That dichotomy - the 'women as objects' adolescent attitude to sex and roving and more than occasionally thoughtful and deep content - pretty much sums up the magazine and the man who ran it.

I definitely can, male insecurity can be a bottomless pit.

I read one of those long in-depth Rolling Stone articles on Hef more than a decade ago that was revealing.

Hef bonded with the (male) reporter big time, and they talked about literature, politics, he always welcomed him with books he wanted the reporter to read so he could discuss them with someone.

The reporter portrayed him as a very melancholic figure. Trapped in a mansion of his own design with dozens of young blonde models which he couldn't hold a conversation with.

But most guys would look at the surface and say: "Hef has got it made, uh?"

The main thought, though, ties back to the 2024 election. Playboy and Hefner were very left-leaning enterprises for their day, so with their seven million circulation nudie mag thrills, they served as a Trojan Horse for wider liberal thinking into mainstream male American identity. With the modern paradigm of the manosphere and its media avatars - from Elon Musk to Andrew Tate - the same demographic is now being shaped by some very dark, right-wing ideologies. Same general audience (male heterosexual teens), same draw (curiosity about sex and women), vastly different philosophy. Certainly not the only explanation for the rightward shift of young American men, but no doubt a large contributor.

Interesting. 

But if there's truth to that, it's a ship that sailed decades ago. The Playboy I grew up with in my teens was the Pam Anderson / Anna Nicole Smith 90s version that was a grotesque parody of itself already and didn't have much room for left leaning sensibilities.

A project like Playboy (which I value overall) was only really possible in the sixties and seventies, it was a time that allowed *some* authentic rebellion and questioning *some* of the status quo, and Hef gave it a good try. It had many blindsides of course which weren't really possible to overcome but it was entertaining to see him try to debate feminists and the like.

But Playboy ceased to be relevant in a cultural way almost at the same time it ceased to be relevant in a real, tangible way via internet porn. Too much to overcome, almost a miracle it survived in some fashion. The branding was really, really strong.

I don't think it's the same types of kids that are in the "manosphere" now, but there could be some overlap. But if they are curious about sex and women they must be so in a very roundabout way to go to Musk (insufferable nerd) or Tate (fake alpha male, misogynist, possibly closeted homosexual *Rorschach voice*) for advice.

But hey, Hefner was a fake alpha male too I guess. 

Doesn't sound too different from the reported final years of Stan Lee.

Stan even played him in one of his cameos (IRON MAN 2, I think).

Some very interesting parallelisms between both now that I think about it.

I realized that a good source of the same people in different head positions was adult magazines.

As I worked in retail (sorta), vendors would help me by giving me all the adult magazines- once they tore the cover off the unsold magazines. And it took a huge collection to find the same characters and get them in enough poses to work for a whole comic story. I had BOXES and BOXES - enough to completely fill my closet.

We had alarm installers over and they went to run a wire and knocked over a huge stack of boxes and tons of adult magazines spilled out. 

I had to show them all my comics and art to explain why I had such a massive collection. Very embarrassing. 

1. The internet. They have their own subscription website now.

2. The decision to drop full nudity and only go topless.

But I quit reading it over two decades ago, so I do not really care.

From what I understand it still exists in print in some foreign countries, though.

Musk owns a mass social media platform which now distributes softcore pornography and is essentially a lifestyle icon. Even before he purchased Twitter, he was 'that guy' for a lot of impressionable young men. Tate's mindset is just the ultimate destination down that path.

The way algorithms work on media platforms, the slope from 'kid looking at sexy women' to 'red pill Q junkie' is not only a steep one, but a short and seemingly inevitable one, unless a parent or guardian has been vigilant regarding curating their kid's content. Some platforms are worse about this content lean than others - Instagram is kind of benign, YouTube is pretty bad, and I'm pretty sure that X is now deliberately meant to be a right-wing recruiting tool.

I'm pretty sure most people on this board went through a period in their teens where, if the wrong people and ideas got into our heads at a vulnerable time - say, when you're a spotty-faced pudgy teen who can't get a date to save his life - would have been swayed by the incel philosophy. Playboy paired its sex fantasies with literary reviews, thoughtful geo-political reporting, and a pro-intelligentsia world view (they were, after all, part of the liberal media). Even if a kid did nothing but go right to the centerfold, they'd still absorb the philosophical gist by osmosis.

Agree, but I think this applied less and less to the actual Playboy brand from the '90s onwards. A kid from that era is much more likely to associate it with Pamela Anderson or the Girls Next Door show than literary reviews and thoughtful geo-political reporting, even if it still existed in the magazine in some fashion.

Still, if there's some truth to that and the manosphere filling that void for the kids now it would be yet another unfortunate shot in the foot by feminism in this era.

They argued that the Playboy libertine intellectual worldview hated women deep down, and there's definitely truth to that. But what replaced it REALLY hates women.

Can't catch a break.