Word: hef
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...smoking jackets formalwear is bound to be divisive. But whether you consider Hugh Hefner a smut-peddler or a "prophet of pop hedonism"-TIME's phrasing in 1967-you can't deny the guy his place in the American canon. And in Mr. Playboy, biographer Steven Watts argues that Hef's influence extends well beyond the bedroom. By framing sex as an All-American aspiration-as worthy a pursuit as good wine or flashy cars-the famous free-love evangelist scrambled our social norms, "[loosening ]old-fashioned moral strictures on one of the most powerful of human urges...
...Hefner's first real high-school love interest spurned him. "He saw [Betty Conklin] as the ultimate coed and they learned to jitterbug together, but when school started, she invited someone else to the hayride," Watts writes. Suffice it to say that the jilted lothario-to-be rebounded. Hef's fixation with sex sharpened after Alfred Kinsey released his famous 1948 study. The following year, he married his high-school sweetheart, Millie Williams. But he soon began bristling at the constraints of monogamy. Risque parties quickly gave way to experiments like wife-swapping (with his brother!) and even...
...snafu) a liberating force for both sexes. But naturally, some women questioned whether swapping aprons for lingerie constituted a net gain. After some 300 protestors organized by a Chicago women's group picketed the Playboy mansion in 1970, a female secretary leaked to the press a memo that underscored Hef's antipathy toward "militant feminists": "What I'm interested in is the highly irrational, emotional, kookie [sic] trend that feminism has taken...these chicks are our natural enemy. It is time to do battle with them...
...Hef also clung to impossible double standards. If one of the girls he was juggling arrived home while he was otherwise engaged, his staff would cut the music piped into the mansion to alert him of her approach. Hef wanted his consorts to be spotlessly faithful, but when one of them insisted he do the same, the publisher would "stomp his feet and beat his pipe on the table and turn purple in the face...
Except that I didn't really want a pool. I never thought I was the kind of person who should own one (Hugh Hefner, everyone on Cribs), didn't want to dress like the kind of person who owned one (Hef again, or Dustin Hoffman in Meet the Fockers) and never even cared all that much for getting wet (I hadn't owned a bathing suit in 10 years; I now have three...