> Part of what was going on, says E, was a kind of resistance to the
> bonds of wage-labor. Working in gray flannel suits wasn't all it was
> cracked up to be, so men wanted to reclaim the home from which they'd
> been banished. Once Kings of the Castle, now they were relegated to
> the outdoor BBQ grill and the basement, so they thought. Playboy
> encouraged them to take back the indoors: appreciate art, fine food,
> wine and spirits, and dress well. No more was fashion something that
> signified queer, but something hetmen enjoy. The aggressive
> heterosexuality of Playboy ensured they could do so without being
> judged fags or misogynists. After all, as Ehrenreich remarks, the
> images in Playboy assured everyone that it wasn't that the Playboy
> hated women, they just hated wives. Playboy could get away with the
> aesthetic because, unlike the Beats (who Enrenreich examined in the
> previous chapter) they weren't interested in dropping out of the
> workforce altogether, nor were they rejecting consumerism. They just
> rejected the social controls that had kept working men in line: to be
> a man is to be a worker who supports a wife and children. For Playboy,
> they just dropped the wives and kids for babes, brandy, and Rimbaud.
And it's genuinely sad to see what's happened to _Playboy_ over the past two decades. I remember when they'd run interviews with the likes of Philip Roth and Miles Davis and Fidel Castro, and run fiction by John Cheever and Donald Westlake and Vladimir Nabokov. The music section addressed everything from classical to jazz. And the photography was, well, breathtaking. Nowadays, competing with the likes of _Maxim_, it's frat-boy monthly, where the interviews are mostly with movie and sports stars, the music's mainly fake-blues beer-rock, and the photography's gone way over to garish colors and bizarre poses.