Word: hef
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...human sexuality. Playboy remains the genre's big kahuna, and its stew of titillating photo spreads, risqué party jokes and, yes, interesting articles was the original recipe for success in the pornographic magazine business. But the strange, seamy history of smut on paper neither began nor ended with Hef's brainchild...
...Compared to these early efforts, the magazine Hefner hammered out in the living room of his Chicago apartment was a paragon of high culture. Nudity aside, Hef conceived of Playboy as an aspirational publication - one which rightly framed sex as an all-American pursuit and sexual conquest as a badge of honor. The first issue of the magazine - which would have been called Stag Party but for threats of copyright infringement - sold about 54,000 copies, cementing the allure of Hef's smoking-jacket sensibility. By the swinging 1970s, the magazine's circulation surpassed seven million...
...winning formula. Penthouse magazine, an upstart competitor formed by Bob Guccione in 1965, closely mirrored Playboy in format, with a lascivious mix of interviews, fiction features, cartoons and narrative pieces surrounding the buxom centerfolds. But in its choice of images, Penthouse lacked Playboy's sexual subtlety. (Professional competition aside, Hef and Guccione actively disliked each other; while Guccione promoted the rumor that Hef was a "closet queen," the Playboy publisher, noting Guccione's cultivation of a similarly decadent lifestyle, remarked that "If I were he, I'd want to be me, too.") Larry Flynt's Hustler, founded in 1974, swung...
...HEF Co-President David Kosslyn ’11 explained the concept behind the competition as “having your boss’s boss’s boss in the elevator with you and that’s all the time you have to pitch an idea...
...Puritan roots are deep," Hef told TIME. "We're fascinated by sex and afraid of it." Hefner didn't seem skittish; he indulged in it at every chance he got. Life at the mansion was lavish and lascivious-a Puritan's ninth circle of hell. Strolling grounds populated with imported squirrel monkeys, flamingos and llamas, dotted with waterfalls and full of celebrities, Peter O'Toole said: "This is the way God would have done it if he had the money." Adds a guest: "It was like going to some infant's paradise, where you could eat all the candy...