Beyond the bawdy, tawdry, quixotic, outdated quandary that is the empire of Hugh Hefner, it’s often forgotten how iconic of an institution “Playboy” once was. It could very well be aptly described as the “New Yorker with tits”, and that would be doing it a disservice. A quick glimpse tells you that authors ranging from Roald Dahl to Vladimir Nabokov have been featured in its pages; Joyce Carol Oates was noted as a distinguished writer, as were Haruki Murakami and James Baldwin. John Hughes got his start writing in Playboy. A random issue I purchased from January 1971 features Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bill Cosby (lol), Mario Puzo, Joan Rivers, Michael Crichton, David Halberstam (writing about the “Vietnamization of America”), Shel Silverstein doing humor, Senator Gaylord Nelson, tons of other notorious authors, and, of course, “Playboy’s Girl-Watching Quiz”. What gives? A magazine most people would categorize as an afterthought from a bygone era where its closest relative is the SI Swimsuit Issue contains a higher percentage of words versus pictures than your average grade school math textbook.
You’re telling me this is of literary merit?
Don’t Judge a Magazine by its Cover
Certainly, historically, the distinguishing between “spaces” and “male spaces” was mostly a formality. It was the era of locker room talk, nuclear families, and the lothario. Perhaps there was no better representative of this than the self-centered mirage of masculinity that was Hugh Hefner. And yet. The magazine is wholly separate from this orgiastic funnel apparatus. The cover is deceiving — of the 284 pages of this randomly sampled Playboy, besides the cover, beyond the “girl-watching quiz”, barely a dozen pages contain anything more objectionable than Instagram influencer content, most of which is contained in the “Playmate review.”
284 pages! That’s a lot more than you’d expect from your average “nudie mag”. It begets the question, what was in Playboy? The answer is more complicated than you think.
First of all, they understand that a martini is made with gin, not vodka
What you are looking at is a merging of male libido and intellectualism. The average intellectual depth of a magazine from 1971 is probably more strenuous than your average college liberal studies course. Take, for example, the third fucking page of this magazine referencing an article published one year ago:
Once you turn to page 117 and read about “The Vietnamization of America”, you realize that a critique of Kissinger in Playboy came 30 years before Hitchens’ iconiccritique of that hellspawn individual:
We, who had been so sure, would export our values to Vietnam, where surely they would work. But our values would fail there, and, in failing, would so damage the major organism as to diminish belief in our democracy. The liberal democratic center, so damaged by the war, would begin to come apart. In its place would grow a new angry, alienated, militant, and sometimes violent left (told not to be violent, its spokesmen would cite the national violence carried out in Vietnam); and then, in turn, on the right, a new menacing nationalism — angrier, anti-intellectual, bitter about the challenges to authority from the left, bitter about what they had done to the flag. Construction workers joyously beat up war protestors, encouraged, it occasionally seemed, by the White House.
January, 1971, Playboy
This passage was incredibly hard for me to process, as is what follows:
It was not just the war, of course, that was the tearing the fabric of this society; there were many other factors that contributed to the division: the spiritual vaccuum that seemed to accompany material influence and technological success, the great racial sores in this country, the hypocrisy in much of American life. But finally, it was the war that magnified all faults, that eroded if not destroyed the faith of so many people in this country. We had set out to impose our values on a foreign land; we would help them, teach them good things. We found them a president, wrote them a constitution, bought them an army. What more could they want? But we learned that they did not want these things. Then, having seen our values fail there, we re-examined them here at our home, and found the definition of our society, and what constituted success, wanting. We had begun the Sixties sure of our values, willing to export them to all nations: advisors, Peace Corps people, Alliance for Progress workers. On reflection, there was a colossal arrogance to a nation that sought to aid the poor of the world but would not help its poor at home; to a Congress that would approve all kinds of programs to help the poor Vietnamese peasants fatten their pigs so they would have juicier pork than the Viet Cong but sat back and laughed and joked when a bill came up asking for Federal funds to be used against the rats in the nation’s greatest cities.
Please tell me this is just another nudie mag.
Every single page of this random Playboy issue (from January 1971) is absolutely remarkable. Here’s an argument on page 11 between a Yale Law professor, a Paper Editor, and a Reverend from a Pennsylvania Church:
”There are more sex maniacs than radicals and it may do the [traders] good to think about radicals for a while rather than girls, or boys, or whatever they normally fantasize about.”
Great advice, honestly.
Here’s the chairman of the NAACP worrying about the possibility of Nixon being unable to “bring us together in the foreseeable future” (on page 18).
Here’s a Yale Football coach talking about Diogenes in regards to sports gambling (on page 25):
I mean honestly, what the hell is going on in this paper? I thought it was just supposed to be naked women!
I’m going to avoid posting page after page of the incredible content of these issues — I wholly suggest you find an archive and observe for yourself the mind-blowing wit and whimsy that traipses through these pages — but allow me to highlight one of my favorite pages:
Here’s Playboy a) publishing discourse from women regarding the double standards of sexual activity b) outright stating that they advocate for the repeal of restrictive abortion laws and c) providing an extensive case summary of current caselaw.
And the very next page contains a smorgasbord of content that would appear in a Huffington Post article. Playboy was the anti-Buckley.
I could go on posting intellectual insights from this entire January 1971 (I have to keep highlighting it!) issue, but I guess it’s time to get to the point.
(substack blocks showing videos natively — but I promise you, you will be flabbergasted when you watch this.)
This is what counts for television that deems you worthy of a visit to the White House nowadays; a PSA from a group of essentially castrated males.
Look, I understand as well as anyone else that the age of the “masculine novel” died a while ago. It’s not The Savage Detectives anymore, both due to publishing demographics and the fact that those novels just weren’t that interesting. Shantaram was of the last ilk to penetrate that realm of the absurd, extraneous masculine adventure — one which could only be done by an unassuming male, as I’m so keenly aware throughout my solo travels. I like to point to two breakpoints in literature — one was Jhumpa Lahiri’s breakout, and the second was Cat Person (which indicated that there was no market other than what marketed to the vox populi — imagine trying to sell Céline from 2017 onwards!) These two instances, combined with the fact that women simply read significantly more fiction than men do, markedly shifted the publishing industry away from catering to the burgeoning male.
“But Trevor was six foot three. He was clean and fit and confident. I’d choose him a million times over the hipster nerds I’d see around town and at the gallery. In college, the art history department had been rife with that specific brand of young male. An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on “offee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side. Nobody up there listened to the Moldy Peaches. Nobody up there gave a shit about “irony” or Dogme 95 or Klaus Kinski.
The worst was that those guys tried to pass off their insecurity as “sensitivity,” and it worked. They would be the ones running museums and magazines, and they’d only hire me if they thought I might fuck them. But when I’d been at parties with them, or out at bars, they’d ignored me. They were so self-serious and distracted by their conversation with their look-alike companions that you’d think they were wrestling with “a decision of such high stakes, the world might explode. They wouldn’t be distracted by “pussy,” they would have me believe. The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves. So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.” It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny, to Selma Blair, to Leelee Sobieski. To Winona Ryder.”
As a male who has read Nietzsche, Proust, DFW (by the way, my advice to anyone is to always run whenever a guy mentions him), and perhaps fits a couple of those other descriptors, is it not emasculating to see these kind of authors featured and lauded and winning Booker prizes? I don’t take it personally, and nevermind the veracity of the softboy critique — but isn’t there anywhere I can turn to to feel good about myself other than the older canon or Andrew Tate?
Compare that previous passage to one from Elif Batuman’s “Either/Or”:
The Sorrows of Young Werther was shorter than I had expected, under a hundred pages, and mostly in letters. I sat on one of those round step stools at the bookstore and skimmed just the parts about Werther’s love life.
I realized, as I read, that I had wanted the girl to turn out to be less interested in Young Werther than in her own goals and activities, and for that to be why he had to kill himself. This was not the case. In fact, the girl, Charlotte, had no goals or activities, other than nursing sick people. You never found out if she even liked Werther, because she had already promised her sick mother that she would marry some other guy, and because she was “virtuous,” meaning that Werther himself didn’t expect or want her to change her mind.
Werther decided that the only way forward was for someone to die: either him, Charlotte, or the other guy. Because murder went against his moral code, he opted for suicide. First, he tricked Charlotte into giving him pistols, so he could say he was “dying by her hand.” Then, he did such a crappy job of shooting himself “that everyone had to watch him spurting blood for twelve hours. That part was narrated by an editor, because Werther couldn’t write it himself. The last lines were: “Charlotte’s life was despaired of. The body was carried by laborers. No priest attended.”
It sounded to me as if Werther’s suicide was less an expression of a rejection-induced loss of self-worth or cognitive capacity, than a practical work-around to his “no murder” rule. His self-worth had never been on the line. He hadn’t been rejected, after careful consideration, on account of having an insufficiently impressive soul. For this reason, I didn’t count The Sorrows of Young Werther as a book about how men were just as incapacitated by heartbreak as women.”
Is this not the most redeeming description of an absolute fucking loser you could possibly read? What did she understand that actually gave a length of rope to your average moron?
(Sidenote, Elif Batuman is by far my favorite current writer of the scene — The Idiot is one of my absolute favorite books to recommend.)
Tie it all back to Finance, nobody wants to hear this MFA sadsack story
I guess the complaint outlined in the paragraphs prior is that men understand the concept of toxic masculinity. But, as outlined in the 1971 “Vietnamization of America” article, there’s a spiritual vacuum that arises from technological and economic success — namely, why didn’t it come to “me”?
The original core delusion of modern America was that the post-60s boom was sustainable and that was how things should be rather than the greatest confluence of circumstances to create a once-in-a-lifetime boom that fueled the growth story until 2008. Now, we add one more core delusion to the mix, for this generation — that the mentality surrounding money that we grew accustomed to in the ZIRP era is how things work, rather than an unprecedented step to fuel economic recovery.
If you really think about the iconic IPOs post 2014, where the average Zoomer first got their smartphone, has anything materially impacted the world other than Uber? How are Truecar and Zendesk doing? Snapchat is a money sieve, Lyft is going under imminently, food delivery is an unsustainable business… is this really what we got out of ZIRP?
I have written about how frustrating it can be to see other people become randomly enriched off of nonsense like HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu:
…markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent... If variance in retirement projected rate of return widens, more individuals will be reliant on the government for retirement, potentially ruining decades of planning, but that doesn't necessarily translate to any systemic level impact, much like how it doesn’t matter much to the economy at a macro level whether 70% of the empty restaurant space in SoHo gets filled with a Chipotle or a Carbone or a Chase Bank. Bond liquidity will be constantly supplied federally, but for the mortgage delinquent people, here’s a kick of the can down the road, a prayer for things to work out, and $600. Like markets and the economy, quality of life and the economy are correlated, not interdependent.
So, to end the year, I’d like to offer some practical, actionable thoughts (and, as the legal disclaimer goes, not financial advice):
All those insane returns you see being posted online, talked about by your buddies on zoom, by that annoying kid from high school, wherever, are a result of higher variance, not skill. Trading is zero-sum; wealth creation happens over time, not through short-term volatility. Someone had to lose for each one of those posts you see, so avoid the envy and the FOMO.
The losses aren’t evenly distributed between institutional and retail traders: retail traders lose at much higher rates. It is incredibly hard to attribute trading returns to skill - one year of returns is not indicative of anything
But beyond the financial returns, I think there’s been a certain type of cultural rot as well, where males struggle because there’s simply no space accepting of natural male tendencies, and I think it’s reflected by PLBY stock. Just look at this atrocity:
I think if you do any sort of digging, and read the rest of this post, you’d realize that Playboy was always sort of an intellectual product catering to males. Obviously the objectification and other issues that arose were severely debilitating, but then why did the stock perform so well in 2021?
Playboy had a certain niche — a catering to both the intellect and the libido of the male, and an emphasis on not sacrificing either aspect. Certainly some elements of the company could have been done away with. But why did this stock go to the gutter? Personally, I think it’s because they joined the crowd. Certainly some elements of past malehood are toxic and should have been moved on from, but compare this to that Ted Lasso embarassment of “locker room talk.” My DARE presentations in elementary school were less soul-sucking. Is it too much to accept that the burgeoning young male nowadays both understands how to avoid toxic behavior and can also accept the fact that, well, they feel like men sometimes? It’s shocking how I can’t even make a joke about She’s All That or “Winner gets me” or hiding a Playboy from your parents because the concept is totally foreign to the younger generation. It’s not that this is admirable in any way — it’s just normal. It’s going to exist. The biggest struggle of the modern generation is that they didn’t grow up with Fight Club from a young age — the undirected burgeoning male angst at how the system is unfair resolving in some manner that is totally arbitrary, and letting it go while punching the fuck out of someone else, is something that needs to be acknowledged. Tyler Durden wasn’t stupid — but he was wrong. Learning this difference is an exercise in and of itself. The eradication of intellectual male spaces that accepts that it’s alright to be male results in a certain demographic catering to them as “contrarians” while being totally intellectually bankrupt or incompetent — the Tates and the Petersons of the world. Compare them to Hitchens, who might have been wrong about an innumerable amount of things, but was erudite, reasoned, and pleasant in articulating his views.
Could a product succeed that cateres solely to male intellect and libido? I’m not sure. But it certainly has to be better than whatever fate PLBY decided to assign to themselves.
In investing, there are plenty of dogs, and even moreso that don’t even deserve to be called dogs. But in the case of Playboy, I can’t help but feel like I have to pour one out.
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