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Cargando... Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern Americapor Elizabeth Fraterrigo
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Pop culture with insights that will likely be familiar to most readers. ( ) Fraterrigo writes, “Exploring the world created in the pages of Playboy, this book looks at transformations in postwar middle-class society. It begins by examining changing modes in gender roles and family life. In the years after World War II, the men and women who raced to the altar and generated the baby boom endorsed the roles of male breadwinner and female homemakers. They also grappled with their identities, however, and expressed frustrations as they negotiated these roles” (2). Following Hefner’s work and “drawing inspiration from the playboy, by the early 1960s, the ‘Single Girl,’ an unmarried, working girl, had taken her place alongside him, both figures providing models of unfettered individualism and self-fulfillment” (5). Fraterrigo continues, “Playboy’s representations of women shaped later discussions of gender equality and consumer society” (6). Playboy fits into the debate regarding the difference between “masculine” and “feminine” elements of culture in America at midcentury. Fraterrigo begins her narrative with Hefner’s biography and a discussion of popular culture immediately after WWII. Fraterrigo writes, “As [Betty] Friedan acknowledged, women formed a convenient target, their alleged attempts to dominate men and their undue feminizing influence providing a suitable explanation for unsettling changes in American society” (29). In 1952, Ezekiel Gathings’ Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials “sought to define obscenity, assess the scope of offending publications, and propose remedies for curtailing their distribution” (39). The committee failed to reach a conclusion. At the beginning of the 1960s, Helen Gurley Brown countered Friedan’s argument, by making “a strong case for female autonomy, but offered a different strategy for achieving it. She articulated a relationship between feminine identity, paid employment, and consumption that accepted women’s limited career opportunities and construed marriage to be the eventual goal, while placing sexuality and commodity consumption at the center of a prolonged stage of pleasure-oriented singlehood” (106). Despite this framework, the working girl was encouraged to take pride in her appearance, be empathetic, and generally pose “no threat to the gender order” (116). While Playboy certainly fits into the narrative of reclaiming masculinity during the Cold War, it simultaneously fit into prescribed gender roles.
Fraterrigo makes penthouse parties, bachelor pads, office sex and even the “Playboy Bed” sound dull — like Champagne without the fizz. Fraterrigo has given us the most laudably sober and analytically rigorous book ever written about an adult magazine. While her prose strays into occasional thesisese, her research is phenomenally thorough and her conclusions are bold enough to be interesting and modest enough to be feasible.
Playboy was more than a magazine filled with pictures of nude women and advice on how to mix the perfect martini. Indeed, the magazine's vision of sexual liberation, high living, and "the good life" came to define mainstream images of postwar life. In exploring the history of America's mostwidely read and influential men's magazine, Elizabeth Fraterrigo hones in on the values, style, and gender formulations put forth in its pages and how they gained widespread currency in American culture. She shows that for Hugh Hefner, the "good life" meant the freedom to choose a lifestyle, and theone he promoted was the "playboy life," in which expensive goods and sexually available women were plentiful, obligations were few, and if one worked hard enough, one could enjoy abundant leisure and consumption. In support of this view, Playboy attacked early marriage, traditional genderarrangements, and sanctions against premarital sex, challenging the conservatism of family-centered postwar society. And despite the magazine's ups and downs, significant features of this "playboy life" have become engrained in American society. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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