Reflections on Playboy

December 26, 2011

Yuletide schadenfreude

In case any fans of this blog wonder where I’ve been, I’ll link to my latest post at the Keirsey temperament forum I've been haunting for the past few months:
http://brainsandcareers.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1924

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:36 PM

November 25, 2010

John Conyers is not a pervert; you just need your ass loosened

And probably kicked, too, but let’s take it one step at a time.

The most boring sex scandal in history has just broken. U.S. Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan) has been “caught” reading Playboy while traveling on a commercial aircraft back in July. Make sure the children have left the room before you watch this filth:

Is your dick hard now? Mine neither. Yet somehow, these twelve seconds of minimalist erotica have inspired juvenile snickering in headlines like “Mr. Smut goes to Washington” and “Here Is John Conyers On An Airplane Fapping To Playboy Magazine.” If bloggers in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Ten still find Playboy too disgusting to read in public, they should at least begin their rants with, “I’m not a prude, but...,” thus indicating the same lack of self-awareness as those who say, “I’m not a racist, but....” It’s the decent thing to do.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 8:24 PM

September 12, 2010

This blog is like nowhere, man. Dig the scene at my new blog instead.

The Seven Handsome Connoisseurships is my new blog. Check it out.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:00 AM

June 16, 2010

I didn’t exactly learn rugged self-reliance, but at least I refused any more help from my mother

The post title gives the bad news and good news for my integrity as a libertarian from my experiences last month: six days of relatively easy homelessness followed miraculously by obtaining a one-bedroom apartment. For my 38th birthday on April 23, my mother had tried to restore my good will by mailing a check for a hundred dollars. I tore it up and threw it in the trash. To the best of my knowledge, she still insults me by refusing to change her mind about the enslavement of young Americans in the diabolical public school system. As worried as I was about money in April and May, I still refused any more help from a woman with no remorse about selling her own son down the river to a system ruled by bullies and bureaucrats—and helping my father feed me a load of “Families aren’t democracies” horseshit at home. Good for me. I take perverse glee in refusing to pay back the thousands in interest-free loans I coaxed from her since I was kicked out of my Sacramento slum apartment in 2008. War is hell.

Yet somehow, despite my malice and mischief, my karma has been good enough for me to receive generous help from my case worker at the Arcata Endeavor, a philanthropic organization in the beautiful town where I now live. I owe a debt of gratitude to his hard work in getting me the apartment. In the meantime, I was lucky enough to spend every night of my brief period of homelessness at the Arcata homeless shelter, an agreeably small and informal affair where I was treated to free food and movies on the DVD player. Lord, why am I so bitter about my lot in life when I’ve had it so much better than I deserve? I admit it’s a fair question.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:00 PM

May 23, 2010

After the darkness, the dawn

After a few days of homelessness, the seemingly impossible happened: I got an apartment. The details of the story will have to wait until I have more access to the Internet. Anyway, you can stop worrying about me.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:28 PM

May 9, 2010

What sort of Playboy fan blogger faces homelessness in a matter of days?

In spite of the hokey-jokey allusion to Playboy’s famous ad-for-advertisers campaign in the above question, it’s not a joke. Although the structured legal settlement over my father’s 1997 death will bring me more money in June, I can’t afford my motel room for more than the first two weeks of May. I’m worried about paying for food all month long, too. For obvious reasons, the crisis is prompting self-examination. What sort of man am I to have fallen into this easily foreseeable situation?

I have spent my life running in terror from responsibilities of all kinds. When I’m forced to carry out responsibilities, I feel imprisoned and humiliated. To behave responsibly is to die a living death. I rationalize away the benefits of being responsible—pride, money, love—as not worth the trouble. My friends in the libertarian movement will remind me that responsibility brings freedom, and I can’t refute it. But I didn’t become fully libertarian (instead of left-wing “liberal”) until 2003, the year I turned 31. Bitterness and the force of habit cause me great difficulty in unlearning “responsibility” as taught by America’s Prussianized public schools, where the term is associated with coercion, intimidation, and an endless series of utterly pointless tasks. In a Sudbury-model school, an education system worthy of a free society, I think I could have avoided the tendency towards panic or rage at the thought of being responsible. It could have been a pragmatic issue, not an emotionally charged one that affects human relationships. Today is Mothers’ Day in the United States, and I refuse to observe the holiday out of spite.

Then again, I anticipate complaints that I’m just finding another way of avoiding responsibility when I blame my upbringing for my behavior. I don’t know what to say about that, except to suggest that I’m experiencing a teachable moment through the crisis. If you think you know what constructive criticism or rhetorical ass-kicking might be called for, please leave it here in a comment or send an email. By the way, I’ve been wondering if I have Asperger syndrome, which can result in the kinds of problems I’m describing. But since an Asperger diagnosis would be complicated and expensive for me to obtain as an adult, I have to rely on moral guidance from friends.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 7:36 PM

May 4, 2010

Ashley Dupré and Kim Kardashian: the prerogative of regret

This post is meant as a companion piece to “Rachel McAdams: the prerogative of boldness, the prerogative of shyness.” In Ashley Dupré and Kim Kardashian, we respectively see one woman moving towards Playboy and another moving away from it, each in so doing expressing regret for a past choice. It’s all good.

Counterintuitively, it is indeed possible and advantageous to separate empathy from morality. (Steven Pinker calls Homo sapiens “the sanctimonious animal.” Moral order is necessary, yet our moral sense is often our own worst enemy.) This separation makes it easier to appreciate the nuances of human drama in celebrity gossip. “Yeah, I was an escort,” says Ashley Dupré. “As much as I wish I could make that go away, I can’t. I’m trying to take it as a lesson learned. I am not proud of what I’ve done.” Her interviewer, Christopher Napolitano, calls Playboy a place “where she can establish herself as sexual without shame, a girl who made mistakes but who nonetheless has the smarts and depth to win you over.” Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian has made more or less the opposite judgment in hindsight about her December 2007 Playboy pictorial. “I’m sorry I did Playboy. I was uncomfortable,” she told Harper’s Bazaar—for which magazine’s May issue she did a nude photo shoot that “felt really empowering” (see below). Whatever Playboy symbolizes for a given woman at a given time, the drama doesn’t fail to fascinate. It’s all good.

Hugh Hefner openly doubts that Playboy has seen the last of Kardashian. Photographer Stephen Wayda recalls that Kardashian was more relaxed and spontaneous than Dupré in front of Playboy’s cameras. Be that as it may, I’m not too proud to let a woman contradict herself. It’s all good.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:47 PM

May 1, 2010

Hypothetically, Ashley Graham could take revenge by posing for Playboy. I’m just saying.

It’s not clear whether the ABC and Fox networks discriminated against the above commercial because of plus-size model Ashley Graham’s physique, or clothing retailer Lane Bryant made the accusation last month as a publicity stunt. Did ABC and Fox treat the ad differently from equally sensual images of skinny Victoria’s Secret models, or is Lane Bryant cynically trying to position itself as the politically correct but sexy champion of “what real women look like”?

In any case, this kind of ad campaign doesn’t deserve much hype for celebrating “real women” and helping them feel included. For every woman who feels better about herself after seeing Ashley Graham’s thick waist, some other woman might feel worse after seeing her smooth skin, well-formed face, vibrant hair, large breasts, long legs, or whatever. The campaign may be relatively “inclusive” in a contrived, statistical sense, but it’s no less Social Darwinist in its basic sense of beauty. The Mozart-versus-Salieri kinds of issues it raises will always be with us.

Naturally, I’ll play along with Lane Bryant’s game of righteous outrage—if it can help talk Ashley Graham into a Playboy pictorial. All politics aside, I’ll invoke the aesthetic principle that a varied repertoire of taste in anything, including female bodies, is good connoisseurship. If some (not all) of the magazine’s models were shaped like her, many of us guys would appreciate the variety. Won’t somebody tell her she needs to do it for the sake of curvy women everywhere?

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:58 PM

April 26, 2010

Boobquake: a triumph of Western civilization

(Image credit: Mid Day.)
Ironically, atheist blogger Jen McCreight serves as evidence for the existence of a Supreme Being Who loves us. In a series of posts (here, here, and here), she has encouraged women everywhere to participate in a scientific test today of an Iranian Muslim cleric’s assertion that women cause earthquakes by dressing immodestly. If the surge in amateur cheesecake correlates with increased seismic activity today, Iran may be owed an apology. (For the record, I have philosophical reasons to believe in God that are even more compelling than the wonders of the female form.) Naturally, it’s time to cue the Carole King song:

Update, April 27, 10:07 a.m.: A true scientist, McCreight has reported and evaluated the seismological data on Boobquake Day.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:35 PM

April 19, 2010

Do black Tea Partiers hate themselves, or do they know better than to call the movement racist?

If you know of my libertarian political convictions, you can guess my answer to the question. Almost a year ago, I blogged about Playboy.com’s cowardly attack on the Tea Party movement. Filmmaker Nathanial Stuart interviewed African-American protesters at a Tea Party for the video below, which I discovered at Reason’s blog Hit & Run.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:28 PM

April 16, 2010

When one door to the Playboy Mansion closes, another opens

From 2006 through 2009, the Marijuana Policy Project held four annual benefit parties at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, all four of which I had the good fortune to attend (see my written accounts of 2006, 2007, and 2008). In an email, I’ve been told that MPP no longer wishes to use that venue for fundraising. However, representatives of TicketsToTheMansion.com have left comments at my blog announcing their sales of access to Mr. Hefner’s famous residence. Although I haven’t gone to the Mansion through them, their web site looks like the real deal to me.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:07 PM

March 23, 2010

According to Tracy Quan, a self-respecting man takes abuse and humiliation quietly

Huh? What? Quan’s thesis, not quoted exactly but restated fairly in my post title, proves utterly ridiculous the moment it’s said. But that’s what she said.

It’s a pity the message came from such an intelligent source. Author and sex workers’ rights activist Tracy Quan had formerly earned my respect with her nuanced libertarian wisdom on sexuality, as in this excerpt from a 2005 interview by Kerry Howley of Reason:

Reason: What do you make of claims that sex workers are motivated by deep-seated psychological problems?

Quan: All human beings have deep-seated psychological problems. That’s what makes us interesting. Writers have deep-seated psychological problems, and I would hope a prostitute has deep-seated psychological problems. I think those claims come from people who have been brainwashed by the medicalization of therapy; they want everyone to be flat and have no problems. But that’s never been the goal of serious psychotherapeutic thinkers. The goal is to understand what lies beneath the human condition. These people are bureaucrats and they aren’t thinking about the range of human experience. [page 2 of 3]

With this insight, Quan one-ups my favorite magazine, which has betrayed the sexual revolution by endorsing that bureaucratic twit, Dr. Drew Pinsky (see here, here, here, and here). But her reaction to the sexual harassment scandal that helped force the resignation of Congressman Eric Massa really turns me off.

Could there be a more unsympathetic figure than the former Democratic New York Congressman? Maybe the tattletales who brought him down. If these guys knew their reports would reach Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, we’d have a masculinity meltdown on our hands.

Massa’s swift exile from the political class was appropriate, but the follow-up was bizarre. For once, bipartisan accord: a nearly unanimous House vote (404-2) for a post-Massa investigation, at the taxpayer’s expense. Who said what and when about the ex-Congressman’s tickling? It’s no longer a burning issue. What we really need to know is:

Where has all the testosterone gone?

....

“Taking it like a man” means dealing with the unacceptable without tattling to the principal. If it’s controversial to call men out for behaving like middle school maidens, it shows that feminism-for-men is now America’s white-collar default setting.

I have a problem with that.

We need to bring back the double standard. If Massa had groped, tickled or bothered his female staffers, I would not be saying the same things. Men and women aren’t identical: our bodies make us vulnerable, and decent honorable guys will be mindful of this.

....

One of the more appealing American archetypes—despite modern feminism—is the man who will physically protect us. It’s impossible for me to imagine this of a man who files an official complaint when his masculinity is challenged by an embarrassing jerk. As financial parity becomes a reality in our culture, as women sometimes even out-earn men, it’s more crucial than ever for masculinity to retain its integrity. We need to feel something primal and irrational—it’s called admiration—in order to respect the men around us. Too many women find themselves shacked up, legally partnered or otherwise connected with men they don’t admire.

If it’s not realistic, even after feminism, to expect women to stop thinking that macho is sexy, I hope Quan will at least acknowledge the unintended consequences of her glamorization of cruelty. Will she be patient and understanding when the degradation a man endures silently in the workplace kills his erection?

Or what if, instead, his pain turns into resentment of some of the women in his life? I like to think I have a healthy attitude about women in general, but my mother is a cunt for not letting me avoid the brutal machismo of the schoolyard. When I fantasize about beating her to death with a baseball bat, I’m just being human.

(Hat tip: Reason’s Nick Gillespie made me aware of Quan’s article.)

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:59 PM

March 18, 2010

Change is bad, but welcome to my new URL anyway

“I don’t like change!” says sociopathic toddler Stewie Griffin in an episode of Family Guy. Big baby that I am, I can relate. In January 2006, I moved this blog from a “blogspot” domain to FTP publishing just so I could have the exact URL of my choice. But nothing good lasts forever. For obscure technical reasons, Blogger.com’s choice to stop using FTP has effectively forced me to place a subdomain in front of “reflectionsonplayboy.com”. (Or maybe not, according to this tech-support blog post that came just a little too late for me. What’s done is done.)

My previous post, “This blog has moved,” was not written by me but made automatically by the “FTP migration tool” that brought me here. If you look at the versions of that post at the old URL and at this one, you’ll see two different publication dates, respectively the dates I started and finished the migration. I wanted to point that out. Big baby that I am, I fuss over tiny details.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:15 PM