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Thursday, November 20. 2008
Bunny II (Redux)
part 2 of a series)
Back to Hugh Hefner’s contribution to the Decline of Western Civilization and all things Christian and moral about America.
Playboy has been credited — by its founder primarily these days — for ushering in the sexual revolution. Prior to the magazine’s arrival in the drug stores and magazine stands across America, if a person wanted to look at photos of nude women, they had to find one of those stores on that side of town or subscribe to one of the nudist magazines that showed families frolicking around lakes and volleyball nets, smiling, naked as jaybirds as if being naked around mom, dad, and the other seven siblings was natural and acceptable.
I’m picturing my six remaining siblings nekkid right now … I’ll never do that again …
Laws and mores were strictly coded along the lines of Christian philosophy, regardless of the assault on personal liberties. You didn’t talk about sex, you didn’t even talk about pregnancy on television and you sure as hell didn’t mention oral sex—unless you were really mad at someone and wanted to call them a … vile epithet that for reasons of decency I’ll leave out of this. But, if you want to pick a fight with someone, that’s the name to call him (or her).
In many states oral sex was illegal. In fact, in these states oral sex is still illegal: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia, and while were listing, not only did President Clinton lie about his blow job in the White House, he broke a municipal code ’cause it’s illegal in Washington D.C. as well.
While were listing where it’s illegal to hum a bar or munch a pie, this you might find interesting if you plan on visiting or moving to the state of Utah: it is illegal to have sex with anyone other than your legal spouse. And of course, Utah has a broad definition of “sodomy” which includes not only homosexual acts, but also any act deemed “unnatural.” Makes you wonder: is the spoon position unnatural?In the Catholic religion we grew up in, it was a mortal sin to even think about sex, and it would be unrelenting eternal damnation for engaging in masturbation — even though years later I found out everybody did it anyway.
Did you know a priest’s and nun’s vows forbid them from pleasuring themselves? Now that’s spiritual!
Sex was not for pleasure, although throughout time that has been one of man’s great pleasures (not so much for women who had no say in when, how or with who), sex was for procreation. Heck, the Catholic Church still clings to this philosophy. Every time I squeeze on a condom I’m committing a sin.
To be fair to the Cat’licks, and let’s be honest, were I to return to Jesus, it would be in the Catholic Church, many other Christian sects have the same philosophy: birth control is an abomination.For the religionists, nothing less than abstinence outside of marriage will do and anything more than the missionary position for procreation is sinful. And if we do anything to prevent the possibility of that sperm coupling with an egg and creating yet another human being, that’s just as bad as having sex without the marriage certificate.
In the 1950’s, having sex was not spoken of; having a baby out of wedlock was a mark of shame on the family and the woman having the baby was little more than a “whore.” That is one of the most derogatory terms in the English language since it is used so freely and so widely accepted as a definition of a woman who may have had multiple sexual partners.
The more I get into this, the more it’s apparent we as a nation haven’t changed very much from the 1950’s in regards to how we treat each other when it comes to sex.That was all about to change though in December 1953 when a 27-year old Chicago man decided to publish a men’s magazine called Stag Party. Prior to the arrival of Hugh Hefner’s dream job though was Alfred Kinsey who published two books, The Kinsey Reports, in 1948 and 1953. Kinsey was controversial because he studied sex by interviewing thousands of men and women about their sexual practices. Later Masters and Johnson published their work, Human Sexual Response (1966), based on clinical studies of sexual response, most notably in women.
Women can have multiple orgasms whereas we men, one squirt and we’re done, for at least a little while anyway.
From the first Kinsey Report, a wrinkle was beginning to appear in the sexual fabric of America and it was into this wrinkle that Hefner took his first step.
It was obvious from the underground popularity of nude pinup calendars (usually found on the walls of auto repair shops) that men loved to look at nude women and Hefner took a chance to exploit that desire with a magazine devoted to the male of the species that would not be confined to backrooms, repair shops and the neighborhoods of the deviant. Stag Party would be urbane and sophisticated, exploring matters men of means would find interesting. The writers who contributed to the editorial content of the magazine would be giants in the fields of literature, sports, the arts, politics and society. Some of the magazine’s interview writers themselves would go on to greater things, most notably Alex Haley who won international acclaim for his book and the mini-series that followed, Roots.
There was just one snag, a deer hunting magazine called Stag threatened legal trouble if Hefner went with his original name, so, after tossing about for a new name, Hef and his colleagues came up with Playboy and adopted the rabbit as its mascot. Get it? Fuck like a rabbit? The first centerfold — they weren’t Playmates in the beginning — was Marilyn Monroe. Yep, she just flew to Chicago and posed nude for this unknown, unpublished magazine started by an equally unknown guy just a few years removed from the military. Yep, Hugh M. Hefner is a veteran.Actually, Monroe had no idea she would be the first centerfold beauty of the new magazine. Hefner bought the rights to her photos from a calendar company, as he did for the following centerfolds for over a year.
Here it is over 1,100 words into this installment and the topic that got this tome started hasn’t even been mentioned. For that, you’ll need to tune in for just one more installment and this time, I mean it — just one more and I’ll wrap this up.
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