Word: playboy
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...Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream By Steven Watts Wiley...
...pops Viagra like Pez and considers smoking jackets formalwear is bound to be divisive. But whether you consider Hugh Hefner a smut-peddler or a "prophet of pop hedonism"-TIME's phrasing in 1967-you can't deny the guy his place in the American canon. And in Mr. Playboy, biographer Steven Watts argues that Hef's influence extends well beyond the bedroom. By framing sex as an All-American aspiration-as worthy a pursuit as good wine or flashy cars-the famous free-love evangelist scrambled our social norms, "[loosening ]old-fashioned moral strictures on one of the most...
...Hefner considered Playboy (which would have been called Stag Party if not for a copyright snafu) a liberating force for both sexes. But naturally, some women questioned whether swapping aprons for lingerie constituted a net gain. After some 300 protestors organized by a Chicago women's group picketed the Playboy mansion in 1970, a female secretary leaked to the press a memo that underscored Hef's antipathy toward "militant feminists": "What I'm interested in is the highly irrational, emotional, kookie [sic] trend that feminism has taken...these chicks are our natural enemy. It is time to do battle with...
...Lowdown: Watts is intent on exploring the deeper meaning of Hefner's popularity and securing the publisher's place in America's cultural history. But he takes this admirable impulse too far. Nearly every chapter sub-section ends with a sweeping pronouncement: "Hefner and Playboy's social and political orientation in the early 1960s reflected a Kennedyesque sensibility," he writes in a typical summation. The effect can be grating-a magazine which calls the naked librarian gracing its pages "as dewy as a decimal system" cannot then be said to embody the Cold War ideological gulf demonstrated by Nixon...
...read, “Is it the beginning or end / of real love / when we pity a person / because, in him, / we see ourselves?” Armantrout said that her work draws from many facets of daily life—the poems she read referenced Anna Nicole Smith, Playboy, CNN and the Iraq War—but that it is not a comment on any particular theme of contemporary times. “I don’t think my writing is that intentional,” she said. “It reflects the world...