Like it or not, Playboy is part of our culture. If you want to read about its Playmates, go here. It's a review/essay of The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds. Yes, the piece is risque (though no pictures), but only to the extent necessary to tell the story. A handful of interesting excerpts:
Six hundred and thirteen women are represented, but there is one basic model. On top is the face of Shirley Temple; below is the body of Jayne Mansfield. Playboy was launched in 1953, and this female image managed to draw, simultaneously, on two opposing trends that have since come to dominate American mass culture: on the one hand, our country's idea of its Huck Finn innocence; on the other, the enthusiastic lewdness of our advertising and entertainment. We are now accustomed to seeing the two tendencies combined–witness Britney Spears–but when Hefner was a young man they still seemed like opposites. Hence the surprise and the popularity of Playboy. The magazine proposed that wanton sex, sex for sex's sake, was wholesome, good for you: a novel idea in the nineteen-fifties.
Above all, we get youth. In January of 1958, the magazine had published a centerfold of a sixteen-year-old girl, with the result that Hefner was hauled into court for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. (The case was dismissed. Miss January had written permission from her mother.)
Miss March 1968 got into Playboy because her grandmother wrote to the magazine, “My granddaughter is much better looking and much bustier than any of the girls you've been shooting.”
As for the Playmates' acting history, the statement on Miss October 1999's page–“On screen, Jodi's best known as Ramdar, the 'Super Hot Giant Alien Chick' from 'Dude, Where's My Car' ”–more or less sums it up.
At the same time, the text is very forthcoming about how many divorces these women have had, and how a number of them are no longer eager to have a man in the house. Several Playmates have found God.
Hefner is addicted to games: pinball machines, electronic games, board games. He likes to do forty-hour Monopoly marathons, fuelled by Pepsi (of which, it has been said, he used to consume three dozen bottles a day) and Dexedrine.
