George Eliot captured the essence of childhood in The Mill on the Floss: "We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call 'God's birds' because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?"
Had she written that passage today, she might have described how children lisp to themselves (often in unprintable language) between beeps from the Nintendo game as their tiny fingers grasp the controls; she wouldn't mention the hips and haws because they are not found in the sprawling urban areas where most children live. In any case, children are so divorced from nature that they wouldn't notice them, or God's birds, unless they appeared on the television screen. Monotony exists in the fast-paced, scheduled living of the 1990s, but it is not sweet; everything is known, but that familiarity has produced boredom, not love.
It is against this backdrop that Richard Louv has written his book calling for a rebuilding of community and family life. Louv, a father of two and a columnist for the San Diego Union, says he spent three years interviewing more than 3,000 parents, children, volunteers, teachers, and other professionals nationwide—a staggering pace for a man with his own family obligations.
Louv identifies two themes that stood out in his research: "First, time—the sense that time is a decreasing natural resource for both children and parents; and second, the lessening of trust. Powerful, often subliminal fear burns slowly beneath the surface of American culture. One mother summed up her most intense feelings this way: 'Childhood today scares me. But I don't have time to do anything about the fear.'"
Parents, he writes, are torn between investing time in their children and earning money to offer them material goods. As one woman put it, "I want to be there for them yet I want them to have what's good, too." And since parenthood, along with childhood, has been devalued, parents often choose to offer their children "what's good," which has profound consequences. The lack of parental time manifests itself in the disappearance of family rituals, dinners together, and even after-school time together, since most parents work away from home all day.
Estimates of the number of children who care for themselves during some part of the day range as high as 7 million to 15 million. In extreme cases, children as young as 3 are being left to fend for themselves and their younger siblings. They feel neglected and abandoned, and as they get older, Louv writes, many turn "to peers, to gangs, to early sex partners, to the new electronic bubble of computers and video."
Louv is a good reporter, but his analysis is faulty and his solutions are misguided. Part of the problem is that his vision is clouded by milk-and-cookies memories of growing up in Missouri. Childhood today certainly is different from Louv's idyllic recollections of the 1950s, but that is not necessarily all bad. For example, while children may not get as much time as they'd like with their parents, both parents can now be strong role models. Children no longer have the skewed view of gender that prevailed in the '50s, reflected in "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It To Beaver."
Sometimes it's not clear whether Louv is trying to make a policy statement or simply wants to give parents self-help advice. He often slips into the latter, with tips, for example, on how to make the most of time with your children. When he does offer broader prescriptions, however, he is quick to resort to government.
Other institutions are gradually taking over childhood, Louv says, but they are not doing a very good job of it. Poor television, inadequate day care, lousy schools, and stingy public policies that restrict what libraries can offer have all contributed to what he calls "the vanishing web." He notes that the United States is the only advanced Western nation where family life is a private matter that government and employers have largely ignored.
Louv wants the government to ensure leave for parents after a baby is born, and he wants firms to recognize that family pressures often spill over into the workplace in the form of distracted employees and lost productivity. He suggests that companies offer more flex time and more part-time options to parents—not particularly innovative solutions.
Louv calls vaguely for "family liberation" and a "new web": "As part of a family liberation movement, parents ought to demand more freedom in choosing their own work hours and their children's school hours, thereby creating larger windows of family time. Our goal should be to help parents care for their children and to have the time to do it." The children Louv interviewed seem to want these changes, but he never really convinces the reader that parents want family liberation. Many claimed that they work too many hours and don't have enough time for their kids. But parents make choices, often preferring to pursue their own interests rather than spend time with their children.
The amount of time parents spend with their children has dropped 40 percent during the last quarter century, Louv reports. In 1965, the average parent had roughly 30 hours' contact with his or her children each week. Today the figure is down to 17. It's easy to say, "I don't have time" and dodge the real reason some parents don't spend time with their children: "I don't have the desire or the patience." Even when they have the chance, many parents don't invest time in their children; instead, they depend on television and computers to babysit, or they fill their children's schedules with organized activities away from home.
Throughout his book, Louv refers to the need for "a vast public effort, much of it by government," to support the family, but he never outlines what kind of effort he has in mind. Still, the words are ominous. The money for this "vast public effort" would come from families who are already heavily burdened by taxes. Moreover, whenever the government takes over family obligations, there's the danger that it will replace rather than assist the family, ultimately weakening it. David Popenoe, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, writes in a recent issue of The Public Interest that this is precisely what has happened in Sweden, "where the family has grown weaker…than anywhere else in the world."
"What has happened to the family in Sweden over the past few decades," Popenoe writes, "lends strong support to the proposition that as the welfare state advances, the family declines. If unchecked, this decline could eventually undermine the very welfare that the state seeks to promote…The family in the welfare state may become so weak that it is unable or unwilling to provide the kind of personalized child rearing that it alone can offer." That ought to give any policy maker pause.
Louv keeps returning to his memories of growing up outside Kansas City, at the far edge of suburbia. "How much of who we are, as creative adults, was formed long ago on a slow summer day, watching the trees move?" he asks. He recalls going with his pet collie to the woods near his home, where he would "build my own world out of small mysteries: exploring near a farm hidden away next to a swamp, lost in those woods; climbing a poplar, one of the tall, straight hedge trees overlooking the corn fields, clear to the top, until the trunk was three inches thick, until it began to bend and sway in the Missouri wind."
While this sounds like the ideal American childhood, it is hardly typical, even for those raised in the '50s or '60s. Louv identifies some genuinely disturbing trends, but his understanding of them is skewed by an idiosyncratic standard. He wants America to recapture not just childhood but his childhood.
Fern Schumer Chapman is a freelance writer in Evanston, Illinois.
The post You Can't Go Home Again appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Maggie Gallagher has written a post-feminist polemic that illuminates the shortcomings of the sexual revolution, the problem of motherhood's low social status, and the repressiveness of the new cultural androgyny.
Gallagher claims that the women's movement has oppressed women more than liberated them. The sexual revolution, she says, is killing the family, marriage, and sex. The choices made possible by feminism have given men more opportunity to take advantage of women. Women have traded a vital security for an empty freedom.
Although Gallagher's critique includes important insights, she overstates her case, ignoring the real benefits of the women's movement. Moreover, she blames women's current problems on the evils of choice itself, rather than the failure to choose wisely. The danger of too much freedom is a persistent theme of her book.
Here's how Gallagher sees the progress women have made during the last 20 years: "Women are more likely to be abandoned by their husbands, to have to raise their children alone, to slip into poverty and to experience all the consequent degradations.…Domestic violence is on the rise. So is sexual abuse of children while the sexual abuse of women has become the social norm.…Women today work longer and harder than their mothers did and, under stress, are more likely to collapse in nervous breakdowns. Fewer women can find suitable marriage partners and many who do marry will never have the children for which they long."
Gallagher believes that women were better off before the developments of the past few decades, that they have had to sacrifice a lot to get some choices, and it was not a worthwhile trade. But do we really want to give up the gains that women have won?
Before the women's movement, women basically had no choice but to stay home and raise their children. Now they have professional options, which are important to almost every woman. Women are having fewer children and living longer, so they have more years, even after they have raised their children, to take advantage of the new opportunities. Tragically, as Gallagher notes, the expansion of career options has been accompanied by a devaluation of women's contributions to their homes and the sacrifices some make for their families.
Essentially, Gallagher figures, choice is the malefactor; women are the victims; men are the beneficiaries. "Choice sanctifies every pain," she writes early on. "Choice explains all suffering. Choice is the wand which magically produces justice in personal relationships. And choice, or the exaltation of choice as the highest human good, is the excuse society has given for institutionalizing the degradation of women."
Statements like these are enough to make any self-respecting libertarian's skin crawl. But Gallagher is no statist, and what's most disturbing is that some of what she says is true. No doubt, Gallagher has a huge chip on her shoulder, and understandably so. As the reader discovers, she had a child at 22, and the father seems to have had little interest in her or the child. She says she lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her 6-year-old son, and the reader concludes that she hasn't received much financial aid from the father. It seems she considers herself a victim of choice.
Gallagher challenges her readers to look at how things have changed for both men and women during the past 40 years. These days men have more sexual opportunities than men decades ago could have imagined. With no-fault divorce, they can easily exit from marriage. They are no longer the sole supporters of their families. Yet they are not expected to do housework or take time off when their children are born. They don't assume equal responsibility for the children. For men, the women's movement has provided all kinds of benefits and imposed no obligations.
Even women who believe that they have happy marriages are not secure, since every married woman is dependent on one man's willingness to shoulder his moral obligations. And if one day he should decide to run off with the secretary in the accounting department, there it all goes. He can bail out any time, no questions asked.
"Today," Gallagher writes, "every woman with children is only a divorce away from welfare, and divorce can happen at any time for any reason or no reason at all." For women and children, the consequences are dramatic. Single mothers are six times more likely than married mothers to fall below the poverty line, and 54 percent of all single mothers live in poverty.
But while Gallagher's description of the situation is accurate, her analysis is faulty. Choice is not the problem; it is, however, an important part of the solution. True freedom for women includes the right to enter into contracts that impose enforceable legal obligations on men. Women should take advantage of that option, rather than leave the requirements of the marriage arrangement to be decided by the courts.
In the absence of an explicit contract, no-fault divorce laws dictate that marriages will end with no assignment of blame. This legal assumption has paved the way for more divorces. Before no-fault, there was a social sanction against divorce. With no-fault, divorce became easier and therefore more common and acceptable; marriage was no longer binding.
Moreover, the repeal of community property laws in most states has resulted in divorce settlements less favorable to women. This trend has been reinforced by the judicial assumption that women are now as capable of earning a living as men. Socially, we need more obstacles to deter partners from getting out when the going gets tough, especially when the couple has children. Legally, we need marriage contracts that offer women insurance against divorce.
Child support also requires a stronger contract to ensure that men will fulfill their obligations as fathers. As it is now, deadbeats can neglect their financial responsibilities without fear of social stigma and, in some cases, without legal repercussions. When a man becomes a father, he has a lifelong responsibility to that child. Even if he feels unattached, he should be bound legally to support his offspring. Every father has an implied contract to support his child, and it should be enforced with the same diligence as, say, traffic laws. Or perhaps states should follow Wisconsin's lead and simply deduct child-support payments from the father's paycheck.
But Gallagher's critique extends beyond the legal realm. "The plain fact," she writes about what she calls the new man shortage, "is that, as a group, men today are much less involved with their children than their fathers. There is a New Man, but he doesn't act like Dustin Hoffman. He lives with women and off women's salary. He refuses to marry and settle down. If he does marry and have children, he won't see any more of them than his father did. If he is single or divorced, he will probably abandon his children."
Clearly, Gallagher's writing and her perspective are colored by her bitterness. While some men may be less involved, there is evidence that many are trying to be better fathers. While it's difficult to generalize, some who watch these trends say they have noticed improvements in men's attitudes toward their families. For example, Ellen Galinsky, a co-founder of Families and Work Institute, says that men and women now have the same complaint—that they simply don't have enough time with their kids. She says that when she first started surveying men on this subject some years ago, the ones who talked about their long hours usually complained about their wives' complaints.
But Gallagher is really pressing a larger issue: What has the women's movement brought women? The irony of the movement is that the value of what women do must now be confirmed in the male world. Consequently, those women who simply want a career have found the advances of the women's movement exhilarating. But the movement has been devastating to the family-centered woman. Motherhood has been devalued, and the status and well-being of children have declined accordingly.
"Children have been demoted from a public good to a private pleasure," Gallagher writes. "In the process, women's work has been transformed into a play activity, a hobby, like collecting model trains.…Kids are supposed to be weird objects of gratification to parents, a bothersome nuisance to everyone else. You prefer to spend your money on your (noisy, smelly) kids. Me? I prefer a Ferrari."
Gallagher points out that there's a lot the women's movement didn't teach us. She takes a hard-eyed look at sexuality, illustrating how feminism has tried to remake men more than women. And, of course, men never wanted to be remade. Meanwhile, women refuse to see men for what they really are.
Gallagher tells the story of 90 male power players, including two reporters for the Washington Post, who gathered for a stag party. There, a naked girl jumped out of a cake, and the men slathered her with whipped cream and then cleaned her off with their tongues. Hearing about the incident afterward, women reporters at the Washington Post were shocked, Gallagher says, because "men were behaving like men when they had promised to behave like people. And they did that in public."
She continues: "If sex in the sense of gender is merely a product of stereotyped ideas about men and women, then a commitment to sexual equality ought to change our sexual natures, to remake men into something better, higher, less frightening: into people. The really shocking thing about the whip cream incident is that it hints that sexual nature may not be merely a matter of ideology and as such amenable to social control."
Anyone who has been the mother of sons is convinced that sexual nature is certainly not a matter of ideology. Some women, including Gallagher, seem to think of themselves as somehow more civilized than men and therefore superior to them. Women are certainly different, but not necessarily better. And while some might like their men to be more sensitive and nurturing, eradicating the basic differences would also diminish the attraction between the sexes.
Gallagher has written a provocative and intriguing book that deserves as much attention as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. She has shown the superficiality of the women's movement and addressed those issues which feminism tries to ignore—the true nature of men, the importance of children to a woman's sense of well-being, the value of motherhood.
But her attack on choice is misguided and dangerous. Choice is her gimmick, her all-purpose villain, which she plugs in at every opportunity. She has found a convenient formula to cure societal ills: Get rid of choices. It's a solution that's neither feasible nor desirable. Rather than surrender our choices, we must create a social and legal structure that upholds them.
Fern Schumer Chapman is a freelance writer in Evanston, Illinois.
The post An Indictment of Choice appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Annie Dillard's writing has often met Virginia Woolf's challenging definition of what art should do for the individual. "Nature, in her most irrational mood," Woolf wrote in "A Room of One's Own," "has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm, a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture. But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement…shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives."
Dillard has written several precious passages of this kind; they have brought her many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She has given her reading audience a new perspective through her extraordinary gift of observation. Parts of her most recent book, The Writing of Life, meet Woolf's standard. And that is quite an accomplishment given that she has chosen one of the most banal topics—writing.
She set out, in her own words, to "recount what the actual writing feels like—feels like inside the mind at work"—a daunting challenge. Dillard imparts practical information, tales of the writing life, and one metaphor after another in her effort not only to capture the mind at work, but to gracefully illustrate the word at work as well.
As dazzling as these passages are, the book never gets beyond them—the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. The book is little more than a well-written string of anecdotes, lacking any larger theme. The writing is at times so rich that the reader overlooks the book's shortcomings. But those familiar with Dillard's other works will feel a little frustrated. As skillful as Dillard is at musing on a subject, her observations and descriptions set her apart from other writers. But in this book, she seems confined to her office, and her writing sometimes seems cloistered as well.
The last piece in the book transcends these problems. Dillard gets out into the world and casts her gaze at a stunt pilot who uses the "plane inexhaustibly, like a brush marking thin air." The chapter works as a whole, with its own momentum and metaphor. Through those brush strokes, Dillard shows how art works: "He controlled the tension of the audience's longing. You desired, unwittingly, a certain kind of roll or climb, or a return to a certain portion of the air, and he fulfilled your hope slantingly, like a poet, or evaded it until you thought you would burst, and then fulfilled it surprisingly, so that you gasped and cried out." This is quintessential Dillard—she observes ingenuously; she reports imaginatively; and she writes expansively.
The Writing Life may not be Dillard's best work, but it still showcases some of her talent. And even though a reader may close the book and feel slightly cheated, he will not leave empty-handed. He will take with him long passages like this one, in which she describes what it's like to be in an airplane that barrel rolls: "The g's slammed me into my seat like thugs and pinned me while my heart pounded and the plane turned over slowly and compacted each organ in turn. My eyeballs were newly spherical and full of heartbeats. I seemed to hear a crescendo; the wind rolled shuddering down the last ninety degrees and settled on the flat. There were the islands, admirably below us, and the clouds, admirably above. When I could breathe, I asked if we could do it again, and we did. He rolled the other way. The brilliant line of the sea slid up the side window bearing its heavy islands. Through the shriek of my blood and the plane's shakes I glimpsed the line of the sea over the windshield, thin as a spear." Undoubtedly this is what Virginia Woolf had in mind when she described the stand-bys that a reader will return to as long as he lives.
The post Brief Review appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hefner fille, wearing little makeup and conservatively suited, is a picture of American wholesomeness. At 33, she has been called "Playboy Enterprises' purest face." An ardent feminist to boot, she nevertheless objects to the feminist claim that pornography as such exploits women. "If Christie Hefner had not existed," a former Playboy Enterprises president once quipped, "the first thing I'd do is invent her."
She joined the magazine in 1975 with no business or management experience. Hefner had a degree in literature from Brandeis University and a year's experience as a writer for a Boston alternative paper when she became assistant to the chairman at Playboy. She was later promoted to corporate vice-president and a member of the board of directors before becoming president in 1982 and chief operating officer in 1984.
Hefner has to earn her $193,000-a-year salary, coping with some of the roughest times in Playboy's 32-year history. Her challenge: to rebuild the magazine's eroding circulation and nudge Playboy's other enterprises to appeal to the changing male in a postfeminist era.
Hefner was interviewed recently in her office by Fern Schumer Chapman, a Chicago writer.
Reason: Did Playboy spark the sexual revolution, or did it ride on the revolution's coattails?
Hefner: It's hard to say definitively which came first, but I think it's fair to say that if Playboy had never existed, the pressures and circumstances and other factors were there that would have created a sexual revolution anyway. On the other hand, Playboy became a major communication vehicle and force within that, so it's a little bit as if Edison had never lived, would somebody have invented the light bulb? Yes. But he had a profound impact by having done that.
The aspect of the revolution, if you will, that Playboy contributed, that it would have been hard for someone else to do, was a mass-circulation magazine being as provocative as Playboy has always been on a whole host of issues—certainly sexual, but also the war, drugs, race relations, lesbian rights. I mean a whole litany that you wouldn't expect to find as an agenda if you moved outside of the small-circulation magazines.
Reason: Would Playboy survive in the marketplace without pictures?
Hefner: If Playboy didn't have pictures?
Reason: Right.
Hefner: It would probably still be the largest-selling men's magazine, because I think it clearly far surpasses a magazine like Esquire in the quality and range of its writing. The Playboy interview. Playboy won among all magazines the best-fiction award last year, and I think it has consistently presented quality fiction, which few magazines do present. The quality of the articles, whether it's investigative journalism or profile journalism. The columnists, whether it's the men and women columns or Dan Jenkins on sports. I'd say it's the best writing around and covers the best range of interests.
But part of what makes Playboy so extraordinary is its willingness to say that you don't have to choose between intellectual interests and sexual interests, as a full human being, and that a magazine can reflect that range. That is its philosophy as much as anything [Hugh] Hefner ever wrote in the pages of it. So without pictures, it wouldn't be Playboy, because what Playboy is, is a unique commitment to the idea that as full human beings, we ought to be able to be open about our erotic interests as well as be knowledgeable politically and be interested in enhancing our lifestyle.
Reason: But would you have a readership without pictures?
Hefner: I think it still would be the bestselling magazine, but it would have a smaller circulation. If it had all pictures it would sell fewer copies, if it had no pictures it would sell fewer copies.
Reason: How much overlap is there between your readership and hard-core magazines such as Swank?
Hefner: I'd say very little. First of all, the majority of Playboy's readers are subscribers. And the people who are subcribers—and it's true of magazine subscribers generally—are more often than not married, are in their early thirties, and are college-educated. They may read Time or Business Week, but they don't read hard-core magazines.
The minority of Playboy readers who are newsstand purchasers, a minority of that minority will pick up another magazine. But from all of the research that I have seen, they don't pick it up because it's a substitute. They pick it up because any magazine with an audience as large as Playboy's is going to include some people who have a desire for hardcore pornography. Just like some of the audience at Playboy is also interested in tennis, and they will buy a tennis magazine.
If you were looking for explicit sexual experience, you'd have to be pretty stupid to buy Playboy, given what else is out there. When we do research, whether it's with Playboy magazine readers or Playboy video watchers, one of the things you find is, they don't expect Playboy to have explicit sex. In fact, I think they'd be shocked if it did. Even people who will buy a sexually explicit magazine don't expect it or want it in Playboy, because Playboy is making a different kind of statement. It's talking about a lifestyle in which the sex is romantic and tasteful, and it's not the same kind of attitude toward sex as is in another magazine.
Reason: Still, Playboy has become more explicit over the years, and I assume that's in some effort to compete with the…
Hefner: It's the same reason why films are more explicit than they were 20 years ago. Society has changed. I grew up at a time when Midnight Cowboy was X-rated! Today, Midnight Cowboy could at least be in the running for a PG-13. But look at what's in R-rated films today. That's not because R-rated films are competing with X-rated films—it's because our attitudes about nudity and sexuality have changed a lot since the '50s and early '60s. And any media that is of the culture is going to change as those attitudes change.
Reason: How would you characterize Playboy's politics?
Hefner: Well, I'd like to say liberal, but that's gone so out of favor that I hesitate to use the word. And in fact if you polled the readers of the magazine, you would find libertarian would probably be a more apt description than liberal. There's a strong pro-individual, antigovernment element—in the sense of government controlling individuals' lives—that has very much been there in the magazine. Interestingly, for example, although the magazine editorially supports gun control, probably the majority of our readers do not, and they don't because for them not having gun control is more consistent with the other issues which they relate to and which the magazine relates to—which is individual choice and the recognition that when there may be the abuse of that, whether it's alcohol abuse or First Amendment–press abuse, it's always better to err on the side of freedom than government intervention in individuals' lives. So, I guess liberal-libertarian would be probably the best description.
Reason: Would you call yourself a libertarian?
Hefner: I'd actually call myself pretty much a liberal. A progressive liberal. Because I do think that government is there to be a provider of services for people who cannot provide for themselves. I don't think that government has been efficient at it, but it's been inefficient at defense too, and I don't hear a lot of people arguing that the government should get out of the defense business. They just argue about how government should be in it. You could find a whole lot of issues where the libertarian position is my position too, but I'm supportive of programs that I perceive the traditional libertarian philosophy not to be supportive of: Aid to Families with Dependent Children, medical programs, educational programs, job-training programs.
Reason: Would you say that Playboy exploits women?
Hefner: No, and I don't think anybody who really thinks about it would come to that conclusion. It's one of those cliches that you get to repeating without really thinking about it.
It's not exploitive of the model. These are women who very much enjoy the experience with Playboy, who are very well compensated for it, and work under better conditions than most women who work in the fashion-model business.
Exploitive could also mean that which in its message is violent or demeaning in a way that is hurtful. But if Playboy wanted to publish pictures that were exploitive, it would have published the pictures of Vanessa Williams. These were pictures taken of a woman who clearly never intended to have them published, who clearly was going to be hurt by their publication, who had a special other kind of social significance as the first black Miss America. The pictures were brought to Playboy, and we wouldn't publish them.
Reason: Was that your decision?
Hefner: It was everybody's decision. There was absolute unanimity. Hefner, me, the editors—nobody wanted to publish them. It was very obvious what publishing them would do. It would sell a lot of magazines, and it would really hurt this woman. And if you believe, as Hefner has always believed, that you can celebrate sexuality in nude photography, that you can make it a positive, that you can take it away from violence, take it away from exploitation, then the last thing you do is publish pictures that are going to hurt somebody.
The absence of anything that is violent or demeaning and the romance of the pictures in the magazine are so clear for 30 years that, especially in an environment where there are so many images that are exploitive, many of them nude, many of them not nude, if you're willing to accept that nudity in and of itself is not exploitive, then I don't know what kind of erotic pictures you could run that would be not exploitive if you think Playboy's pictures are exploitive. Then everything—Calvin Klein jeans ads, everything in Vogue, everything that has a woman looking sexy—is exploitive. Or if you say, "No, that's not true, there's got to be a difference," then you really need to make that difference. When you talk about Playboy being exploitive, then you are using a word that is inappropriate, unless, as I say, you truly think that everything that surrounds women and sexuality is in and of itself exploitive.
Reason: How has the magazine evolved since you've become a leader here?
Hefner: Well, implicit in that question is the assumption that it's evolved because I've become a leader. To some extent that's true, but it's more subtle than direct. I don't confer with the editors or direct the editorial policy. I know in advance what we're going to publish, but I don't read the articles, I don't review the graphics, I don't sit down in editorial meetings. In that sense, I'm much more like a businessperson. I assume that the creative people are putting out absolutely the best magazine they can, and I try and get involved at a much broader level—Do we really know what the readers are thinking? and, Are we contemporary for 1986 as opposed to 1976?
I do think the magazine has changed in the years since I've been here, and perhaps in some subtle way, the fact that the company has a president who is a woman makes people think more often about how greatly the roles of women, and therefore the relationship between men and women, have changed over the last few years. Maybe the best place you could see that in the magazine would be to read, over the course of the last year, the Asa Baber and Cynthia Heimel columns, which run every month. I think it's wonderful writing, but that's just a subjective viewpoint. But if you wanted to get a sense of what Playboy thinks are the issues surrounding men and women today and their relationship, you'll get it from those two columns.
Those columns wouldn't have run a decade ago. The presumption would have been that the way you talk about men and women in Playboy is sexual. Now there's a much greater sense, and you see it in articles as well as in the columns, of talking about relationships. Not just sexual relationships—work relationships, love relationships.
Reason: Do you ever wake up in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror and say, "Christie, how could you be doing this?"—in terms of being a woman and putting out this particular publication?
Hefner: Quite the contrary. Only people who don't take the time to understand Playboy would even have that question. If you interviewed people across this company—the woman who is the fiction editor of Playboy, the woman who's the cartoon editor, the woman who's the controller, the man who's the general counsel—you would find people who have very much the same personal and political agenda and goals that I have. The people who relate to Playboy, both readers and people who produce it, are not the way the critics think they are. Now, I'm not saying that people don't have a right to criticize the magazine, but at the very least acknowledge the fact that if you really read the magazine, if you really talk to the people who produce it, if you really look at the research on what the views of the readers are, you would find absolute consistency of support for the same things that I believe in: greater equality between the sexes, a sane international foreign policy, a more liberal-libertarian view vis-à-vis the individual and government that you wouldn't find at most women's publications, most newsweeklies, most business magazines—never mind most television and film companies. So there are many comfortable things about what this company stands for.
And then, of course, because I'm the president, I get to do things like set policy as to how employees are treated and what we do in terms of community relations. And that also is sort of nice. I once was talking to a woman from the Washington Post and was telling her about some of the things we've done with flex-time and part-time benefits and stuff, and she said, "God, I wish Katharine Graham did half those things at the Post." There's no guarantee that somebody because they are a woman will be more sensitive than a man. So it's nice, on that other level of "How do you feel when you go to bed at night?" to feel good about that.
Reason: What do you think of feminist efforts to ban or restrict the display and dissemination of pornography?
Hefner: Well, I think it's an enormous error of judgment, both in misunderstanding what impact pornography has on society and in misunderstanding what laws like that would be used to do. On the latter, the reason why a lot of feminists have now become so outspoken against that effort is because censorious laws are interpreted by the people with power in society, not the people without power. It was only the '70s when Bill Baird was arrested for talking about contraception in front of an audience that included a woman with a baby—and he was arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. So if you think that laws that have to do with sexuality are going to be interpreted by feminists, that's very naive. If you think that the first things that are gone after are not things related to abortion and lesbianism, that's a very naive understanding of the process. So that's one perspective that I have that I think a lot of feminists share.
On the impact of pornography on society, the rhetoric has so overwhelmed the reality that there is no reasonableness applied to the subject at all anymore. If, for example, the president of the United States really wanted to have a useful commission on pornography, one would have thought that what the commission would be doing is updating the research that the 1970 Commission on Pornography and Obscenity did. That would mean original research, reviewing research that has been done in the interim, looking at what's happened in Denmark and other countries that have liberalized pornography laws, and coming out with a thoughtful report. Instead, the commission has no budget for research and has been traipsing around the country listening to individuals give their life stories, which is anecdotal evidence that has no validity. It would be like deciding whether or not to go back to Prohibition by having people come forward, and some people would tell terrible stories about being beaten up by a husband who was drunk or having their child killed by a drunk driver. I don't want to take away from the seriousness of those problems, but they don't have anything to do with the cause and effect of pornographic images in society.
And what happens is that people take the substrata of pornography that is out there that is really ugly and violent—or child pornography, which everybody recoils from—and then use that as a springboard. If you're considering Playboy pornography, and you're trying to suggest that Playboy leads to wife abuse, you're on such completely quicksand footing that it's only by not paying any attention to the real research that you can even begin to make that kind of leap.
Reason: Is Playboy a victim of hardercore pornography?
Hefner: There's no question that before the other magazines existed it was easier to see Playboy for what it is, which is a sophisticated men's magazine. It says a lot about our society that we think that because 20 percent of Playboy is sexual, it's a skin magazine. But that's a function of how obsessive we are as a society about sex. We talk about there being a sexual revolution, but that's only in some areas. You look at the level of nudity that's in advertising and on television in other Western countries, it's dramatically different from in this country. You don't diminish the interest in pornography by passing laws against it. In fact, evidence would suggest the contrary. In Denmark, where they've liberalized laws for all pornography for adults, the major market for pornography is tourists.
Reason: What do you think of the feminist movement today?
Hefner: It's very unfocused right now. A number of things have kind of conspired to slow down progress in the political arena of the women's movement. Among them, the fact that we clearly have in Washington right now the most inhospitable administration to women's rights that we've had in my lifetime. And that's very hard to reckon with. At the same time, the most visible leaders of the women's movement are now in an older generation—I don't mean senior citizens, but they're in the next generation. And we haven't done a very good job of finding a way to nurture a younger generation of women leaders.
The other thing that seems to have happened is there's this whole generation of women, the people who are in college now, who don't seem to feel at all either beholden to the women's movement or necessarily supportive of it. This is an overstatement, but I think there's a lot of truth to it. They don't realize—at least this is my assessment—how (a) hard-won and (b) tenuous are the gains that the women's movement achieved and therefore how absolutely necessary it is for that generation of women to get connected in some way to continuing the process.
That's all sort of the bleak news. The one kind of countervailing and positive thing that has happened is that in many ways the women's movement has moved its arena from the public to the private. So what's happening in people's personal lives and the way young women and young men relate to each other, in the workforce, at home, and so on, is profoundly different than a generation before in the most positive sense. I'm not saying that it's an ideal. You can get to certain issues—for example, the raising of children, where I think we have hardly begun to build a society that supports the rights of both men and women to pursue their own personal talents and supports the nurturing of a family. I think we still sort of say, "Yes, we know women work, but you'll solve the problem when you want to have children."
So there are real weaknesses that have not been addressed, but if you step back from those for a moment—and I am admittedly a person who tends to see the brighter side of things, but I think even if you factor out my innate optimism—we've come a very long way from where we were. And that's very much a result of the rhetoric of the women's movement and the impact it had on the consciousness of women and men who have rethought and maybe even without being able to articulate it have adjusted their views of themselves, their possibilities, their roles, and their relationships.
Reason: What has been Playboy's effect in all of this?
Hefner: Interestingly, to some extent, it's a little bit like with the Vietnam war. Playboy was the first magazine that gave a forum for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And John Kerry and a lot of people wrote for the magazine. But the thing that made it different was that Playboy was the magazine that the guys who had gone over, and especially the guys who had enlisted, were reading. It would have been one thing if The Nation had been running John Kerry. Apart from the circulation level, it's a different kind of thing—a magazine that is accessible to a young man, that he relates to, because he does feel that it's reflecting a positive attitude, a view that life is something to be enjoyed, that's fun, that can be pleasurable. And that this is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. And a political conscience is a part of that. I think it has a much different effect.
Now, moving to your question, I don't think that what Playboy does on these issues is going to fuel the women's movement or affect women at all. The women who read the magazine don't read it because they're looking for the articulation of a feminist blueprint. But when Playboy covers women's issues, whether it's a piece on rape or a piece on lesbian custody or a piece on abortion, its impact on the 11 million men who read the magazine is, I think, very profound—because it's in Playboy. You could put that same piece in Ms. or even a large-circulation women's magazine, and it isn't going to have the same impact. So, it's in that sense a great communication vehicle of ideas and attitudes.
Reason: Is your readership changing?
Hefner: Not a lot. It's the same demographically, but different psychographically. The reader is the same young, college-educated man that he was in the '50s. He's about 31 now, he was 27 then, but that's the population shift. But a 30-year-old today has a whole lot of different attitudes and interests than a 30-year-old in the '50s. A different relationship with women in his life, different attitude toward leisure time, I think a different political orientation. In that sense, the audience is very definitely changing.
Reason: Of course, there's been the introduction of video and VCRs, and I'm sure that that's had a profound effect as well on Playboy.
Hefner: All magazines, or almost all magazines, have been declining in newsstand sales while growing in overall sales. And generally it's assumed that newsstand sales are more of an impulse item—you know, you're going home from work and you decide to buy a magazine, as opposed to "I want to get every issue of this magazine from a subscription." And it's not unreasonable to think that some of what's hurting all magazines on the newsstand is that if you're going home from work, for $3.50 you can rent a video. As people are putting more of their discretionary time, even more than money, into these options such as videocassettes and pay cable television, that's time away from reading. And certainly from newsstand purchases. And I think we're hurt by that, as is everybody. But not, and perhaps this is part of what you're thinking, because of the availability of explicit sexual material in video. There was already so much explicit material available in print that that segment of the audience is not likely to be with Playboy.
Interestingly, in our own video that we are doing, at least the very early results are showing that the two media can support each other instead of cannibalizing each other. We can do video versions of the magazine on cassette and not have cannibalization, because the experiences are still very different. A good magazine has to have a kind of depth to what you're getting that's never there in video. The Playboy interview in the print magazine is going to give you the feeling, if it's a good interview, and I think most of ours are great, that you really have some insight into who this person is and that they've revealed something of themselves to you. In a television interview, if you've talked as long on television as we do in print, I mean, people would be asleep except for the mother of the person you are interviewing! On the other hand, you can see the person, you can get some feeling for how they respond and react, you can see something of how they live. So it's a different kind of communication, even though it's literally the same feature. It appeals to different kinds of interests.
Reason: You have changed the Playboy Clubs to be more appealing to women. Are you trying to do this with the magazine too?
Hefner: The two are not really related. In the club area, one of the things that I realized was that Playboy Clubs hadn't ever changed since they were introduced in 1960. In 1960, people who went out to clubs and bars were almost exclusively men. In the 1980s, a significant number, if not more than half of the people who go out, are women. And they are women who go out with their friends or their boyfriends, and either way, if you've created a club or bar environment to which women do not want to go, you are pretty much assured of failure. So, what we wanted to do was to create a club environment that had an appeal to women as well as to men. We did a lot of things in that regard—the way that we lit the room, the band, and obviously the rabbits. If we were going to say, "Look, a part of the Playboy Club ambiance is that there are these attractive, nice people who are hanging around to wait on you," then if the only attractive, nice people hanging around to wait on you are these good-looking women in these very revealing costumes, then why, as a woman, would you be inclined to want to hang out there?
The difference with the magazine is that we have no intention, and from a business point of view it would be suicidal, to make the magazine a magazine for couples. Because the reality of magazines are that they seem to be more personal forms of expression, with a more specific audience. Magazines that are dual-audience work because they have a strong subject matter, like Tennis or Chicagoan, and magazines that try to cover the range of information and entertainment that Playboy does need to have a more special viewpoint, or they will, by trying to be something for everybody, wind up being nothing for anybody.
I do think that as attitudes change, it is possible to have some erotic, romantic photography in the magazine that has men in it as well as women. Now, you can't have a photograph of a man that has frontal nudity without getting such a visceral reaction from men that it's really extraordinary. The whole rating code in the film business is built around the degree of male nudity. I think that why women are sensitive about Playboy, and why the whole question of exploitation comes up, is in part because as a culture we're surrounded by images of women that are sexual and there's almost a complete absence of images of men that are sexual. That makes women more sensitive about being looked at sexually.
I wish somebody had done a really good magazine for women that had erotic content instead of Playgirl, and every once in a while I think that we should do it. From a business point of view, I'm sure that there's enough of a market there. It would be wonderful if there were a magazine for women that had the intelligence and quality that Playboy has. A magazine that acknowledges that women are also sexual and that this is a positive, not a negative. Maybe that will be done.
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