Thanks for the Prolonged Adolescence, Hef!
Buried in today’s obituary column was the profoundly sad news that the Playboy centerfold is dead. Or at least a completely nude body has been sent to the graveyard of pornographic history. Airbrushed, lipsticked, coiffed and embalmed. Teenage boys of the 50’s and 60’s went into deep mourning, their dreams of one day living in silk pajamas and a smoking jacket all day, every day, surrounded by a bevy of heaving bosoms by the pools and the hot tubs of their own mansions, dashed forever.
Hugh Hefner, with his stockpiles of Viagra and Cialis, has thrown in the towel. The bunnies will use it to cover themselves now, relegated to the status of pin-up girls, coquettish and demure. Maybe it’s the old raconteur’s way of atoning for bringing the world non-stop hardcore internet porn, sex stripped of elegance and glamour, returned to the raw basics of grunt and rut. Or maybe he knew he couldn’t compete with global orgiastic excess.
Old Hef brought sex out of the closet back in those prudish, frigid years of Ike and Nixon, surrounded it with literature and essays, packaged it in glitter and sold it on the newsstand next to Life and Good Housekeeping and National Geographic. Even the women’s right movement couldn’t shame Hugh from making them a toy, an object, a living sexdoll.
It’s a dark day when sex can no longer sell a sex magazine. If we’re not careful, violence won’t monetize movies and video games either. Political correctness will once again rule the land of the bland, home of the fleeced, and the preachers of purity will return again to their pious pulpits. And, of course, worst of all, us adolescent boys might finally have to grow up.
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