Kathy Shaidle's Blog, page 23

Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy pitch was for the gamma male who fancies himself an alpha…”

(Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

 

I haven’t written as much about Hugh Hefner as I thought I had… (and below, I got assists from John Robson, quoted above, and Colby Cosh)

…the “gauche, twitchy” Hefner was only able to pull off his “Most Interesting Man in the World” pose because we collectively, for whatever reason, went along — a sort of Emperor’s New Smoking Jacket or Sexual Stockholm Syndrome.

“Society” “need” a Hefner right that very second, and he’d have to do.

Watch his excruciating TV appearances and anyone can see that he’s a ridiculous poseur, a little boy playing at being a grownup playing at being another grownup.

Here’s something I wrote about the occupational hazards faced by Playboy centerfolds:

Why such a fuss over a slain pin-up girl? Because Stratten’s death was, to express it with a rhetorical blunt instrument, exquisitely timed. Her “career” straddled that Edenic sweet spot in American sexual history that comedian Adam Carolla calls “pre-AIDS, mid-coke.” At that thin wedge of the Reagan era, Stratten’s fate was seen by some as an early warning sign of trouble in the sexual revolution paradise.

And in show business, as they always say, timing is everything. Maybe that’s why another Playmate’s far more bizarre and theatrical demise six years earlier failed to capture the culture’s imagination. (…)

Myers, a friend and neighbor who’d been on the scene, says Young’s bedroom wall was covered with “news clippings, magazine articles, everything you could think of [about the Playboy mogul]. Written across it was something like: ‘Hugh Hefner is the devil.’”

One of the great benefits of having moved from left to right is that I was suddenly gifted with words — words and phrases for things I’d struggled to articulate for most of my life.

It felt like finally having a pebble removed from my shoe.

One of those phrases was “social capital.”

Thank you to Myron Magnet and a host of other early-days socons for that…

Wiser observers than I have pointed out that when the underclass adopts the elite’s “progressive” social experiments, the results can be especially tragic. After all, the poor lack the financial resources and social capital that help the rich counterbalance or even reverse the ruination these fads inevitably wreak.

No one in my working-class family ever made $25,000 a year, let alone $25 million. They were more or less law-abiding, unintellectual, and non-ideological, with no use for “art.”

But they took their cues from the larger 1970s culture. One sunny afternoon in my father’s new girlfriend’s backyard, her neighbor passed around Polaroids of his family’s vacation to a nudist colony. The grown-ups attempted to sound sophisticated, twittering about how “normal” and “natural” such an excursion surely was. Mostly I recall the blank, bewildered look on the face of the naked prepubescent daughter in one photo, a girl around my age.

My father matter of factly left his Playboys lying around his red-shag-carpeted, cork-walled “bachelor pad” on the rare occasions he kept to his post-divorce visiting schedule. To do otherwise was to “shelter your children.” That was frowned upon by “experts.”

For precisely the same reason, my stepfather was equally adamant that I not be banished from the living room should a “not recommended for children” R-rated movie come on TV.

Interestingly, only one of those men was a perv.

Anyway, the Guardian’s clock has stopped.

Over at LifeSiteNews:

It is perhaps an irony that Hefner suffered the same adverse effects as millions of others who would become hooked on the product he helped bring into the mainstream. As I wrote in a column three years ago, Hugh Hefner actually became sexually dysfunctional, unable to perform without pornography even when he was with beautiful women:

Here’s Mark Steyn:

 

A Centerfold’s Guide to Suicide: My NEW Taki’s column

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related Stories“The shadow of the permissive culture that paid for Hefner’s mansion looms over the proceedings.”Joe Bob Briggs: “‘Take a knee’ in football used to mean ‘run out the clock.’ We really need some other term.”ScreenPrism: “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) – The Glamorous Psychopath”  

“The shadow of the permissive culture that paid for Hefner’s mansion looms over the proceedings.”

By sheer coincidence, this look back at the 1973 novel Other Men’s Daughters appears in the latest issue of BookForum.

‘Anchorman Lies His Head Off, And You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Joe Bob Briggs: “‘Take a knee’ in football used to mean ‘run out the clock.’ We really need some other term.”

Joe Bob Briggs writes:

But then that brings up the question of what to do if the person who’s actually singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” wants to take a knee. This is especially hard for women since they’re already trying to walk across deep grass in high heels, and getting up and down from the take-a-knee position would be awkward and potentially embarrassing, while the only alternative—getting down on both knees—would be reminiscent of Al Jolson in blackface singing “Mammy” and so obviously inappropriate under the circumstances, assuming that the gesture has something to do with Black Lives Matter in the first place—and I’m still not totally sure that it does.

Plus, now that everybody is taking a knee—the entire Dallas Cowboys team and the owner took knees on Monday night—it’s starting to lose power as a protest gesture, don’t you think? I mean, it’s one thing to get a dragon tattoo in 1984, but it doesn’t exactly brand you a rebel thirty years later when most of your friends already have them.

Joe Bob Briggs: How CVS Invaded My Brain

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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ScreenPrism: “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) – The Glamorous Psychopath”

Clive James warns: When a house of cards has “finished collapsing, all the cards are still there”

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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“Maybe after this I will buy a camera with a better lens”

People read meanings that aren’t there into photographs, because they are looking for  

Just Tommy Robinson getting his own daily show and stuff…

No biggie…

Ezra Levant interviews Tommy Robinson

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Steve Sailer: “…almost nobody on the left or the right is willing to think about the relationship between college rape and college football”

Football will be the death of America.

Steve Sailer writes:

White spectators like to conceive of their team’s black players as defending the homeland. The ability of black football players to play as a team on Saturday and Sunday inclines whites to be more optimistic about blacks’ potential for pro–social order than might be warranted by what they observe on Monday through Friday. And, indeed, football offers the kind of authoritarian structure under which African-Americans do best.

Moreover, football fandom serves as a way for Americans to reassure themselves of their society’s capacity for military might and lawful cooperation.

Steve Sailer: The President’s Prejudices

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Sailer: “A couple of generations ago, you almost couldn’t be a big time writer in America without championing the release of some pet inmate…”

by the death of Edgar Smith, who was “adopted” by William F. Buckley (as I wrote about here.)

A.W. Morgan writes:

As for Buckley, my guess on his support for Smith is this: Buckley enjoyed the role the contrarian, and reveled in shocking his audiences, like the bad boy in the classroom. That’s how he got famous in the 1950s, after all.

Thus, he admitted smoking grass, albeit in international waters so he wouldn’t break U.S. law. He wrote for pornographic magazines. And as Christopher Buckley told us, whipped it out and peed out the door of his limousine as it zoomed down the road.

James Fulford has more:

But Buckley, for all his faults, wasn’t Norman Mailer. It was only his misguided belief that Smith was innocent that had him fighting to get him off death row–Mailer thought guys like Abbott should be allowed out even though they were guilty.

Only good writer at National Review gets all huffy about a trivial aside

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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If you’re sick to death of “At Last,” use this Mark Steyn essay as a defibrillator

And allow him to (possibly) introduce you to “Serenade in Blue”…

Oh.

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Jason Miller: “My Journey from Antifa to Trump supporter”

Yes, this is REALLY long, but just get a coffee then…

Sometime before the Toronto G20 while we were in San Francisco I began to see something wrong. Motherfuckers were just breaking shit and stealing shit because they felt like it, not any justifiable anti-capitalist reasons. Soap made by independent stores that literally did everything they could to prevent any harm, made from all natural home grown organic vegetables paying employees living wages, using 100% recyclable packaging would get their shit kicked in and set on fire just like the Gap.

Motherfuckers stole ice cream. Not even like Baskin Robbins ice cream or someone you could call a corporatist, some family “Bob’s Burgers” type spot, they obviously lived there because otherwise they’d have left but motherfuckers really ran in and stole whole buckets of ice cream and carried it on like a 98 degree day till the whole bucket melted. I’ll never forget the looks on those people’s faces.

(…) and I still feel like I have to apologize to Toronto for the g20 because we straight ghosted ya’ll and that was dirty. (…) I actually developed a weird respect for police seeing and being there first hand taking all the shit we threw at them, spit, said to them and handling it professionally. I’d probably be a cop if it weren’t for people like me.

‘The Ice Bucket Challenge Is a Satanic Baptism Ritual!’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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