Tuesday, December 09, 2008 - Posts
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We're looking for a publisher for Double X, the women's Web magazine that Slate is launching in the spring. If you're entrepreneurial and you have deep experience leading sales and marketing efforts for digital media properties, we'd love to hear from you. Candidates should have a track record of closing sales. They should also have experience managing sales and marketing teams, and collaborating across editorial, tech, and marketing sections. We also want to find someone with good industry contacts, including relationships with ad agencies and clients relevant to Double X.
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I have always marvelled at Christie Hefner. Because of her, it was possible to believe (perhaps for way too long) in Hef's vision of porn as a "lifestyle," something for the pretty girl next door who's won the lottery. And if you read and loved Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife, as I did, you would have in your head the image of Hef as an American pioneer of a sort, instead of the cartoon he later became. Christie was always unabashed about presiding over his empire: She claimed to be a feminist and a businesswoman and an intellectual and not see the contradictions. In that way, she was from the '80s superwoman age of feminism. Now that she's gone, porn is just back to its dismal, daily grind.
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For five years, I worked for Playboy Enterprises. I worked for the cable TV end of the business, but Playboy is like an octopus, its tentacles flailing everywhere, so we were all privy to the inner-workings of what was already a financially struggling company. On the inside, everybody knew the trouble was Hef. While he was proudly taking Viagra to support his love life, he had less to work with when it came to making savvy business decisions for one of the world's most recognized brands. Yesterday, his daughter Christie announced she would be stepping down from her position as Playboy's CEO, a job she's held for the last 20 years. Subscriptions are down, the stock is falling, and the outlook is grim. At this point, it's hard to know who or what's responsible for sending Playboy down the tubes: the rise of adult content on the Internet that rendered Playboy a soft-core throwback to bygone days; Hef's staunch refusal to let the Playboy aesthetic change from his original vision of it in the 50's; or self-described feminist Christie's inability to capitalize on a titillating brand that couldn't compete in today's market, amidst the Pink Tacos and the Hooters. Regardless, it looks like porn has won the sexual revolution that Playboy helped spawn.
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Jennifer,
I don't think my reaction to 'Gender Bender' was so different from yours. Ultimately I just found it unsatisfying. Because you're right: it's a problem both genders share. So why? What does it signify? And what can be done?
About 10 years ago I took a class with the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who was in the process of publishing a book called The Great Disruption about the breakdown in social capital or "trust" in the Western World that resulted from the social upheaval of the sixties and seventies. "Trust" -- the mystical ingredient that prompts people to shovel their driveways and pick up litter and correct inaccurate Wikipedia entries, join bowling leagues and not cheat on their taxes -- is also, in Fukuyama's view, what made Toyota the undisputed leader of the auto sector and much of East Asia such a manufacturing powerhouse. And I would argue that "trust" is largely what many members of my generation --"Kate" the bitchy I-banker who drinks to seem more "fun" around her male colleagues included -- is trying to replace when we get bombed.
And that is where feminism becomes relevant. Fukuyama famously blamed the Pill, among other innovations, for destroying social capital in the process of emancipating women from the confines of monogamous, procreative relationships. (You might call it "procreative destruction"!) In hindsight Fukuyama's singling out of the Pill seems somewhat packaged to appeal to his then-neoconservative "base," because I do remember thinking it was secretly subversive. Because the political right had long since replaced America's belief in "trust" with a crippling fear of the "moral hazard" that might accompany it. Right now we mostly equate moral hazard, which describes the shift in behavior that accompanies the removal of risk from a certain activity, with the reckless financial institutions in which the Fed is now "injecting" funds. Those financial institutions now seem equally bent on convincing us that renegotiating mortgages for people facing foreclosure would create a similar "moral hazard" just as welfare creates the moral hazard that people will be lazy, the Pill perpetuated the moral "hazard" that women who took advantage of it would have more sex earlier and fewer children later in life and being thrust from suburban automobile-reliant upringings into a city with a bar downstairs that's open till '4 might disincentivize abstemiousness.
And yes, all that has happened. But life without "social capital" is no life, and we must take it as part of a virtuous overall phenomenon that our generation devised a few ways to replace it during those years during which we put off having kids. We repopulated cities, we found "virtual" friends through blogs and grassroots political movements. Where real estate was too costly -- and it has generally been so for my peers in the ever-downsizing industries -- we figured out how to meet regularly with one another in public spaces. And it so happened that bars were a natural, not generally being managed by corporations bent solely on increasing turnover times or transaction size. They're open late. They're everywhere. And many of them -- and many of their regulars -- have been around for generations, connecting us with our pasts and a less complicated period in history in a way that is comforting.
And sure, drinking five nights a week is a less-than-ideal way to achieve all this. But it can't be denied that to patronize a bar regularly, tip forty percent or whatever you can afford, catch up with a regular
group of friends, spend nine dollars at the jukebox playing songs you just heard on your iPod because they sound better in the presence of other people and escort home anyone who overindulges all in the confidence that the phone you forgot will be there in the morning -- all that generates and sustains trust. Hazards also: every densely-taverned town invariably houses an equally-fertile network of AA meeting places, halfway houses, and rehab centers, staffed in large part on a trust basis by people who invariably spent a big chunk of their lives being highly un-trustworthy. Maybe a larger percentage of my generation will wind up patronizing the latter category of venues in our imperfect quest to fulfill this basic human need, but in the meantime behind the slips and slurs and self-mockery exists an earnest effort to prevent that from happening to the people we care about. If anything, Alex Morris's story is merely evidence of that.
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Moe,
We came away from that piece yesterday with entirely different thoughts. You reacted to the condemnatory tone and the assertion that hard-drinking women are drinking to be like men (which I thought was a shaky point, too). I reacted to the fact that, from what Morris said, these self-proclaimed feminists seem to be drinking their way to self-fulfillment.
Today, I have a somewhat different reaction. I don't think it's about gender, feminism, or equality. More than ever, both women and men are looking for a way to tune out the drone of their daily lives and just have a little fun—looking for a place where they feel free and soothed and courageous and everything else Morris said.
But self-fulfillment doesn't come from a bottle. When the buzz wears off, life and all of its pressures are still there, waiting. Another drink or two or 20 won't ever erase that fact. (Not to mention that, as you might have heard once or twice, heavy drinking destroys your liver and kidneys and lends you all the professionalism of a college frat boy.) The only "equality" here is that, male and female, we've got the same problem, and we need to find another way to deal.
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Just when I was feeling all elevated and proud to hail from the Land of Lincoln and 44, here comes Gov. Doo-doo Head, aka Illinois Democrat Rod Blagojevich, along to remind me why I could never, ever say with a straight face that I've never been anything but proud of my country/state/church or party. He was arrested this morning for trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat. Alexis de Tocqueville was wrong, that's all. He thought that one thing that made Americans so darn exceptional was that chez nous, anybody at all could aspire to a fortune. But I'm pretty sure he did not foresee a politician so venal as to view an inspiring, history-making election that showed America at her very best and think: Ah, quick-buck city! Come to papa, you beautiful dollars and board appointments! "I want to make money,'' off the appointment, he reportedly said on a wiretap; let's just say that subtlety is not a hallmark of corruption in my state. I guess he figured that if his Republican predecessor, George Ryan, could milk bribes out of driver's licenses, then he could ride the hope train all the way to an ambassadorship. Blagojevich was elected in 2003 on promises to clean up Illinois government—and just like that guy who ran for Mark Foley's congressional seat on family values, well, he did exactly the opposite. Should we maybe start reading campaign promises as campaign threats? Because I grew up in the Louisiana of the Midwest, I will not pretend to be surprised. But how he could go so low—or imagine that he would not be caught—is something I guess he will have ample time to kick around with Ryan when he joins him behind bars.
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