Woman NewsTimes Snuggles With Viscount of Viagra: Yuck!
Caryl Rivers didn"t appreciate the NYT"s recent front-page "appreciation" of Playboy"s Hugh Hefner. The aging libertine popularized the pleasure principle for men, she says, but his female "playmates" are subservient to male fantasies.
Page 2 of 2But once nice girls could say yes (a fine idea) they also couldn"t say no (a very bad idea). In Hef"s world, women are supposed to be endlessly available for male sexual fantasies and needs. They are playmates, after all.
Legacy of Sexual-Service Pressure
One result I see of that attitude is the great pressure that young women today seem to feel to meet male sexual needs, even at the expense of their own. In 1999, The Washington Post"s Laura Sessions Stepp reported on oral sex rings in middle schools, in which girls were servicing their same-age male classmates. Her article was the first of many that followed the oral sex trend among pre-teens and teens.
Even in the bad old days, when I was growing up, "everything but all the way" meant that both partners could get to orgasm, but no intercourse was allowed. That was certainly a better deal for girls than a "Deep Throat" quickie. Especially in middle school.
In the world of Playboy, one sees what Susan Sontag has called, "the double standard of aging."
Men get older and older, like Hef, but the women on their arms stay eternally young. Hefner these days appears often with his three "girlfriends," each young enough to be his great-granddaughter. This brand of sex isn"t new and daring; it"s as old as history: a powerful old man who can pay for young concubines.
In the Times op-ed piece, author Joanne Lipman, founding editor in chief of Condé Nast Portfolio magazine, said that she recently searched the Internet for information about a TV newswoman who was about to interview her. She said she got a full page of results about her breasts. She also noted that during the presidential primaries the news media made a major effort to avoid racial stereotypes, it was still O.K. to discuss Hillary Clinton"s "cankles."
Hyper-sexualizing young women--and disdaining women as they age--is one recipe for retaining male power. It"s certainly one that Hugh Hefner has long followed.
It"s a recipe we ought to toss immediately in the trash.
Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University, and author of "Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women" (University Press of New England).
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