sense of wonder for me.
I was fortunate enough to spend several minutes in conversation with Miss May 1998, Deanna Brooks, and later on with Miss November 2002, Serria Tawan. Brooks and I discussed the philosophical underpinnings of the sexual revolution. A self-described feminist, she objected to the frequent claim that her posing for Playboy was in any way anti-feminist. I’ve said essentially the same thing here. But we politely disagreed on whether people’s anxiety and awkwardness about sexuality are learned through social conditioning or at least partly inborn. I argue the latter.
During my chat with Tawan, a tall, leggy, cute black woman, I was reminded of the mixed blessings of being a sex symbol. A male party guest pinched her backside as he walked by. (I wouldn’t have known it had happened if she hadn’t told me.) Some men behave that way towards Playmates, she explained, because “they think we’re whores.” Playboy shows respect for women, but some guys don’t get the message. Don’t feel too sorry for Tawan, however; she can reportedly kick ass[not work-safe] when she needs to.
Tawan and I were soon joined by Libertarian (yay!) political candidate Edward Teyssier. “Your mission,” he told me, “is to find a libertarian Playmate,” since an endorsement of libertarianism by a Playmate would help the movement. If, by chance, any actual or aspiring Playboy models are reading this, I invite them to take this very short political quiz. They may be libertarian without knowing it.
Playmates at the party included Cassandra Lynn (Miss February 2006), Christine Smith (December 2005), Julie Cialini (1995 Playmate of the Year), Scarlett Keegan (September 2004), Jillian Grace (March 2005), Athena Lundberg (January 2006), Tina Jordan (March 2002), and Marketa Janska (July 2003). I think I probably saw Pilar Lastra (August 2004) and Julie McCullough (February 1986). (Several of the female guests, I might add, looked good enough to be Playmates.) Adam Carolla showed up. My fellow stoners might have recognized cultivation expert Ed Rosenthal, who wore a wizard costume with images of cannabis leaves sewn on it. Tommy Chong dropped by for a while, but, regrettably, I didn’t see him there. Worse yet, I didn’t see Hugh Hefner, even though he’s in one of the photos on the MPP page on the event. So near and yet so far! When I think of it, this makes my memory of the event somewhat bittersweet.
Party guests were not allowed inside the Mansion itself, but we had access to most of the grounds, through which the Playmates led tours. We saw the pens housing many animals, including birds, monkeys, and rabbits. We could play billiards, pinball, and video games for free in the game room. At one point, I wandered into a guest bedroom with mirrors covering two walls and the ceiling (wink). For the wild party capital of the world, though, much of the property has a surprising air of tranquility. When I wanted a break from the party, I could easily find peace and quiet in a garden path. Playboy often impresses me with this kind of balance of yin and yang.
Four hours was too short a time to spend in such a delightful place. Ask for my snapshots through the email link on my Blogger profile page, and I’ll gladly send them to you.
I’m sorry I didn’t report it sooner, but I sent a letter with a sample of my writing to Hugh Hefner, and he wrote me back:
February 2, 2006
Dear Brian423:
Thanks for the piece on Playboy. I appreciate it.
Sincerely, Hugh M. Hefner
Ain’t it cool?
Update, November 5, 2007, 4:20 p.m.: It may be ambiguous because of Hefner’s use of “Brian423” in the salutation, but our exchange took place entirely through snail mail, not email.
Those who criticize Playboy for showing women in “passive” or “submissive” poses have the wrong idea. Just as farmers depend utterly on good weather, Playboy’s photography department depends utterly on women’s willingness to show their bodies. Many beautiful women are bound to decline any offer to pose, and this fact humbles every thoughtful Playboy fan.
Despite the financial and (mixed) social rewards, there’s something self-evidently wild and crazy about the choice to pose, which, for me, only intensifies the gratitude and wonder at this choice. In the new book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy documents one such moment of choice. Waiting in front of a receptionist’s desk at Playboy’s corporate headquarters in Chicago for her interview with Playboy Enterprises CEO Christie Hefner, Levy found herself next to two women. One of these women had entered the building with the intention of trying to become the Fiftieth-Anniversary Playmate. The other, a friend of hers, had apparently tagged along just for moral support. While the first woman followed the receptionist into another part of the building, her friend “flipped through a copy of the magazine she’d picked up off the coffee table. A few moments passed and then she looked up from a spread on college girls, wild eyed. ‘I’m going too,’ she said. ‘What the hell!’ Then she went dashing in after them.” (p. 38) Levy worries that this woman may have been brainwashed by “raunch culture,” but I take it for granted that women have free will and am content to marvel at the mystery of exactly what happened inside her head at the moment she changed her mind. I don’t believe I’m just flattering myself when I say that I show more faith in women’s autonomy than the left-wing feminist Levy does.
However, I concede one important point of Levy’s book: Much of the rhetoric in support of what she calls raunch culture unfairly implies that anyone who is shocked or embarrassed by explicit sexuality must be an uptight prude. Christie Hefner told Levy that Playboy’s growing popularity among women proves that the “post–sexual revolution, post–women’s movement generation...has just a more grown-up, comfortable, natural attitude about sex and sexiness....” (emphasis in the original, p. 39) But sexiness is always at least mildly transgressive, and transgression constantly threatens to make us uncomfortable. Can the libertine and the square each find a way to be right without making the other wrong?
This is what I’ve just memoed to my Netflix friends:
This photo and plenty of salacious details of his birthday party come from TheVegasEye.com.