It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
Following the spat over Patricia Ridenour’s male nude photos at the Benham Studio Gallery, the space put up another photog’s show full of men for this month. But the personas shown in this show are clearly gay–which makes them actually less threatening than Ridenour’s straight-guy nudes in the topsy-turvy, reverse-double-standard realm of the Seattle art world.
FASHION UPDATE: Artist-designer Godis Nye asked me to tell you she created some of the set pieces seen in the fashion-show photos below.
BRIT VS. BRITNEY: A Londoner taunts the all-too-apparent hypocrisy of today’s poster child for “abstinence education.”
…was an “alternative” fashion show held Thursday night at a packed Catwalk nightclub in Pioneer Square. Billed by its promoters as “the next level of multi-media art,” it comprised runway segments by 12 local designers (including print MISC writer Jennifer Velasco), all coordinated and sequenced to form one semi-continuous spectacle.
The clothes were all fun and well-constructed. Some outfits were more creatively designed than others; but even the nothing-you-haven’t-seen-before garments (PVC fetish dresses; pseudo-rustic “tribal” rave wear) were perfectly good examples of their subgenres.
The hour-and-a-half show began over an hour late, and was prefaced by a long set of annoyingly repetitive techno music and video projections of war, famine, and mushroom clouds. Then a solitary female model wandered onstage and sat herself down, expressionless and mute.
This depressing moment was followed by several runway segments devoted to similarly downbeat themes (described in the show’s flyer as “Anger,” “Deception,” “Future Fear,” and “Mourning.” I began to worry that the whole show would be another example of Seattle people thinking they could only be hip if they imitated a New York sensibility–in this case a cynical, everything-sucks type of New York sensibility.
Only in the eighth segment, entitled “Inspiration” and costumed by our pal Christina Collins (see picture below), did the mood lighten up. The rest of the show, thankfully, was about (as the flyer said) “the transformation from darkness to light, from winter to spring.” The music became more listenable; the video images became more hopeful. Models began to prance instead of sulk; some even smiled.
The next designers’ segments continued the warming trend. I-Ching Lao showed off funky multicult wear, on models of non-bulimic stature. Megan Wilson presented colorful, sheer “Girlie Fashions,” on models who visibly enjoyed living in their bodies. Then came Velasco’s brief segment (see picture below), with bright-and-bouncy clubwear in cool shades of white.
On the freebie table at the front of the Catwalk were stacked copies of what might just be the dumbest fashion/lifestyle magazine ever created (and I know that’s saying a lot). The San Diego-based Revolt in Style combines pictorials about swimsuits and boxing, profiles of allegedly rising stars in music and movies, and strip-club ads. The name itself, of course, is the dumbest aspect of the mag. If this country ever had a real revolution, it’d be against commercial tripe such as that represented in Revolt.
A LOT OF PEOPLE have told me they read the print MISC in the lavatory, but this is the first pants-down reader I’ve been able to document. Christine was one of the models for a body-painting exhibition last night at the Forgotten Works Gallery. (There were a total of two ladies and two gents with unclad but all-decorated physiques; though one of the guys kept a loincloth on.) All the models were bright and vivacious and (except for the loincloth guy) had no apparent qualms about total strangers seeing their total bodies (even bare feet) live and in person. You’ll be able to meet Christine, fully and fabulously dressed, on April 25 at the Fashion Underground show in the Catwalk club in Pioneer Square. (Yep, she not only wears clothes most of the time, she designs ’em.)
SPEAKING OF THE PRINT MISC, the Science vs. Science Fiction issue will be out next week. (Anyone who’d like to help with distro should email me.) We go straight into production from there on the More Sex, Less Gender issue. (Get your story ideas in now.)
And consider yourselves warned: There will be another public MISCmeeting soon after the new issue comes out. Among the topics: Figuring out how to make this quixotic venture at least a little more fiscally self-sufficient. (Despite apparent rumors to the contrary, I’m not independently wealthy and cannot keep running it at a loss indefinitely.)
The Age of Uniforms
from the Winter 2002 print MISCby Matt Briggs
MOM FIRST WORKED for Boeing in the late ’60s, in a long building with dirty windows overlooking the Duwamish River. She worked as a production illustrator, producing diagrams and signs. She didn’t keep the job for long, but she said this was her favorite job.
She wore blue jeans and black boots and an oxford shirt, or sometimes she wore a dark blue skirt and a sweater. Graphite always filled the space under her fingernails.
Always a boom and bust town, Seattle busted in the beginning of the ’70s. Boeing’s layoffs resulted in a company town without much of a company left. Mom found work waiting tables and wearing other people’s clothes. Washington State law stated at the time that if your employer required you to wear clothing of a particular color or style, he or she had to provide it.
SCOTTY WATTS OWNED the Copper Kitchen Restaurant, where Mom first met my father while she waited on tables. Scotty also owned the Peppermill and the Dutch Oven. Scotty Watts’s waitresses wore mustard colored dresses and mustard colored hats that looked like mushrooms. Because the top-heavy hats fell into people’s soup, none of the waitresses wore them.
“We girls rolled up our dresses because they came down over our knees,” Mom said. “The waist had an elastic strip and we folded the dresses and tucked them in and tied the apron string to keep everything up. The style then was to wear your skirt cut just below your crotch.”
After she married my father, Scotty moved Mom to the Peppermill. She wore the same uniform. Mom said the shoes were the most important article of clothing with a waitress uniform. She bought nurse shoes that only came in white and she shoe polished them brown to match her uniform. The heavy rubber soles looked like gigantic translucent erasers.
In the spring of that year, when Mom became pregnant, my father insisted that they get married. He had already been in enough trouble that they’d suspended his driver’s license; but he still drove his dented blue Buick. He’d sworn off alcohol. In the months she’d known him, my father seemed sober and even a little nerdy and not at all like a drunk. Mom said, “You don’t know about someone’s history until it becomes your own past.” That summer, she miscarried and spent three days in the University of Washington Medical Center.
In the beginning of September, Mom began work at the Alpine Cafeteria. The waitresses left the brown dresses with muttonchop sleeves at the restaurant. They wore white aprons and wedgies. They were supposed to wear hair nets. The hair nets would slip off into people’s food, so they took them off and kept their hair in ponytails, which fit the theme of the restaurant anyway.
Labor Day fell on her second or third day and, because she was new, she didn’t know to worry when the other waitresses didn’t come in. Few restaurants were open, so crowds of people sat in the restaurant. The food kept on coming. Mom didn’t know where the plates were supposed to go, so order after order piled up on the hot counter. Angry customers pointed out their food.
The busboy was a 35-year-old mute. He’d lost his voice from screaming in Alaska. He’d been in two airplane crashes working the salmon. The older waitresses treated him like shit. He wore blue jeans and a T-shirt. Mom and he formed a little team because she would give him tips and treat him well and so he’d bus her tables quickly; so she had a better turn-around on her tables and was able to make more money per table than the older waitress.
Many of the waitresses at the Alpine Cafeteria had worked there for years. Each had her own regular customers. They were stunted, hard women with gray legs and dyed black hair and faces like stale doughnuts. They took their time and nothing stopped them or sped them up. “It was a horrible job. I only lasted for four months there.”
Two weeks after she started at the Alpine Cafeteria, Scotty came and said my father was in the King County Jail. He’d been pulled over and put in jail because of his suspended license.
Finally, she went back to the Peppermill. The cooks wore black and white checkered slacks and double-breasted blouses. Scotty didn’t allow the waitresses to take their uniforms home. She worked there until she was pregnant with me.
After a couple of months off, she went to work at the Denny’s on Aurora Avenue North and worked there until she was pregnant with my brother. She had to buy an orange and brown uniform and had to wear it to work and home because there wasn’t any place to change. They wanted to upgrade the image of waitresses, to make them more like stewardesses. They wore very heavy A-line dresses (costing $12 to $15) and black turtlenecks. She didn’t like to wear the dress home on the bus, because the brown fabric smelled like the kitchen and the food and cigarette smoke.
She worked there until she was five months pregnant. She made her own dress using matching fabric because their dresses wouldn’t accommodate a pregnant figure. Finally the manager fired Mom for her pregnancy. “You can’t even wear the uniform,” he said. “My customers are complaining that you are working too hard for a pregnant woman.”
She didn’t work for nine months or so. In that time, she had my brother and the family moved to Fall City in the Snoqualmie Valley.
At the Gateway Cafe in North Bend, a roadhouse on Sunset Highway and then the original interstate, Mom wore a black skirt and white shirt. They supplied the apron. She kept a pot of coffee in one hand and a plate of the special in the other.
The lumberjacks wore corkboots and blue jeans cut just above the boots. Red suspenders held up their loose pants. They came in directly from the logging camp where they weren’t allowed to drink. They came in covered in mud and sawdust.
“Just like an old time saloon, at first they would accidentally brush up against your breasts or you’d feel a cold hand on the back of your thigh; and as the night wore on, they moved into the Moriritz Room where they’d all try to grab you and you’d have to dance and squirm past them.”
Only women bartenders worked at the Gateway. They called the owner, Edna, “The One Armed Bandit.” She lost the arm in a washing machine as a little girl. It was one of those old-fashioned ones with belts. She was a very good-looking woman. She ran the place like a drill sergeant. She encouraged the girls to make the men happy. Her husband was named Bear and he kept to the back room doing accounting. In the summer, the girls wore halter tops and brief shorts. At the end of the night, they served the lumberjacks breakfast and coffee.
At the Summit House at Snoqualmie Pass, an ancient structure of raw logs with plywood and drywall and insulation tacked to the interior, Mom wore black skirts and a white blouse and red paisley vests with pockets. The homeless bartender slept in the storeroom. He let a cigarette go and it burned the place down. With no running water at the Pass, there wasn’t enough water to put out the fire.
The next place, Ken’s Truck Town, required her to wear a white polyester nurse-style uniform. They supplied these; but the waitresses had to change into them in the break room. Mom caught pneumonia from the walk-in freezer and was sick for a long time. The customers started to complain. Her boss told her, “Tomorrow you come back well.” She went to the doctor, took penicillin, and started to look for another job.
“I had interviewed with Scott Adams before. I went down looking for a job. I remembered the interview from before being really long and like he was grilling a potential chief financial officer of a bank. I told him I could wait a rush with 250 customers on the floor, and I was looking for a job. He told me I must be a real crackerjack waitress. He hired me right on the spot.”
He owned the Denny’s on 4th Avenue South, in the franchise’s original diamond-shaped building. Mom had to buy another single piece orange and brown uniform with black stockings and dark shoes, the same uniform she hadn’t been able to wear four years before.
He eventually fired her for being too volatile. Mom says it was because she was getting a ride to work sometimes from Harold Johnson, a black guy. Everyone thought she was sleeping with him. Specifically, Scott Adams fired her because she refused to take a personal check. Mom obeyed the policy that Denny’s would not accept personal checks. A guy came in and Mom didn’t accept his check even though he was a regular. She was fired a couple of days later.
When she went back to pick up her last paycheck from Scott Adams, he hunched down to ask me how I was holding up. I asked him, “Why did you fire my mom?” He wore a blue suit and kept his two individual clumps of hair on either side of his head neatly stacked and the clean bald expanse of skin between them oiled like a highly polished linoleum floor. He had an expansive black mustache and slightly damp, red lips. He held my arms and started to cry. “Tiger, your Mom will always have a job here.”
“It became clear to me I would be one of those old nasty Seattle waitresses. Clear to me I wouldn’t be able to stay married to your father. The job I had that made me the happiest was when I had been a production assistant at Boeing.”
MOM WORE POLYESTER slacks and shirts when she went to Bellevue Community College to study drafting. After her second year at BCC, she found a job at the Ambrose Co. at an Overlake office park. She wore slacks and shirts.
Ambrose created a line of machines designed to fill paint containers. Mom did manual drafting on boards. Mom produced complicated blueprints for the company; her mechanical drafting block letters filled the margins. In the front office, the company paid for the women’s hair to be done. “They were dressed to the nines,” Mom said. “But I was in the back office and just kept my hair short.”
The summer she finished college she bought two suits, a wool herringbone jacket and skirt and a gabardine jacket and skirt. Before she left my father and moved to Renton, she walked hurriedly through the house wearing thin high heels and her work uniform. On the soft wood floors she left a trail of heel impressions like someone pressing the tip of a pencil into a sheet of clay.
SHE FOUND A JOB right away at Boeing where she became a tech-aid, a drafter, on the 737-200. When she came home late after driving along the stop and go traffic on 405 and then the long drive from Eastlake to North Bend on I-90, she still wore her Boeing Security badge over one pocket. When someone got a job at Boeing, they always said, “I got on at Boeing’s.”
Every fourth person in the area had a job making airplanes. The other seventy-five percent of the population called Boeing “the Lazy B;” when they asked someone to explain their job there, they couldn’t make sense of the explanation.
For seven years, Mom wore professional clothes. In 1987, casual Fridays started. “On Friday you wore whatever you wanted to wear,” Mom said. “The guys wore polo shirts and jeans. After a while it was like that every day. Now, I don’t wear uniforms anymore.”
…without the officially-proclaimed “in” colors for 2002, including “Rosa Roja,” Langostino,” Snappy Orange,” “Lemoncello!” (Found by McSweeneys.)
THANX TO THE NEARLY 100 souls who braved the blustery Feb. night to attend our suave Signifying Nothing exhibition opening last night. The rest of you can see it seven days a week until March 6 at the 2nd & S. Jackson.
BACK ON THE POP-CULT FRONT, that PBS workhorse Sesame Street got a major format overhaul this week. The kiddie-ed show now features far fewer one-minute-or-less blackout skits and films, instead favoring longer segments (up to 10 minutes) with narratives and familiar characters. Producers say this restructuring is the result of intense audience research into what Those Kids Today prefer to see.
This, of course, begs the question: What will come in future years, as this long-attention-span generation enters adolescence? I’m no corporate futurologist a la Faith Popcorn, but there are certainly intriguing possibilities to imagine emergine sometime in the mid-2010s:
THE GUY WHO TRIED to move the Seattle Mariners to Tampa is now in line for a cushy federal appointment, despite his career history of shady dealings.
A SCOTTISH JOURNALIST wonders why the recent media hype over the “porno chic” women’s-fashion fad hasn’t involved actual porn performers.
“44 REASONS NOT to get a boob job.” (By the (male) author of “Why I’m Still Not a Libertarian.”)
As promised a couple weeks back, here is my preliminary list of some of what I love about this nation of ours. Thanks for your emailed suggestions; more are quite welcome.)
(This article’s permanent link.)
Teenage girls across North America are snapping up T-shirts with risque slogans on them, including assorted variations on the number 69, Playboy, and declarations of general naughtiness.
Parents, journalists, and even a few politicians are getting predictably perturbed. (My, aren’t these grownups just so immature?)
News flash: Adolescents have hormones, and love to make a big tease among their peers. Adolescents also love to proclaim their independence and impending grownuphood, and there are few better ways to do that than by publicly announcing one’s sexual arrival.
What’s new? Just the particular pride and explicitness in these T-shirt statements.
Three years ago, one of my ex-Stranger colleagues tried to get a deal to write a book about high school girls who were really virgins but were branded as sluts by other girls, merely for looking or acting insufficiently ladylike. Three years, of course, is the standard turnover rate for teen trends; so the younger sisters of those ‘90s shunned girls are now proudly proclaiming slutdom as a status symbol.
(Of course, today’s assertions of slutdom probably have as little to do with reality as yesterday’s accusations of slutdom.)
The Smithsonian Institution’s museum-store catalog now offers a kimono with pictures of U.S. WWII fighter planes. A Japanese-style woman’s garment, festooned with images of male-piloted attackers ready for their “thirty seconds over Tokyo,” brings up all sorts of potentially odd gender-role imageries we don’t want to even think about right now.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of Morris Graves, last of the ’50s “Northwest Mystic” painters and a continued inspiration even to diehard urban skeptics such as myself.
SOME OF THE THINGS I’VE BEEN DOING in recent weeks, instead of finishing up the transformation of this site to that popular “weblog” format:
They sat me down for an hour with a Betacam camera and a chroma-key blue screen in a Westin Hotel meeting room. I gave the usual shtick on the rise of Cobain and co. (Refreshingly, they were interested in Nirvana’s music and indie-rock philosophy, not the Cobain-Love celebrity circus or the drug tragedy.)
While I was miked up, I also answered questions about the movie Slacker (the product of a highly un-slacker-esque DIY-culture aesthetic), the continuing success of Nintendo’s Super Mario character (putting him in ever-bigger worlds only enhances his feisty-little-guy appeal), “designer grunge” fashion (I pleaded with viewers not to blame anyone in Seattle for it), and that way-overused term “Generation X” (the BBC producer was unaware that it originally came from a 1964 British book).
I’ve no idea when the show will air in Britain, whether it will ever appear Stateside, or whether any of my comments will make the final cut.
NEXT: In the Seattle upscale monoculture, everybody’s white (including the blacks).
ELSEWHERE:
A COUPLE WEEKS BACK OR SO, I told you about a fashion makeover with some odd consequences. I didn’t tell you all the consequences, however.
It seems that when Demographic Debbie, the perfect embodiment of the white upscale-professional archetype, let her new friend Janis dress her in those retro-’80s clothes so popular these days, Debbie’s personality regressed to its former teenage state. Without her self-suppressions of adulthood, without her tightly-held facade of hyper-bland conformity, Debbie reverted to the look of primal fear she’d displayed all through high school.
She went around her home and her office sulking, head lowered, arms clutching her briefcase to her chest as if it were a Pee-Chee. When she talked, it was always either fast and nervous or slow and almost stuttering. When she drove her car, it was with the sputtering and speeding-to-the-light of a new driver trying to prove she wasn’t scared. When she spoke to authority figures (her company’s board of directors), she rambled incoherently as if she were trying desperately to think up a lie to tell to her school principal.
Among her female subordinates at RNI Business Technologies (formerly RevolutioNet Inc.), she was chatty and palsy-walsy and gossipy. With the men, she displayed a thin veneer of stoic indifference, above a slightly-thicker layer of attempted seductive allure, on top of a base emotion of total hormonal confusion.
Debbie’s children instantly interpreted her new look and attitude as a pathetic attempt to become their “friend.” They shunned her like last year’s toy fad.
Debbie’s husband initially got off on the fantasy-come-true of legal “underage” sex. But within days he tired of her constant fumbling, her constant feigned shock at the sight of his body, her screeching fake-orgasm moans, and her constantly asking him if he really did like her.
The only person who really got along with the new Debbie was Janis’s own teenage daughter Anais, who at last had an adult she could tell everything to who wasn’t her mom.
Debbie was sufficiently self-aware (indeed, that was her biggest obsessive trait) to know she had to change. In a heart-to-heart with her at the local coffee shop, Janis insisted that Debbie’s previous moderation-to-the-extreme personality was nothing to go back to.
Debbie, Janis deduced, needed to become the emotionally fully progressed post-adolescent she’d obviously never been.
But how?, Debbie asked.
As Janis explained, the best way to quickly mature a giggly-nervous teenage girl was to put her through a humiliating first sexual experience, preferably leading to a pregnancy scare. But Debbie had already had two husbands and three kids, so that wouldn’t work. Even if Debbie’s emotional self was situated to react with abject fear, Janis surmised, her body knew it’d be nothing she hadn’t already survived.
No, Janis concluded, Debbie would need a different instant-aging scheme.
Exactly one week later, Debbie had become a new woman. A newer new woman.
She strutted on the streets with a new-found confidence. She stared life in the eye and made it blink. Business clients were intimidated into signing contracts on her exact terms. Employees respected and adored her. Her kids did whatever she told. Her husband dragged himself into work every morning, spent from the night before.
In her car, Debbie kept the stereo cranked up to the total-immersion compilation tape of punk-rock classics Janis had prescribed for her. With every two-chord repitition, every shout of X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage Up Yours,” Debbie felt more confident, more in tune with her inner vengeful brat.
From their usual post at the coffee shop’s back table, Janis and her daughter Anais watched the new punkified Debbie hold her head up high, stand perfectly still in her all-black office suit and stiletto heels, and calmly yet assuredly demand her favorite beverge from the barista. It was Anais who noticed the first faint slivers of ash-blonde roots growing from Debbie’s jet-black dyed hair, and asked Janis how long Debbie would stay this way before she mutated into something hideous and dysfunctional.
We’ll just have to wait and see, an assuring Janis told her kid. Anais’s face lit up with the impatient anticipation of an all-new freak show, coming soon to a theater near her.
NEXT: Does the “Northwest Lifestyle” personality type even exist?
WHEN WE LAST LEFT our lovable fictional gang at the promising Internet startup company RevolutioNet, control of the firm had just been usurped by Demographic Debbie, the perfect urban-white American adult female.
In her first month in charge, Debbie’s already proved herself valuable to the company’s backers. As the perfect target-market consumer, Debbie knew what her fellow perfect target-market consumers (in her case, small-to-medium-business owners) wanted. And as someone who looked good in a dress-for-success suit, she’s successfully schmoozed her way into trial deals with many of the businesses needed for the firm’s new focus as a business-to-business supply brokerage.
But as the leader of a staff of computer geeks and young Web hotshots, her day-spa looks and ever-so-moderate demeanor left much to be desired. That was all fine for her investor-bosses, who enjoyed her image of “adult supervision,” showing the world that this was no hopeless dot-com venture but Serious Business run by Serious People.
Her employees, though, didn’t like to be treated as rude schoolchildren in need of a strict schoolmarm’s discipline. They (especially the programming staff) began to chafe under her ever-tighter grip on expense accounts, departmental budgets, working hours, even in-office music (official order: nothing weirder than Enya).
Debbie may have been a priss, but she was an attentive priss. She knew any staff insurrection (especially by Pratt, the headstrong chief programmer who’d hand-tooled most of the website’s code) would be disastrous at this stage in the company’s halting start. She knew she had to change, to reach out to the young and/or hip among her charges.
That’s why she came, albriet reluctantly, to the little coffeehouse near the office, where many young and/or hip people congregated. It was hard, mighty hard, for her to admit needing help in anything; and she certainly wasn’t going to let a man hear it. So she asked Kirsten, the sullen barista; Janis, the 41-year-old punk rock mom; and Flies-With-Eagles, the New Age shaman. As they sat around the big table in the back of the coffeehouse after hours, she asked them to help her loosen up, lighten up, and wisen up, at least among the staff in the office.
Flies-With-Eagles said Debbie needed to confront and release her fears–fears of failure, of vulnerability, of being fully human.
A more pragmatic Kirsten said Debbie had to trash the beige pantsuits, the M.A.C. cosmetics, and the horrendously conventional short brown hair.
A patient Janis waited her turn, then said both the other women had their points. Debbie, Janis quietly proclaimed, needed to shed both her old way of looking and her old way of thinking. In short, she needed a makeover, and pronto. What’s more, Janis proclaimed herself just the one who could make Debbie over right; to make her look and feel younger, less inhibited, more alive and attuned to the world around her.
At least that was the idea. The result, I must confess, didn’t quite work out that way.
Oh, Debbie looked years younger all right. Between the Krazy Kolor hair dye (with clashing-color extensions), the neo-1979 platform shoes, the Alexis Carrington handbag, and the vintage Generra unisex pattern tops, Debbie looked, and felt, just like she had as a teenager.
And it was just at the time she looked at herself in the ladies’-room mirror in the coffeehouse, in this garb with this hairdo, that she suddenly remembered what a miserable teenager she’d been.
Instead of freeing her from her repressions, her new look unleashed everything she’d spent her adult life working so hard to repress.
The first words she told Janis: “Is my ass too big? I don’t just mean in this outfit, I mean is it too big in general? Am I EVER going to get boobs? You don’t see any zits, do you? Do you think I’d look better with those collagen puffy lips? What CAN I ever do to stop looking so fat?”
Kirsten and Flies-With-Eagles both rolled their eyes in dismay.
Janis, however, couldn’t have been happier. Another successful case, she thought, of a soulless yuppie turned into a real person.
A real unhappy, obsessive person, but a real person nonetheless.
NEXT: Real life among the dot-com decommissioned.
YESTERDAY, we riffed on a vision of sexual liberation for a post-corporate era.
That, of course, presumes that such an era is imminent, or at least that one can imagine it to be imminent.
I know I’m far from the only observer who’d like the current socio-economic-political zeitgeist to change. And I can’t think of a better way to help it happen than by making positive affirmations that it already has.
In that spirit, let’s imagine the components of the ’90s nostalgia craze, sure to hit just as soon as the rest of the nation realizes how over the era is.
And as for that other form of techno-optimism, that John Perry Barlow-propagated idea that we should just let big businesses run everything (in the name of the Internet Revolution) took a rather substantial dip in credibility around late ’99 and early ’00.
Of course, my having listed these trends under the “nostalgia” rubric implies they’re not just going away, but will roar back with a vengeance. And with the ever-shortening revival cycles, you can expect them back sooner rather than later, ensconced with all layers of hip-ironic sensibility.
Consider yourself warned.
NEXT: The wrong way to turn an Internet startup into an established respectable firm.
SHOWTIME RAN ONE of those Playboy self-congratulatory videos this month.
The magazine’s video division has put out at least three or four of these tapes in recent years. All of them gush on and on about how the magazine singlehandedly started the Sexual Revolution, conquered the bad ol’ American Puritan double standards, allowed people to feel good about their bodies, and taught folk to view the mating act as fun and even wholesome.
And its founder Hugh M. Hefner is always depicted by his hired video documentarians as the ultimate cool dude, a great party host and a tireless supporter of all righteous causes. By the time one of these videos is over, a viewer might feel a cult-O-personality trip going on, despite the claims to the publisher’s self-effacing humility.
None of these hype jobs or related PR efforts have daunted the magazine’s longtime critics, who’ve leveled the same charges against it all these years–charges that imagine the magazine to be as singularly influential as it claims to be, but in the wrong direction.
Not only is this single monthly rag blamed for the objectivication of women among males and unhealthy body-image obsessions among young females, but some accusers have even blamed it for rape and domestic violence.
In my opinion, that’s a crock. Neither Playboy nor, I presume, anyone working for it wants anybody to get hurt. Nor, at least in their own minds, do they mean to demean womanhood. They think they’re honoring, even celebrating female humanity by offering what they claim to be “The World’s Most Beautiful Women” and asking readers to worship these women as perfect, unattainable fantasy topics.
That’s what I think they think they’re doing. What I think they’re really doing is different, both from that explanation and the critics’ diatribes.
Playboy is really a relic of the grey-flannel-suit era of marketing and advertising it claims to have originally been a rebellious statement against. It’s corporate and bland. It treats sex as just another consumer-leisure activity, no more or less involving than shopping or tourism.
And the girlie pictures are like ads for an unavailable “product,” utilizing every graphic advance in lighting and digital retouching to portray their subjects as “flatteringly” as ad photographers try to “humanize” the newest cars and detergents.
Today’s Playmate characterizations (and, remember, the models themselves might not really be anything like the roles they’re playing) are neither alluring temptresses nor friendly girls-next-door. They’re L.A. starlets, model/actress/whatevers all done up with bleach and silicone. They exist only in a Hollywood make-believe realm (and in the cut-rate versions of that realm that are North America’s lap-dance clubs). Their purpose is to sell–to sell magazines and videos, to sell their own star-images.
And a lot of the time, they’re not even all that sexy.
It’s an aesthetic that has everything to do with turning young men into good consumers and nothing to do with turning them into good lovers.
Its deficiencies wouldn’t seem to matter, since Playboy has had the softcore-hetero market pretty much to itself. Its only non-sleazy rivals are the new Perfect 10 and the newer print version of the website Nerve. All the other girlie magazines have gone to hardcore porn.
But while neither Hefner nor anybody else Stateside was looking, the British “bloke magazines” such as Maxim started U.S. editions with leering-attitude text pieces, non-nude pictures of supermodels (themselves sales professionals in the business of selling women’s clothes), and advice (albeit often wrong advice) on how young men might get beyond just looking at pictures of women and start dating and mating with genuine females.
Maxim and its ilk are simultanously treating sex more like a part of its readers’ lives and making it seem naughty again. They’re rapidly gaining on Playboy in both circulation and in the cultural consciousness; while Hefner continues to schmooze at his palace with his invited Hollywood celebrities, ignoring (or trying to ignore) the social/sexual changes challenging both his and Hollywood’s grip on America’s minds and crotches.
NEXT: Sex magazines may be dumb, but sex is still great!
