Times Snuggles With Viscount of Viagra: Yuck!

By Caryl Rivers

WeNews commentator

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Caryl Rivers didn't appreciate the NYT's recent front-page "appreciation" of Playboy's Hugh Hefner. The aging libertine popularized the pleasure principle for men, she says, but his female "playmates" are subservient to male fantasies.

(WOMENSENEWS)--On the same day last week that The New York Times splashed an appreciation of the life of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner on its front page, an op-ed column discussed attacks on a woman's sexuality on the Internet and other areas of the media as a major roadblock to women's advancement.

The Viscount of Viagra on page one, a women's rights opinion at the end of the section. Definitely the odd couple.

The 83-year-old Hefner presents himself as a prophet of joyful, unfettered, free sexuality.

As Matthew Scully described him in the Wall Street Journal in 2006: "Always a dreamer" and a "romantic at heart."

In Hef's telling of the story, he dared to challenge the repressive attitudes of his day and left America a freer, happier place. He is guilty only of living out "every man's dream," and if anyone thinks otherwise it must be envy. "I consider myself the luckiest cat on the planet," he often says; a graying libertine's version of Lou Gehrig's line.

But the reality has always been much darker. Hefner has always had power in mind--specifically, transferring the power in sexuality from women to men.

If you read his endless "Playboy Philosophy" (and most people skipped it for the centerfolds), you would discover the truth of the matter.

'Playmates,' Without the Baggage

Hefner believes that in 1950s America, during which time he came of age, men were wage slaves who toiled joylessly to support their wives and children. So he created a realm in which women were "playmates"--not wives who came with all that baggage of kids and mortgages--who would drop their panties at the hint of a male whim.

The Playboy clubs revealed the heart of the power structure in Hefner's empire, especially when Gloria Steinem went undercover in 1963 as a bunny to write an article for Esquire. It revealed a workplace in which (mostly) working class young women were dressed in absurd "bunny" costumes. They came complete with silly little bunny ears and a round little bunny tail placed squarely on their butt.

The young women learned the "bunny dip," in which they could serve cocktails while giving male customers the closest possible view of their breasts without actually smacking them in their faces.

At Hef's famous Playboy mansion parties (male) graying actors, writers and politicians were invited to frolic with women young enough to be their daughters. Women as the equals of men in the regions above the neck was never an idea on the menu at the mansion.

Hefner may indeed have helped ease the Madonna-whore polarity for women by insisting that nice girls did indeed enjoy sex and that the girl next door was a better sexual partner than one you paid for.