I wonder if all the models will attend the funeral in bunny-girl costume?
Playboy founder and dressing-gown wearer Hugh Hefner dead at 91
As all unabashed masturbators love to point out, pornography has historically driven technological uptake. But before the internet, Playboy was the most famous source in the world. Yesterday its founder, Hugh Hefner, died peacefully at home of natural causes, aged 91. The godfather of the wank mag was born in Chicago in 1926 …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 28th September 2017 12:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
// ...I read it for the articles...
It used to be no one would believe that, but these days that's really the ONLY reason anyone buys it. As far as porn goes it's just too tame for most people's taste these days. Even skinamax softcore is harder than Playboy. It just doesn't compete when you've got access to the likes of Pornhub.
Anon because even though I know damn near everyone watches porn my religious upbringing still tells me I should be ashamed of it and I just can't seem to get past that particular hangup.
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Thursday 28th September 2017 21:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Did you know...
Just like how Playboy had its "bunny girls", its would-be female counterpart, Playgirl, had their own gender-swapped version!
(Link is definitely SFW).
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Thursday 28th September 2017 10:55 GMT Nick London
Playboy was Part of My Education
I was a teen in the 60's and had an uncle who subscribed.
It was the height of the good writing and the campaigning for social change in US. Also the cartonns and the pictures but never really was that excited by the photographs.
Later it became tacky and sleazy. So sleazy hat one Donald J Trump appeared on a couple of soft-core videos though apparently not with his trousers down! http://edition.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2016/10/05/donald-trump-playboy-video-cnnmoney.cnnmoney
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Thursday 28th September 2017 11:19 GMT Salestard
I'll give him his dues
I watched a couple of the reality fly-on-wall programme about the Bunnies/Mansion that was running on MTV or whatever for a while.
For research porpoises, of course.
My initial estimation of old Hughie as a filthy old perv was completely shattered - the guy was zen blackbelt in selective deafness; Plastic knockers or not, he had four of possibly the dimmest, shallowest, most irritating idiots tottering about his gaff, with endless inflection, nasal whine, and all accompanied by a limitless supply of little yippy dogs.
Yet ol' Heff just breezed in, dressing gown and yacht hat. Oblivious to the cacophony, smiled serenely, selected his wife for the night, and vacated the room without murder-death-killing any of them.
Peerless.
Meanwhile, back in Blighty, we had the Marquess of Bath.
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Thursday 28th September 2017 12:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'll give him his dues
Meanwhile, back in Blighty, we had the Marquess of Bath.
We also had Miss Whiplash, aka Lindi St Clair who once rather entertainingly called Inland Revenue "Her Majesty's pimps" when they wanted to tax her earnings despite declaring them as immoral, and who at some point ran the Corrective Party (I think, or she was at least deeply involved with them) which actually had a fairly progressive agenda.
She entertained in more ways than one, but especially because she enjoyed upsetting the hypocritical high and mighty at Whitehall who damn well knew that she had many clients amongst them, and she wasn't exactly shy (but, to this day, still utterly discreet). Great entertainment.
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Thursday 28th September 2017 13:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'll give him his dues
"[...] Miss Whiplash, aka Lindi St Clair [...]"
The Establishment were always involved in that side of things at all levels. Sent up nicely in the book and TV adaptation of Tom Sharpe's "Blott on the Landscape".
Cynthia Payne, aka as "Madam Cyn", dispensed tea & sympathy from her suburban house and was taken to heart by the British public. Julie Walters starred in the subsequent biographical film "Personal Services". Emily Lloyd had an early starring role in "Wish You Were Here" based on Cynthia's teenage years.
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Thursday 28th September 2017 21:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'll give him his dues
Sent up nicely in the book and TV adaptation of Tom Sharpe's "Blott on the Landscape".
Let's be fair, the late Tom Sharpe was always enjoyably good at sending up the Establishment and the British way of doing things, from The Throwback to the whole Wilt series (although I admittedly liked the first 3 of those more than the rest).
Those books ought to be mandatory literature for anyone learning English as a (very) foreign language :).
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Friday 29th September 2017 22:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'll give him his dues
"[...] and the British way of doing things [...]"
His first two novels were based on his time in South Africa as an academic lecturer before he was deported for his political views. Both "Riotous Assembly" and "Indecent Exposure" are considered enjoyably OTT satire by British readers. Anyone who lived in South Africa at that time could tell you they were uncomfortably close to real life.
What was interesting was that both those novels were on sale in the equivalent of W.H.Smith bookshops - even in the most conservative of apartheid cities. It may have been that the censors didn't have a good grasp of English - although the lurid covers were the sort of provocation that got Amateur Photographer magazines' front pages censored.
The current UK and USA situations remind me horribly of the "democratic" police state hypocrisy of that time and place.
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Thursday 28th September 2017 12:39 GMT Little Mouse
Re: See what you did there "jazz mag", obvious typo
@AC
Sorry, they really have been known as "jazz mags" (in Blighty at least) for some time now.
I think I first came across <cough!> the term in Viz in the early nineties - e.g. typical headline: "We've found Hitler's horny Jazz Mags", etc.
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Thursday 28th September 2017 13:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Limited access
"That's one posh building site - sure it wasnt Mayfair?"
Mayfair was very popular in the UK in the 1970s. Several young women programmers I knew bought it for their boyfriends.
Less airbrushing of pictures than Playboy - and good looking girls you might actually meet at work. Like Playboy they also had stories etc that were good quality. When beaver shots became the trend - Mayfair resisted the clinical approach of Penthouse - and Playboy looked dated.
A building site was more likely to have one of the down-market magazines that were effectively an updated version of "Titbits"***.
***Titbits didn't go any further than provocative dressed models. For female nudity in the UK in the 1950s you had to find "Health and Efficiency" in a windblown hedge - with its black&white pictures airbrushed to remove nipples and pubic hair.
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Thursday 28th September 2017 14:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Limited access
>***Titbits didn't go any further than provocative dressed models. For female nudity in the UK in the 1950s you had to find "Health and Efficiency" in a windblown hedge - with its black&white pictures airbrushed to remove nipples and pubic hair.
Whatever happened to hedge porn? - Is that one of the ways that the Internet is saving the planet?
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Thursday 28th September 2017 21:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Limited access
"The first time I saw a hairy fanny I was shocked."
I was disappointed. I had expected a neat triangle of pubic hair - not the random pattern of my first girlfriend. Hope kids these days get a better spread of details in their PSE lessons at school.
However - when retrieving their football with his pals the neighbours' 8 year old recently stopped - and pointed to the genitalia on the garden concrete ornament of Michelangelo's "David" saying "what's that?"
Evasively: "What's what?"
"Above the penis and testicles"
Mental sigh of relief: "Hair"
It seems the school lessons hadn't reached the changes of puberty. No doubt that comes in a later lesson - unless the playground grapevine's smartphones get there first.
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Thursday 28th September 2017 13:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Apparently so according to other obituaries. However - a traditional harem was as much about showing your power to get whatever you wanted.
Famously Scheherazade kept herself away from the Caliph's executioner by entertaining the Caliph with stories that just had to be continued the next night - for 1001 nights. Usually it was a terminal one-night stand in the Caliph's bed.
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Thursday 28th September 2017 14:08 GMT Korev
Writers
Back in the day, the magazine was also well known for its literary output, publishing fiction by such writers as Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Ian Fleming, Joseph Heller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut.
And Roald Dahl!
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Thursday 28th September 2017 22:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Writers
Mayfair had similar aspirations to modern literature. There was one author in 1971/2 who started words at random with a capital letter for no discernible reason. Not sure about Penthouse's literary content - although I did buy a copy circa 1977 when a colleague said her sister was pictured that month.
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