Word: playboyism
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...connection was everywhere evident to observers of the Playboy phenomenon. Examining the infrastructure of the Bunny costume worn by waitresses at the Playboy Clubs of the 60s, Norman Mailer called it ?a phallic brassiere - each breast looked like the big bullet on the front bumper of a Cadillac...
...Gradually, the Playmate minutiae accrued: the surrounding photos and brief biographies of the subjects, the Party Jokes page to close the section. The first star Playmate was Janet Pilgrim (July and December 55), a Playboy employee whose name stayed on the masthead for a decade or so as readers? liaison. She cued the notion of the Playmate as hometown houri: not a showgirl or call girl but the girl next door (or next-office), the succulent embodiment of ordinary Americana. The job of posing for a girlie magazine was now not a shame for a young woman but a kind...
...revolutionary, if that?s what Hefner was, has to take attacks from all sides. He got it from the puritan right and the feminist left, though both made the same point: that Playboy objectifies women. The Playmate, one clergyman fumed in the early years, is ?the symbol par excellence of Playboy sex, for she may be folded when not in use ... the Playboy girl is detachable and disposable.? Benjamin DeMott denounced Hefner in the Jewish-intellectual magazine Commentary: ?In place of the citizen with a vote to cast or a job to do or a book to study...
...promoted the religion of urbanity, or, as Newsweek tagged it, ?Urbunnity.? And apparently, many of his readers enjoyed imagining themselves as the Hefner male: the man who wanted fine wines, chic cars and smart clothes to go with his beautiful women. All were accessories to the good life that Playboy promoted as necessities. Madison Avenue quickly saw that Playboy was the ultimate consumer magazine: the editorial and the advertising were...
...Consider that the rise of Playboy coincided with the new status of the automobile: its elevation from a vehicle of practical transportation to a fantasy symbol of male potency and freedom. Women and cars were the American man?s primary sex objects: fast, shiny, glamorous and aerodynamically smooth. Madison Avenue sold the car as woman. Playboy sold the woman as erotic machine. The Playboy man could drive her as NASCAR speeds, stop when he felt like it, trade her in for a new model as the whim drove him - not once a year, as Detroit pressed him to, but every...