Playboy

In one episode of Doonesbury from back when Mike was a college boy, he receives a package in the mail that he calls "my monthly guide to wisdom and beauty." He opens it and checks out the centrefold!

I've never read Playboy magazine myself.  But I recently saw a docudrama series about the magazine and its founder Hugh Hefner.  It's perversely fascinating.  This was a guy with a square background--middle-class Chicago Methodist--but he had a vision that he pursued relentlessly, and not only made a fortune but changed American culture.  And yet his actual vision was a rather pitiful one:  it's for young men who aspire to sophistication and the trappings of "manhood," while at the same time behaving like little boys on Never-Neverland.  The very title "Playboy:  Entertainment for men" is an oxymoron!

The incredible thing is that Hef didn't just sell this lifestyle:  he came to embody it!  Back in the '50s college boys smoked pipes to show how sophisticated they were, and that became part of his look, along with wearing his bathrobe in the middle of the day.  He became Mr. Shameless. (I recall that he was involved with three women called Brandy, Mandy and Sandy!)

All this has been ripe material for satire, especially as Hef grew older. (There were widespread rumours that he'd become impotent.) Like when Playboy did its 50th anniversary issue--a fifty-year-old magazine for nineteen-year-old readers!  Or when Jessica Hahn, after the Jim Bakker scandal, posed for the magazine and moved into the Playboy Mansion, and told one interviewer, "I am not a bimbo!" Eventually there was a reality TV show about Playboy Mansion women, The Girls Next Door.  And the magazine actually was culturally important, especially at its peak in the 1960s.

The satirical Spy magazine was comparing black playwright Anna Deveare Smith to white Playboy Playmate-actress-reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith.  Under ADS: "Attended Beaver College." Under ANS: "A lot of college boys have seen her beaver."