I came across this article tonight on Unherd: “What Playboy got right about men.”
The gist is that, well, men could be men without shame, where tits are just one of the things we like, and also it really DID have a lot of articles.
The article suffers from being ahistorical bullshit:
Today, the consensus seems to be that only a vulgarian could be so comfortable with so little separation between sex and the rest of it, that we are better off for having replaced the casual, ambient eros of the mid century with a world in which sex is both optimized and compartmentalized, guarded by formality and confined to a designated time and place. Behind closed doors; behind the paywall; within the safe and transactional confines of a parasocial and paid relationship on OnlyFans. But if this has been an effective means of banishing sex from places it perhaps doesn’t belong — like the office utility closet — it has also squeezed from the discourse a certain joie de vivre, a certain cheeky symbiosis between high culture and animal instinct, a certain winking acknowledgment of love and lust as powerful forces which (as the song says) birds, bees, and even educated fleas are helpless to resist.
LOL WUT?
It’s annoying for women on the feminism beat to write like they have no knowledge of the Feminist Sex War. Briefly, once upon a time there were radical feminists and they considred Playboy their enemy and wanted to ban pornography. Liberal feminists wanted to continue fucking Chads, enjoy BDSM, and stand up for sex work. This is what defined the transition from the “second wave” to the “third wave”, with generational consequences. Now everyone my age and younger has grown up with internet porn and the general pornification of things, to the point that things are getting weird and actual sex is drying up.
We’re living in the world Playboy created, so OF COURSE some woman in a conservative publication is arguing for more of what brought us here, as if existing to illustrate the silliness of women.
It’s well-written, but that’s a bizarre description of our current reality. It’s fair to say that, today, everything is more sexualized than when we were young. Kat Rosenfield is roughly the same age as me. As if Instagram, effectively a dating app, hasn’t taken over everything. As if short-form video doesn’t throw all of a person’s interests, including women’s jiggling bodies, are thrown into a blender. How is that fundamentally different than an issue of Playboy having more than one type of thing in the table of contents?
I mean…hasn’t feminism spilled barrels of ink arguing that it’s rape culture bullshit to say that love and sex are “irresistible,” when in fact emotions are socially constructed and people follow scripts?