Algren at Sea (40 page)

“But we don't ever expect a specialized magazine like
Playboy
to appeal to everyone—if it did, it would no longer be especially urban or male in viewpoint—and we don't worry about those who don't dig us (no one is forced to buy the magazine—it costs 60¢ to get your hands on a copy) as long as they don't attempt to stop others from enjoying it who do understand and approve.

“Of course, it is the nature of the beast to find the prude and the bigot most anxious to
force
his or her opinion of what is right on the rest of us. They often seem to have nothing better to do with themselves than worry about the affairs of their neighbors. So occasionally, more often in the past and only rarely now, a small group of local citizens, a P.T.A., a police chief, a district attorney with political aspirations, puts on the mantle of the censor in hia community and starts banning books, magazines and movies.

“Whenever
Playboy
is involved in such attempted extralegal censorship, we take the matter into court; and whenever this is necessary, we win.
Playboy
has never been adjudged objectionable by any court anywhere in the U.S. and is never apt to be.”

Hefner has also perceived that he is selling to a class, outwardly self-content
but betrayed by inner fright, that is beating a blind retreat upon itself, declining even those risks by which it might save itself. Thus more at ease with a depiction of passion than with passion itself, it wishes to look longer upon pictures of passion, hear more songs about passion, and read more comments upon passion—anything to avoid
feeling
passion.

The businessman who keeps a mistress for prestige's sake rather than desire's may spend fifty dollars for a key as a prop to a personality he feels is unfinished. The spiritual void in which he encloses himself may be so lacking in person-to-person feeling that, in order to feel he is living at all, he has to feel that whatever it is he is getting, it's costing him less than it's worth.

Playboy
is often reported to be lapping the field of men's magazines:
Cavalcade, Duke, Escapade, Gent, Gentleman's, Male, Mr., Nugget, Rogue, Sir, Swank,
and
Stud
(assuming there
must
be one to cover ridgelings and geldings alike)—but in reality
Playboy
is running its own racecourse with no other entry in the field.

Because while others are peddling material as close to blue as will get through the mails,
Playboy,
behind its foldout nude, is applying department-store technology to the most basic human relationship.

“Ever since I gave my girl a duplicate key to my apartment,” another bemused heart asks The Adviser, “she has been gradually killing me with kindness . . . she has never mentioned the subject of marriage, although it is implied in her every action. She is a beautiful, intelligent, passionate girl and highly sensitive. What can I do to curtail her activities in my behalf and still not do anything to hurt her?”

“Hire a houseman who pre-empts the duties your girl is presently undertaking,” is
Playboy's
advice; “you can explain it to her as a thoughtful move on your part to take mean tasks off her hands for more uplifting pursuits.” The Adviser grows stern: “Don't ever again give anyone but a domestic worker a duplicate of your key to your digs. For when you do, as you may already suspect, you sacrifice the freedom of bachelorhood without gaining the benefits of connubiality. And things can only get stickier, more marital, as time goes on.”

Another way of doing it might be to have the houseman tell the girl that his master doesn't want to marry her.

The success of Playboy Enterprises demonstrates that the question of how to be recognized as a man by the world of men is not so easily solved now as when it could be achieved by dropping a fourteen ball into the
corner pocket. The problem then was not what to do about girls but how to get into long pants. We knew what to do about girls.

The mystery of sex outweighed its fears; its perils were outweighed by its joys. We pursued a rumor of a Chinese whorehouse around Twenty-second and Wentworth but never found it. Later, Kitty Davis used to advertise EVERY GIRL A COLLEGE GRADUATE. We didn't know we'd ever see the day when the appeal would be that the girl was a businesswoman. It would now appear, running through these ads, that for the young American today, love's terrors often far outweigh its joys. By allocating sex to “those areas where sex is important,” the mystery of sex is taken away for mere safety's sake. When one does not commit himself to the world, the retreat continues through love.

Yet it is not possible to live without developing an attitude toward women. However paradoxical it may appear, the young male who assumes early that physical relationships with women are part of life is more likely to develop respect toward women than is the young male who abstains from such relationships.

Abstinence makes the heart contemptuous, and
Playboy
combines both by pinning a tail on a girl's behind. This is not to make her cute, but to encourage contempt of her.
Playboy
laps the magazines-for-men field because contempt is more needful to our middle class than suggestiveness.

Nothing conceals fear so well as contempt, but the Playboy Man is never fearful. If it seems that the young man who is fretting because a beautiful, passionate girl has a key to his apartment is not precisely Richard the Lion Heart, be assured that in his own orbit the Playboy Man is a tiger—and a relentless one.

A lyricist employed by
Playboy
to write a lyric descriptive of the magazine came up with one depicting the
Playboy
reader as exactly that—a tiger. His afterthought, however, was that it was a tiger that was “sometimes gentle and sometimes square.” Lyric and lyricist were dismissed: the
Playboy
image is that of a tiger by day, by night, never restless and never relenting. Women have no choice but to surrender. And once the tiger has enjoyed them, they have no choice but to get out of the way so as not to impede his next leap.

 

This stance of male superiority possesses an aristocratic tradition asserted with confidence by the French essayist Montherlant:

“The wreaths we bestow upon ourselves are the only ones worth wearing,” Montherlant repudiates dependent love; yet is drawn to that woman he meets on a train who had “so besotted an air that I began to desire her.” As if he withdraws from an unbesotted woman. “I do not love in equality,” he explains, “because I seek in woman the child.” A besotted child would, of course, be even safer.

“The lion with good reason fears the mosquito,” Montherlant excuses a fear that his leonine dignity may be too easily compromised. French lions and American tigers alike are aware that any of these girls can feint any forty-year-old businessman out of position and abandon him standing on his head with his socks falling. Strapping her into a contract, thus reducing her to an ornament upon peril of being out of work, is his one chance with her-tigers and lions both alike.

The scene which revolves around an iron suit to the tunes of a shadowy orchestra has been reported variously as the realization of the American dream, as a perversion of that dream, and as a semimonthly orgy. It is neither this nor that nor the other.

Neither the realization nor the perversion of a dream because it is not a dream at all. It is the extension of a PR image as empty of sex as that of the Borden cow. If it were real
somebody
would get drunk.

Nor is this American scene comparable to that representation of contemporary Rome we witnessed in Fellini's
La Dolce Vita.
The film derived tragedy from its depiction of a sensitive man degraded into a purchasable commodity. But when it is assumed that life's highest purpose is to proceed through it boyishly bunnyhopping, the only tragedy can be loss of money. As the only triumph can be that of being richer than anybody.

The heroic American, to
Playboy,
is a twenty-eight-year-old college-educated bachelor whose reason for driving a car is that he needs
something
that doesn't drive him.

The world is a threatening place to a young man who has been abruptly blessed with money and leisure.

In our teens we obtained a spurious maturity from comic books that we obtained from ads in
Ring:

“Now for the first time, through my amazing course, learn how to use centuries-old methods of combat taken from the archives of the Indian and Japanese killercult temples, the ferocious Aztecs, Nazi and Communist Secret Police, all yours for the asking! You will immediately see and learn how a small weak man or woman can overpower and even cripple a 200 lb. brute—
in a flash!”

Playboy
is presently fulfilling the same need by saying, “Don't hesitate—This assertive, self-assured weskit is what every man wants for the fall season.”

Who would want an assertive, self-assured weskit except a hesitant man?
Playboy
speaks to those who wish desperately to know what it means to be male. It speaks to the reader whose masculinity depends upon his choice of deodorant or cigar, one who can maintain respect for a woman only so long as she abides by a tacit assurance not to arouse him sexually. It does not sell sex. It sells a way out of sex.

Sex that—in Karl Barth's meaning when he names the basic relationship of man's life—
Mitmensch
—co-humanity—is out of bounds to the
Playboy
believer. For him sex can be indulged in only as a recreation—“virtue in those areas where virtue is important.” Virtue, like an assertive weskit, may be put on for an evening or for the fall season; but is not something to which one is to commit oneself.

Because one is not to commit oneself at any time, anywhere: not to a weskit, not to another human being nor to an issue alive in the world.

“We hold that man is free,” Simone de Beauvoir writes, “but his freedom is real and concrete only to the degree that it is committed to something, only if it pursues some end and strives to effect some changes in the world. Man is free only if he sets himself concrete ends and strives to realize these: but an end can be called such only if it is chosen freely. The cult of money which one encounters here does not spring from avarice or meanness: it expresses the fact that the individual is unable to commit his freedom in any concrete realm; making money is the only aim one can set oneself in a world in which all aims have been reduced to this common denominator.”

To seek to be free by avoiding involvement with the world, which is the commodity
Playboy
pitches, cannot be achieved. There never was a world—or a woman—who could be turned on and off like a faucet. The woman may run hot and she may run cold, but in all Man's time she has never been turned off.

The man who constitutes the backbone of
Playboy
readership by buying the magazine regularly from a newsstand for sixty cents is a man under thirty. After thirty, readership drops off abruptly: something happens to most of its readers between twenty-eight and thirty-one. You know what I think? I think he finds out you can't turn her off.

The reassurance that
Playboy
thinking offers the young American is that, by going into a blind retreat upon himself, arranging his own room comfortably and adopting those attitudes prescribed by the world of advertising, he has justified his existence; simply by protecting himself from disappointment, risked by falling in love with either the world or a woman, he has fulfilled himself.

“The reality of a man is not hidden in the mists of his own fancy,” Mme. de Beauvoir wrote before these mists began to rise, “but lies beyond him, in the world, and can only be disclosed there . . . it is in economic success that the American finds a way of affirming his personal independence; but this independence remains wholly abstract, for it does not know on what to bestow itself.”

Male failure is always attributable, with Montherlant, to mother, sister, or wife.

“The only place on his body where Achilles was vulnerable,” he writes, “was where his mother had held him.”

Woman, by the fact of being a woman, incarnates failure simply through lacking virility. She fails doubly by loving the man for his weakness instead of for the grandeur of his masculinity. Her justification for her existence is that she affords him pleasure.

This corresponds with Hefner's answer to an interviewer asking him, “What do you look for in a woman?”

“Virtue in those areas where virtue is important,” Hefner replies as precisely, as politely, as a floorwalker saying, “Ladies' hosiery first aisle other side of the soda fountain, madam.” Hefner's assertions are those of a small authority in a large department store, Montherlant's those of a poet.

Poet and floorwalker alike derive the total submission of woman from Oriental attitudes. Montherlant, finding his truth in Ecclesiastes—“the man who wishes you ill is better than the woman who wishes you well”—sees himself in an ancestral Hebraic light.
Playboy's
thinkers arrange Hefner as an American caliph surrounded by lounging beauties, his bed in the background and a pipe in his teeth, for
Time.

There is no tobacco in the pipe. Like the bed strewn with beauties, the pipe is a prop.

Caliphs and pashas, khans of times long gone, herded their harems with the warlike dignity of bull walruses herding their cows. True voluptuaries, they peopled Heaven with women of whom one never wearied. On earth or in Heaven they had but one use for a woman, and in Heaven or earth they put her to it.

Yet no women walk the heavenly home of a key-club caliph. There are no bosomy nudes in that great key club in the sky. There is only a shadowy three-piece band playing cool music for executive-angels. There is no Scotch, there is no rye. There are only vending machines from which may flow Pepsi-Cola or Coca-Cola. But no booze.