My dad, a very modest and conscientious man, had a subscription to Playboy through the sixties. With two teenage sons, he did not work too hard to hide the incoming, brown-paper-wrapped magazines, and my brother—five years older than me—and I had such wonderful, monthly opportunities to spend several hours poring over the latest issue.
Playboy in the sixties had among the highest subscription bases in the USA. It peaked in about 1971. As a proof of its mainstream-ness, consider this ad in a 1968 Christmas edition from Sears & Roebuck.
And consider the literary quality of contributors listed on its cover.
[Click on the picture to make it larger]
Hugh Hefner and the Playboy phenomenon is a complex topic that deserves many book-length studies. Not that Hefner intellectually was and is a very complex man. Rather, he rose to celebrity status and became wealthy at a particular point in American cultural history. By the late sixties, his only work duty was to edit incoming cartoons—of incredible adolescent and misogynist acceptability—and 18-year-old tits. His early authority figure was that celebrated and possibly clinically perverted, scientific expert Alfred Kinsey http://www.leaderu.com/jhs/reisman.html, and as a post-WWII GI early on Hefner entered into a failed marriage with a woman who cheated on him. He was an angry man, and most commentators agree that his magazine was not so much erotic as a sophisticated marketing medium that promoted a bachelor, hedonist lifestyle—not the True magazine image of the man on the hunt in the woods--but the cultivator (consumer) of the bachelor pad, jazz high-fi, culinary arts, European sports car, businessman but not organization man, lover of slam, bam, thank you, ma’am, with complexion color-corrected, young, next-door-innocent females, and with a big payoff from Madison Avenue.
As is my habit, when studying a new subject, I write relatively few words and study the smartest researchers, present and past, two of whom are
Entertainment for Men: Playboy, Masculinity, and Postwar American Culture, by Elizabeth Fraterrigo, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago, April, 2004
and
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Barbara Ehrenreich: Anchor Books, 1983.
Ehrenreich draws this interesting connection between the influences of Hugh Hefner and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s:
Playboy’s assault on the Beats was complicated by an ill-concealed sense of rivalry. Hefner grudgingly acknowledged the Beats as fellow rebels against conformity. He implied, however, that they were faint-hearted allies: “. . . modern-day nihilists for whom it was enough, apparently, to flout and deny.” While the beats dropped wearily from the line of the march, the playboys had gone tearing ahead. The difference, he argued, was that the playboys were ambitious; they wanted clothes, cars, fancy girls and they had the energy to find them. . . .
The Beats, whether celebrating [the working class and disenfranchised] like Kerouac or demanding an “affirmation of the barbarian” in all of us, as the briefly Beat Norman Mailer did, were an unwanted reminder of the invisible class outside and the repressed masculine self within. If they had been political in a conventional sense, offering themselves as champions of the proletariat, they would have been less, not more, subversive in an America that knew how to label, file and dismiss its pinko’s and Communists.
