Ezra Klein: Playboy

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February 09, 2007

Playboy

On this whole Playboy issue, I read Zobenica's essay last weekend at Politics and Prose where they also had the reviewed compendium of "Playboy Advisor" columns. Zobenica's essay, which is awesome, is also something of a misrepresentation. The Advisor column was like "Dear Penthouse." The first one I flipped open featured an angry ex-wife going to her former spouse's home, being greeted by his 26-year-old bride, finding herself desperately attracted to the woman, entering into a variety of BDSM-situations with her, and wondering if this was all okay. The next letter had a woman getting tied up by her girlfriend, assuming her husband would come home and free her, and instead getting discovered by her daughter's slumber party guests. Another woman found herself getting wildly turned on by bar fights. And so it went.

That's not to say there were no sincere, mature, enlightened bits of relationship advice, but it's wrong to paint the column as some sort of island of realism amidst Playboy's otherwise hypersexualized pages. Meanwhile, I like Matt, only read Playboy for the egomania. In this year's blog awards, three of the five liberal sites were ones I I've written for. I couldn't decide if that made me feel like more of a dork, or less.

February 9, 2007 | Permalink

Comments

You must have been rreading Playboy much later than I was. Certainly when I was young enough to be sneaking copies of it from my uncle's stash, the Playboy Advisor was pretty much as Zobenica described it -- advice on stereo equipment, instructions on how to tie a bow tie, etc. There was advice on sex and relationships as well, but I don't remember the Advisor ever straying into anything truly graphic and hardcore. Of course Penthouse may ultimately have pushed it to much more extreme content.

Posted by: AndrewBW | Feb 10, 2007 6:08:26 PM

My main problem with the article, which I addressed in my post about it was that Zobenica wanted so badly to blame feminism for the downhill slide of men's magazines, and yet didn't sign onto which of feminist gains that contributed to it that he would like to abandon. In order to return to the world of Playboy under Hefner (Hugh, not Christina) where sexist men are unafraid of women, we need to take away the things that make sexists fear women's power. Which is to say, in order to get back to that early 60s utopia, we need to strip women of the right to work while married, the right to contraception and abortion, the right to borrow money to start a business or own a home, the right to have your own checking account, the right to an equal education, and the right not to be discriminated against out of careers that are defined as "male" and somehow manage to always pay more than the typist pool/stewardess jobs deemed appropriate for women in Hef's era. Zobenica doesn't address the fact that in the Playboy fantasy, the unscary female companion is probably a stewardess sleeping with a stockbroker. That's hardly equality.

Posted by: Amanda Marcotte | Feb 11, 2007 12:57:18 PM

Oh, and needless to say, the right to initiate divorce. Hefner was deeply unhappy about the gains women made in the 50s in terms of divorce and clearly would have preferred to return to a time when men could abandon their dependent wives without being held accountable but women had no recourse to leave a marriage, since their dependent status made divorce financially ruinous. Doubly true if you remember how, in the 50s, they were bound to be less able to get a decent job even if they could initiate a divorce.

Posted by: Amanda Marcotte | Feb 11, 2007 1:00:32 PM

I read Playboy consistently for about 20 years (1975 - 1995 or so) and not once did I find it like Ezra says. It WAS a very sane column, particularly as we entered the age of AIDS, and the guy who wrote it (James Peterson, I think his name was) was much in demand on the college circuit.

Of course it was witty and not always series (as the Atlantic column says). I remember one gem:

Q. How can I keep from catching or spreading VD? How can I keep from ejaculating too fast? And finally, do you know any ways I can make my penis bigger?

A. To answer your questions in order: 1. Wear a condom. 2. Wear two condoms. 3. Wear three condoms.

Posted by: captcrisis | Feb 12, 2007 3:52:23 PM

I also posted, a tad more critically, about Zobenica's piece, here:
http://www.myvalleyadvocate.com/blogs/home.cfm?uid=7

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