Word: hefners
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hefner has tirelessly proclaimed, Playboy helped spur the sexual revolution with a wink and a nudge. But by the 70s the magazine was not pushing but being dragged. It had introduced pubic hair in the August 1969 issue, with a stroboscopic sequence of actress-dancer Paula Kelly. (Because she was African-American, the breakthrough had a tinge of National Geographic ethnographic exoticism.) The Playmates went decorously full-frontal in 1972, when Hefner felt the competition of the raunchier Penthouse. By then Playboy was a successful franchise with news dealers and big advertisers to consider, and Hefner seemed unsure...
...recent interview with Rick Bentley in the Sacramento Bee, Hefner declared that the Playmate was as young and hip as ever: ?The trademark products are now more popular than ever before, and you see them on high school girls, and you see the fashions in Vogue and Harper?s Bazaar. There are more references to Playboy in rap songs and hip-hop songs, the music of young people, than there has ever been before. Playboy is both contemporary and retro...
...think Playboy is as much a child of 50s fantasies as I am, and Hefner as much the creator and captive of those fantasies. The 50s was the last decade when to be cool meant to be sophisticated. Back then, success and glamour included pretensions to education: not just the famous-author bylines but to racy films with subtitles; Playboy?s equivalent was the Ribald Classics, translations of naughty tales by Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac. And jazz. Jazz was cool then, Hefner loved it, so he started an annual readers? poll of jazz favorites and, in 1978, a Playboy Jazz Festival...
...really trying to create a sex magazine,? Hefner told Bentley. ?I was trying to give sex a good name in a context of a lifestyle magazine.? How very true. Playboy wasn?t just about the sex. It was about being accepted by the arbiters of 50s middle-browism. That brow has disappeared. Now there?s a tiny high-brow culture and a vast low- or no-brow one. Playboy and Hef stayed in the center that did not hold...
...What Kinsey studied, Hefner exploited, in a very 50s way. It was a serious decade, and Hef was, is, a serious fellow - serious even about having fun. He always struck me as an Organization Man (as long as it was his organization). His careful conversation and tight smile reminded me of any number of Midwestern businessmen, politicians, anchormen, clergymen. Hefner was raised a Methodist and remained methodical, at heart and at head. In a second A&E special, ?Inside the Playboy Mansion,? he shows off his Holmby Hills estate; it?s a sort of Neverland, with the wildlife preserve...