Friday Reads

Hugh Hefner once threatened to sue UK columnist Suzanne Moore because she called him a pimp.

I am not going to put the word in quotation marks because that is exactly what he was.

A glorified pimp.
_____

I have been reading a lot of different books lately, and maybe if I get the ambition write mini-reviews on them. This book sounds like it would be an interesting read.
_____

Hefner was a parasite who decided he would be laid to rest in the crypt next to the very first woman he exploited:

Monroe herself said “the magazine, I was told, thanks to my photos, [was] an instant sellout all across the country, an instant success.” From “Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words:”

I never even received a thank-you from all those who made millions off a nude Marilyn photograph. I even had to buy a copy of the magazine to see myself in it … I admitted it was me who posed for that nude calendar even when the Fox executives became nervous and believed this would cause the ruination of any films I would appear in and also the end of my movie career. Of course they were wrong. The fans, my public, cheered when I admitted it was me, and that calendar and that Playboy first-issue publicity helped my career.

This story is nothing new. He bought that crypt 25 years ago. It was too bad she had no family around who could have put a stop to the purchase.

He was a sick bastard.
_____

Hef's sexual revolution--THE "sexual revolution"--was for men only.

The anti-matrimonial position easily shaded into a misogynist one: The first issue of Playboy featured an article warning of the danger of gold-digging women. “It was a no-holds-barred attack on ‘the whole concept of alimony,’ and secondarily, on money-hungry women in general, entitled ‘Miss Gold-Digger of 1953,” Ehrenreich wrote. “From the beginning, Playboy loved women—large-breasted, long-legged young women, anyway—and hated wives.”

If wives were a threat, then even single women, although desirable for sex, were also dangerous as potential wives. Every single woman was an enemy in embryo: a future spouse who could one day henpeck the ensnared Playboy reader. Thus, Hefner’s first editorial took a strong “no girls allowed” stance. “We want to make clear from the start, we aren’t a ‘family magazine,’” he insisted. “If you’re somebody’s sister, wife or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your Ladies’ Home Companion.”

Catching the rising anti-matrimonial mood, which would eventually lead to a rising divorce rate and Hefner’s own first divorce in 1959, Playboy benefitted from fortunate economic timing. Post-war American capitalism was entering its long Golden Age, from the mid-1950s to 1973, driven by the rising discretionary consumer spending of the very types of men who read Playboy. Hefner, himself a cagey capitalist, would argue that the Playboy lifestyle was “obviously desirable in our competitive, free enterprise system.”

Hef was a member of the "greatest generation," but he wasn't so great after all. The worst thing about him was he was a total reactionary.

Hef was the first MRA.
_____

Philip Nel and the "librarian" are complete and total idiots. Geisel's career as a children's author would have been toast in the 1950s, when he published his first books, had he been a racist.
_____