Playboy, responsibility, and prolonged adolescence

Taking  a brief break from grading to summarize my lecture today:

In my men and masculinity class an hour or two ago, I lectured on the advent of Playboy magazine in 1953.  I always put Playboy in the following context:  it made its appearance at a time when the "greatest generation" (those who fought the Second World War) were turning 30.  Men who had fought the Germans and the Japanese at 18, 19, or 20 were now husbands and fathers; they had gone to college on the GI Bill or taken jobs in the expanding economy.  They had transitioned from boyhood to service to nation to service to family without any real "time off" for themselves.

Though he came from a far more privileged background than most of his fellow warriors, I always use the example of former President GHW Bush.  He survived being shot down in the Pacific, returned home to Barbara and immediately started a family.  The former president fathered the current president a month after his 22nd birthday; countless veterans became husbands and fathers at similar ages.  In a sense, they imagined themselves ready for the responsibility of family because they had already borne such tremendous burdens in wartime.  How could they worry about "sowing more wild oats", when they had watched friends die all around them?  These men were boys for only a moment -- and then they were men, ready to rebuild (and repopulate) the world.

Playboy's title is no accident: "Play/Boy".  "Play" is the antonym of work and responsibility, just as boy is the antonym of "man."   Hugh Hefner's philosophy was a radical redefinition of masculinity.  He made it clear that he believed -- and still believes -- in a "masculine right to pleasure".   The sacrifices his generation had made had earned them the right to "play" as it were -- or, at the least, fantasize about "playing."  Hefner surmised, correctly, that the men of his generation were, for all their youthful heroism, over-burdened by duty.  If only for a little while, the Playboy fantasy could help them slip that weight from their shoulders.  (Barbara Ehrenreich's Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment was a key component here.) 

Men of George W. Bush (and Bill Clinton's) generation hit adolescence in a culture in which Playboy and its imitators were increasingly visible and increasingly accessible, if not entirely accepted.  Young men of the "baby boom" era saw the sacrifices their father's generation had made, and recognized quickly that among the many things their fathers had given up was the opportunity to prolong adolescence into their twenties and beyond.  The feminist movement and the increased access to birth control meant that these baby boomer boys could also expect to have access to women's bodies as their father's generation could never have hoped to have. 

As a result, boomer men either got married later or at least postponed having children.  The current president Bush did not have children until he was 36; Clinton until he was 34.   And compared to their father's generation, both prolonged their adolescence well past what nature required -- Clinton may still be in it, and Bush remained in "party mode" until he was born again at 40.   In different ways, these two most recent of our presidents lived out the Playboy philosophy with which they were raised.

The lecture tends to go over well.  We have some quibbles over whether Playboy is "porn" or not, but for the most part, the students seem to get it.  I usually try and close by asking them to think about the proliferation of films about World War Two that have appeared in the past decade.  I've argued for years that our love of these films (Saving Private Ryan being the prime example) has to do with our wistfulness about a lost masculine culture, a culture of premature sacrifice and early manhood, a culture where men accepted responsibility and met their commitments gladly and without complaint.

Sweeping over-generalizations to be sure, but plenty to chew on nonetheless.

Comments

[DJW]

As someone who just finished boring students with a two hour lecture on Plato's theory of the forms, I must say I'm a bit jealous. Sounds like a really fun lecture (to give and to hear).

[Amanda]

One quibble--how exactly did men have "more access" to women's bodies in the boomer generation than before? What does that mean, exactly? The previous generation married younger, so if anything, each man had a wife and the built-in expectation of pretty much endless access to *her* body. In a way, that's "more access". Also, the boomer generation would be one of the first where women started demanding equality, something you can see in the Clinton marriage. Equality meant that men could be judged, for the first time ever, for "playing" before marriage while expecting to have a virgin bride. The WWII generation was notorious for catting around during the war--it seems to me that Playboy was helping them relive a time when it seemed like women were young, pretty and everywhere. (Think of the famous pic of the sailor kissing the woman when peace was declared.)

Clinton's philandering seems more in line to me with the philandering style of the WWII generation, where the stereotypical affair was between an older married man and a younger single woman who is a work subordinate. Boomer affairs are stereotypically between age peers, where troublesome consent issues are not a problem. In most ways, I would say that feminism reduced "access" to women's bodies, if only because women started refusing to see themselves as items to gain "access" to, but more as sexual actors in their own right.

[Hugo]

It's not a zero-sum game, Amanda. The fact that women saw themselves as "agents" did not mean that young men did not have greater opportunity to be predatory. Greater access to legal rights and contraceptives does not water down the fact that men enjoyed a culture where far more young women were willing to have sex outside of marriage. Whether they were doing it out of pressure or out of lust is not the issue -- though the 60s is sometimes over-emphasized as a cultural turning point, folks did start having more partners in that decade as a result of these new freedoms. That that was a "gain" for young men is unquestionable; whether that was an equal "gain" for women is open to debate.

Gosh, I'd be thrilled to believe that "troublesome consent issues" are less common than they were. Date rape reports -- and reports of sexual harassment on campus -- suggest that boomer profs (and Gen X profs) are more than doing their part. All of our WW2 era boys are retired now; I don't know about where you are, but the men I teach with are hardly models of egalitarianism!

[zuzu]

Playboy, when it began, also offered a kind of glamour and sophistication that middle America had been lacking -- and that many of the WWII generation had been exposed to in Europe during the war. Not that people didn't dress up to the nines to go out to clubs and dance halls, even in small towns, but nudity was something different. Hugh Hefner looks laughable now with his pajamas and his mansion, but I'm sure he seemed pretty cool back in the day.

Roles for women changed as well. Some women's magazine, I think it was Glamour, ran a feature about 10 years ago or so comparing pictures of various Hollywood actresses from different eras at age 26. The first was Bette Davis, with heavy makeup that looks aging to a modern eye, but which looked very young and free and spirited back in the 20s and 30s. Then Elizabeth Taylor, who was all sophistication and adult glamour in the 50s, the same time Playboy came out. Then Sandra Bullock, with pigtails and a natural face. It was interesting, the pendulum swing there.

Also, in the New Yorker of either a week or two weeks ago, there was a piece about The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, focusing on how men of the WWII generation didn't dwell on their experiences in the war. But the novel itself was a picture of a man of the generation Playboy was aimed at, and he not only kept down a job, he had a family, an active social life and a hell of a lot of cocktails. The main thread seemed to be displaying one's prosperity rather than letting loose with one's libido (though the main character had a son with an Italian woman he had a fling with during the war).

[Amanda]

I think that the problem is that we *do* see it as a zero sum game, and that's why words like "access" to describe women's sexual behavior is still an acceptable word. We would never describe women as having more "access" to men's bodies, though that has also happened as well.

Back in the Playboy era, tolerating sexual harassment was part of a woman's job description, and date rape was blamed on the victim. There were fewer complaints not because men behaved more but because women tolerated abuse because they had no choice. I think that men noware probably more, not less, likely to understand the boundaries between woman-as-coworker and woman-as-sex-object than then. So, in that sense, "access" to women's bodies has increased and not decreased our control.

As much as it may startle our sexually conservative sides, women's control over their bodies has increased with men's "access" to those same bodies. My grandmother's doctor thought nothing of changing her pill prescription without telling her from the birth control pill to a fertility pill and she got pregnant, of course. A woman of my mother's generation or of mine would sue.

[Hugo]

Amanda, I DO agree with your final paragraph -- "As much as it may startle our sexually conservative sides, women's control over their bodies has increased with men's "access" to those same bodies".

Right. Not a zero-sum game at all!

[La Lubu]

Hmm. Don't know about your premise; men in the pre-WWII era didn't have any time to themselves, either. The single-adulthood phenomenon is fairly new. Playboy's success was partly based on the medium....cheap magazine access for a large group of men. The idea of featuring more nudity was the result of exposure (sorry!) to European magazines, posters, and art....and that started during WWI, not WWII.

Beyond that, I'm with Amanda here. And don't forget that Playboy pushed for acceptance for female contraceptives and abortion...and not because of any feminist ideology, either!

Oh, and in speaking to my grandmothers, they assure me that there was plenty of premarital sex going on during WWII and before. Young women in long-term relationships felt more free to have sex than we in modern times give them credit for. Don't get me wrong, the Pill did make a difference. There may be more willingness to have sex outside of a long-term relationship now, but just talking to older women makes me believe that the amount of premarital sex in long-term relationships was about the same then as now. And of course, what hasn't changed since then is the equation: man who has a lot of premarital sex=stud, woman who has a lot of premarital sex=slut.

And isn't it funny that when asked about the number of lifetime sexual partners, men have a much higher number on average than women?

[Amanda]

La Lubu, have you read the study that they did where they asked two groups of students how many partners they had, one group hooked up to what they thought were lie detectors and one without? The "without" group turned in roughly the same numbers as you would expect--men significantly higher than women. The group that thought they were hooked up to a polygraph machine coughed up much different numbers. The men gave a somewhat smaller number, but the women gave a much, much higher number.

[La Lubu]

Heh heh, just what I would expect!!

[Camassia]

The creation and extension of adolescence in Western culture has interested me for a long time. A lot of people don't realize how new the whole idea of "teenager" is, and how historically peculiar our expectations for it are. I was thinking about that re your earlier posts about "freaking." There's this cultural expectation that teens have their own culture, they'll fool around and try to shock their elders, etc. And really, that expectation is only about 50 years old.

In our society, it's untenable to have kids grow up as fast as they used to. For one thing, there's all this education you have to go through before you're considered ready for the work force. But I do often wish that teens could be integrated into society more. We're so accustomed to age segregation that even churches do it. But I don't see how kids can learn to be adults if they're shunted off into their own worlds where they outnumber the grownups by 30 or 40 to one. No wonder they're often so irresponsible.

[mythago]

Playboy's success was also rooted in a sort of male pre-sexual revolution: rebellion at the idea that sex was something a woman used to lure you to the altar, and put you in the harness of meal ticket/workhorse. It's sad, in a way, because Hefner recognized how the gender roles of the time harmed men, but not at all how they affected women.

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