One thing bugged me about all the refreshing feedback from NBA players in response to the John Amaechi-Tim Hardaway brouhaha: the response by many black athletes that, based on what they and their forbears have gone through, they have learned not to hate. They’ve experienced hate firsthand and now know that hate is bad and thus they are not haters. I find this disingenuous at best. Instead of saying you don’t hate anyone or any group, which nearly everyone claims these days and which is nearly always a lie, why not say that you continue to strive not to hate. But beyond that, I say hate those worth hating. I hate homophobes, racists, misogynists, and I hate the bits of homophobia, racism, and misogyny I find in myself. I hate several people in our current government, in the media, and at least one New York real estate mogul who says "You’re fired!" on TV. To pretend not to hate is like denying those other uglinesses within each of us, and I think is just bad, dishonest medicine. Oh, and while I’m at it, to reiterate once more, while everyone and his uncle stepped up and said they didn’t hate any group of people per se, only one athlete pretty much said he loves the gays: Sir Charles.
With that in mind, and speaking of transitions, as a great comedian once transitioned, when I read Dan’s recent post about Jon Zobenica’s essay in the Atlantic about Playboy versus the “laddie” mags, Maxim, FHM (which is defunct as of this month, fyi) and Stuff, well, I found myself doing some high quality, knee-jerk hatin’.
Dan quotes Zobenica thusly:
The laddie burlesque of male chauvinism is almost purely a reaction to feminism’s ascendancy, which people of both sexes have long taken for granted. And feminists are quite right to feel unthreatened by the lads’ rebellion. Because in fact, it isn’t a rebellion at all but, rather, a capitulation. It’s as if American masculinity has finally surrendered to decades of feminist criticism, criticism the lads have assimilated fully, because—unlike the Playboy men of yore—they’ve known no other world. One can wish that the lad shtick were subversive minstrelsy of a sort, an absurdist attack on unflattering male stereotypes, but more likely, and all pretend insensitivity aside, the laddies are sadly sincere in their embrace of buffoonery. They’re adopting—before the fact, and with the cold comfort of intent—the very characteristics that would most ensure further criticism, further rejection, which is essentially to take control of defeat by forfeiting the game rather than risk another losing effort. It is, in short, to take control by running away.
Zobenica is so cute and pleased with himself from the laddie get-go – “the Playboy men of yore,” indeed – he reeks of the smug stale rank of an elder wanker, and his argument is just sophistic. He tosses off sweeping statements with no grounds – “No wonder feminists haven’t bothered much with challenging this new chauvinism,” (If he were one of my freshmen comp students, I’d scrawl “REALLY??? CITE YOUR SOURCE!” in the margin.) – and his assertion that these lads’ “buffoonery” is really some kind of surrender is as facile as it is flawed. The quintessential image in my head that heralded the era of Maxim, etc, is from the horrid Man Show: big-breasted women in bikinis smiling, giggling, waving while jumping on a trampoline. How, again, is this a cowed surrender to feminism? Zobenica also posits two completely contradictory thoughts about the Maxim boys: that they are smart enough to know when they’ve been whooped by feminism and sensible enough to accept it, while at the same time they’re stupid enough to forgo what he sees as the sexy sophistication (and oh boy am I going to get into that in a minute) of Playboy for the puerile lameness of Maxim.
Zobenica’s love of Playboy and hatred of the laddie mags and their lads is seemingly boundless. Again I quote Dan quoting the Z-meister (my comments/clarifications in brackets):
Their [Maxim readers’] fear of women is nothing but a rueful extension of Mr. New Age’s obsequiousness, their pantomime of sexism nothing but utter compliance with the harshest feminist critique—nothing but a dancing-bear routine in the feminist tent show. It’s enough to put a real man [and who might that be?] off his popcorn. The Playboy guy of old didn’t fear women; he surrounded himself with them. And where the battle of the sexes was concerned, he gave as good as he got, not by running from or validating the criticism directed at him but by refusing to let it define him, one way or the other. To borrow some New Age jargon, he knew who he was—he was comfortable in his skin—and if certain people found him abrasive at times, so be it.
The Playboy guy of old surrounded himself with women? Dood, that was the FANTASY, those were pictures in magazines of staged photo shoots – virtual, not actual women surrounding you, Jon, and the pictures weren’t even real. The playboy guy of old surrounded himself with PLAYBOYS, in which were pictures of creatures made to look and behave as unlike real women as possible: pliable, airbrushed, ungooey, labia-less, balloon-breasted, tweezed, powdered, kittenish and docile.
Zobenica’s chips on his shoulders and axes to grind are embarrassing. His central resentment seems to be at young men for being younger, hornier, and more virile than he has ever been. But he takes quite a few other potshots while he’s at it. He makes an initial intellectual name drop, quoting Nelson Algren’s apt comment that, “Playboy does not sell sex. It sells a way out of sex.” Zobenica disagrees – again, he imagines those Playboy real men “surrounded by women” – and tries to explain how Playboy raised him to be a Man (capital M intentional) through its, wait for it . . . advice column, (yes, he actually claims this). He then carefully cherry picks a sensitive-New-Age quote (although elsewhere he expresses contempt for the pussy-whipped "sensitive" male) from the Playboy Advisor: “A marriage is more than the sum of its anatomical parts; success depends on qualities of love, respect and compatibility.” Wow. Gosh, maybe we had Playboy all wrong based on just LOOKING AT THE PICTURES.
Zobenica’s description of Playboy as having a “general atmosphere of adult men engaging with adult women” is, to give him a bit of credit, perhaps as infuriating as he intended it to be. The fakeness of Playboy as compared to all other girlie/porn mags of my youth, from the photo spreads (with no real spreading) to the bios of the supplicant bunnies to the ludicrous “lifestyle” elements that raised Zobenica to be the Man he is, to the laughable polo club bachelor it idealized, made me, even as a twelve-year-old want to scream, and sent me running to grittier material, as I wrote in Peep Show, about my first Hustler:
I still have the cover of that magazine somewhere, with its picture of a devilish blonde in shiny red leather, head thrown back and to the side, mouth forming an o. The look in her eyes is not soft-focus come-hither but straight-up lust. The image, a thrilling combination of the combative and the submissive, contradicted everything I’d been taught. This woman was objectified and loving it. She was horny. She didn’t want to be tenderly made love to. She wanted — no, she needed to be taken, to be fucked, and fucked hard. This was so wrong, so confusing — and so damn hot.
The images inside the magazine evoked similar contradictory feelings, exciting and disturbing at once. In my first, furtive jerk-off sessions to the photographs I focused on the soft smoothness of breasts and bellies, legs and asses, averting my gaze from the pink, fleshy, wetness. Learning to like pictures of women’s genitalia was like learning to like the taste of booze. The pictures in Hustler burned like bourbon. I started with little sips.
What Playboy “women” lacked, besides visible pussies, was will, which is, I’m guessing, one of the things that Zobenica liked best about them: they demanded nothing and offered everything. He fears and resents Maxim’s rough-and-tumble tomboy fantasies of girls who like to watch the game or play the video game more than be taken the gallery or galleria. He thinks he rips Maxim by writing that “[t]o open these magazines is to walk into a teenage boy’s room,” but the adolescent and post adolescent is exactly whom Maxim is aiming for. But even the teen fantasy of the hot, (tom)boyish young woman threatens Zobenica’s all-but bygone dream of the ascendance of suave masculinity and submissive femininity, as do Maxim’s readers themselves, who dream only of sitting on the couch with that horny tomboy by the glow of TV-light, joysticks wagging merrily in their twitching hands – zap, pow, thud, foreplay!
What makes me not entirely hate Zobenica’s piece is a bit of pity. He’s just so desperate to prove himself and exact some vague revenge in so many arenae. After jabs at the New Yorker and other high-brow publications’ gentle dismissals of his idol Hef, Zobenica for some reason finds it bizarrely necessary to compare early Playboy and its staff to that of the Paris Review in the fifties with it’s boorish alpha-intellectual males. It’s hard to figure what relevance this aside bears to his argument – it reads like a weak jab, twenty years later, in response to a rejection slip. He even goes so far as to brag about how much all of Hef’s exes love him (and gee, what possible reason could they have for saying nice things about him?) while Patsy Matthiessen, the ex-wife of a Paris Review founder complains of “getting them tea at four, sandwiches at ten.” Well, that pretty much seals the deal, doesn’t it. Final score, Hefner: infinity, Plimpton: negative a zillion. As Zobenica tidily sums up, “One might argue that the average Playboy belle isn’t sophisticated enough to register such pique, but that would seem only to make Matthiessen’s treatment the worse.” Again, Zobenica tweaks to suit his purpose – this time, the women of Playboy (earlier considered “adults,” aesthetes even) are bimbos, and it’s not as bad to treat a bimbo like a servant as it is to treat an intellectual lady like one. Feminism, Zobenica style.
Zobenica continues the attack. He calls the girls – who’ve included, after a quick googling, Jessica Simpson, Lucy Lawless, and Christina Aguilera – “c-list starlets,” and one has to ask, as compared to the women in Playboy? Zobenica calls the cheesecake of Maxim et al “daintily low-cal,” to which I can only ask that same question once again? He faults the laddie mags, which cater, I’m guessing, to men aged 18-24, for being sophomoric, quoting a fantasy girlfriend from one of the mags as saying “It’s totally cool to burp” as one of the horrible declasse and infantile features of the mags and their readers. He labels the boyish behavior of some of the fantasy women in Maxim et al as “juvenile swishiness” (that is: liking girls who are into the things you’re into makes you gay, clearly a bad thing here). His bitterness toward younger men is such that he calls them pansies for reading their tepid skin mag instead of his tepid skin mag. He also calls the ideal reader of these mags, a “weird little nebbish” akin to the “sensitive New Age pantywaist” of the eighties. Why such a need to emasculate the men of today, Jon? Spent too much time jerking off to Playboy and not enough actually making sweet love to that “California blonde who’d just moved in with me” when you were young and able? (Mind you, I’m a lot closer to Zobenica’s age than are his hapless targets, and I agree with much of what he faults them and their magazines for, but his cheap shots delegitimize all of his claims.)
For some reason, Zobenica even feels the need (or, I guess, what’s more surprising isn’t that he feels the need but that he gives himself permission to express it) to toss in an obvious, lazy, and near-random barb at movie critic Richard Roeper, calling him “the C-list Siskel.” (Perhaps he thinks he’s coined “c-list” and wants to get it out there as many times as he can.) En garde, Gene Shalit.
Maybe part of Zobenica’s disgust is that the lad mags don’t want him as a reader or a writer, that Roeper got paid more for his dashed off list in FHM of reasons to stay single than Zobenica got paid for his magnum opus in the Atlantic.
Zobenica’s piece poses as, but really isn’t, cantankerous and polemical, it’s just petty and pouty and poorly defends an indefensible (if also not all that attackable any more) pretty much emasculated, once epochal, girlie magazine that would be far better off without his championing.
The other day, I was talking to two 24-year-old men. I asked them about Maxim vs. Playboy. They agreed that, while they’ve looked at pictures in Playboy and even enjoyed them from time to time, the magazine just bores them – “It’s for our fathers—no, our grandfathers. My grandpa subscribes,” said one. When flipping through Maxim, these guys not only look at the chicks but actually read about new gadgets and games, cars and gear. “I know it’s dumb,” one of them said about Maxim, “It’s short articles, stupid humor, but it’s fun for guys today with short attention spans.” While I, like Zobenica, waver between dislike and hatred for those magazines and their foremost counterpart on TV, the repulsive Best Damn Sports Show Period, I appreciated these kids’ responses. They acknowledge their weaknesses and enjoy their cheap thrills. Isn’t that what Zobenica was doing all those years ago. The only big difference is the up-front crassness of Maxim versus the would-be-sophistication of Playboy. There’s nothing a slippery gentleman/cad (aka, the "weird little nebbish" who takes to heart the Playboy Advisor and proceeds to fashion himself after the Playboy man) hates more than an up-front bad boy. The gentleman-cads, via trickery, money, booze, rufis, etc., get laid, but the true bad boy gets effortlessly laid and adored to boot.
Playboy was and remains a sexist rag that presents images of women that even the idealized women it finds and buffs and bakes to a tawny sheen can’t measure up to. Watching the current, horrendous inside-the-Playboy-mansion reality show is an eye-opener. Hef’s ladies are as willfully dumb and obedient as their ten-line profiles in the magazine would lead you to think, but, to a one, in moving pictures with sound, they are awkward and clumsy and ignorant; they don’t even approximate looking or acting like they seemed to when painstakingly posed and airbrushed and ghostwritten on paper (Bo Derek and Pam Anderson partially excepted). Playboy contributes mightily to young women across America’s desire to get boob- and all those other jobs (Hustler et al not only show genitals, they also have always featured women of varying breast and other sizes. Please don’t get me wrong, Hustler is arguably much more offensive and woman-hating than Playboy in other ways, I’m not an apologist for harder core material, here, just the comparer, I do the comparing.). Playboy’s not justifiable as “good,” but it’s hardly worth attacking as “bad.” It’s a dinosaur that’s become less offensive as it’s lost first it’s virility and then its teeth.
Jon Z., Playboy is what you jerked off to, just as grittier, more overtly sexual mags were my guilty treasure. Just get over it, old lad, and enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.
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Out in the blogosphere, I found these responses to Zobenica’s piece:
The theory of anxious masculinity, which is the idea that men who have absorbed our sexist culture are frantic to define themselves mainly as Not Women, makes the shift almost too easy to understand. For anxious males, everything women have has to be disavowed as poisonously feminine. . . .
It’s not a capitulation, but a retreat. And it’s condescending to men for Zobenica to suggest that the only solution is for feminists to give up on our fight, because pity the poor men who can’t take a world where they aren’t in charge automatically because of their sex. The solution to anxious masculinity is not to beg women to quit threatening you with equality, but to buck up and be brave.
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Dana in Campusprogress.org:
The essay is entertaining reading, but I think it’s obvious why it’s especially appealing to sensitive young men. Zobenica makes them feel like it’s not only okay to read Playboy, but that it’s mature and heck, even feminist. Fundamentally, this is just a rehashing of the infamous male excuse–"Hey, I was reading it for the articles!" I’m not an anti-porn feminist by any stretch of the imagination. But when I pick up Playboy, it’s hard for me to take seriously the "Advisor" column’s advice about sexually respecting your real-life girl when the centerfolds, month after month, have obviously fake gigantic boobs, identically hairless and child-like vaginas (Playboy seems to have a policy to never show women with visible vaginal lips), and completely flat stomachs. Women get upset by this because 99 percent of us can’t live up to this standard and are bothered by the idea that the men in our lives find it attractive. And many of us, myself included, don’t even find these women beautiful.
So I think that when talking about Playboy, it’s always pretty disingenuous to overlook the pictures. Because really, when reading the magazine, nobody ever does.”
