Manclan Episode 7: Playboys Take the Godpill feat Hussein Kesvani (Sample)
From Hugh Hefner to Roosh V and Hamza, we track the “playboy” archetype back to the post-WWII period and examine how it’s manifesting in current online manosphere influencers. How did pickup artists start promoting trad religion? Our guest is Hussein Kesvani, journalist and co-host of the Trashfuture and Ten Thousand Posts Podcasts.
Full episode: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
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Guest is Hussein Kesvani: https://twitter.com/HKesvani
Trashfuture Podcast: https://twitter.com/trashfuturepod / https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture
Ten Thousand Posts Podcast: https://twitter.com/10kpostspod / https://www.patreon.com/10kpostspodcast
Cover art by Jess Johnson (http://instagram.com/flesh_dozer)
Theme & music by Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com). Editing by Corey Clotz.
Man, the breadwinner, playboy, carnivore, retainer of semen, and lifter of weights.
He is wild, hairy, dominant, breathing into his balls and bonding with his bros.
And more than anything, he charges you monthly for his content.
Welcome to Man Clan.
We are your alpha hosts and paragons of masculinity.
Annie Kelly and Julian Field.
This week's Sigma guest is Hussain Kazvani, journalist and co-host of the Trash Future and 10,000 Post podcast.
Hussain, how is your regimen of testosterone-boosting supplements been?
I'm no-sup.
I'm about that no-sup life.
Well, because the thing is Ramadan finished a couple of weeks ago, and I would like to think that My testosterone is higher, not because of like any sort of religious contention, but because usually during that month you're like, you know, you're not, you don't have to refrain from having sex, but like you just get too tired to do it.
And so, yeah, I did a lot of like unintentional, do you know what I mean?
I feel like if I say the R words, which, you know, retention, I'm going to feel really sick saying it, so.
Okay.
I'll leave it there.
Your audience can interpret that however they want to.
If you're a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you.
If you like your entertainment served up with humor, sophistication, and spice, Playboy will become a very special favorite.
We want to make clear from the very start, we aren't a family magazine.
If you're somebody's sister, wife, or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your ladies' home companion.
Most of today's magazines for men spend all their time out of doors, thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing about in fast-flowing streams.
We'll be out there too, occasionally, but we don't mind telling you in advance.
We plan on spending most of our time inside.
We like our apartment.
We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.
These were the words of Hugh Hefner in his opening editorial for the first issue of Playboy magazine.
What could have been another short-lived experiment in publishing instead turned into an instant success.
It surprised even Hefner, who was so afraid of the potential reputational backlash that he kept his name entirely out of the pilot issue.
He had just quit his job as a copywriter for Esquire after being denied a raise, mortgaged his home for $600, and raised $8,000 more from 45 different investors, including his mother.
In today's money, Playboy was founded with a little under $100,000 total.
The cover featured a black and white photo of Marilyn Monroe smiling and waving alongside a text box advertising, first time, in any magazine, full color, the famous Marilyn Monroe nude.
The photograph in question was part of a series shot in 1949, a few years before Monroe became a household name in the United States.
At the time, she had modeled nude for Hollywood photographer Tom Kelly after falling behind on rent.
Now, of course, Tom Kelly Famously related to Annie, I believe, her older uncle.
There's two E's in that, Kelly.
I don't know.
I think that's your uncle.
He's way further up on the family tree.
Yeah, well at Ellis Island, they added an E.
(laughing)
Kelly paid her 50 bucks, or approximately $565 in today's money.
Playboy never photographed Monroe nude.
They simply licensed Kelly's photos, named her Sweetheart of the Month,
and successfully used her status as a newly minted movie star
to propel the publication to fame.
The magazine editorial called her, quote, "The juiciest morsel to come out of the California hills
"since the discovery of the navel orange."
By the end of the decade, Hefner and his early associates were millionaires.
The term playboy became a modern masculine archetype, a lifestyle Hefner claimed was attainable for readers of his magazine.
The page following his opening editorial note was filled with home products the Everyman could purchase to affirm their status as Playboys.
An ice bucket, a suit rack, a portable bar, etc.
All available through mail order from Playboy magazine itself.
Hefner hadn't coined the term Playboy, But it had hitherto been reserved for select figures, all rich, jet-setting socialites with a tragic tendency to wrap their sports cars around trees after getting hammered.
Beyond the obvious commercial incentives, Hefner had, consciously or unconsciously, grown aware of an opportunity born out of a crisis in the American social compact.
After World War II ended, the United States needed a big surge in consumption to propel the country's shift out of the war economy.
Simultaneously, worsening economic prospects in the decades following the end of World War II meant it became increasingly difficult to achieve the post-war dream of the single-income family.
The male going off to work, the woman remaining at home to tend the children.
What if instead of getting married and having children, the male skipped commitment altogether and never became a breadwinner at all?
What if he spent his money on a bachelor pad, luxury cars, foreign liquor, fine clothes, and flings with sexually active, disposable young women?
Barbara Ehrenreich in her 1983 book American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment explained, Playboy was more than a publishing phenomenon.
It was like the party organ of a diffuse and swelling movement.
Writer Myron Brenton called it, quote, the Bible of the beleaguered male.
Playboy readers taped the centrefolds up in their basements, affixed the rabbit head insignia to the rear windows of their cars, joined the Playboy clubs if they could afford to, and, even if they lived more like babbits than bunnies, imagine they were Playboys at heart.
The magazine encouraged the sense of membership in a fraternity of male rebels.
After its first reader survey, Playboy reported on the marital status of its constituency in
the following words, quote, "Approximately half of Playboy's readers, 46.8%, are free men,
and the other half are free in spirit only." So I mean, it's pretty explicit right off the bat
that over half of the audience is fantasizing about not having a wife and then fantasizing
a second time about being a Playboy.
But for the 46%, you can just skip the first part.
Go straight to being a playboy.
Yeah, no, it's actually a really interesting figure.
I didn't know that it was like literally half and half that way.
Yeah, I mean, wait till you hear about the guys who were writing a lot of these articles.
Oh, I can't wait.
They also had, let's say, you know, a hidden propensity to be married with children.
Even in its pilot issue, Playboy leaned into the idea that marriage was a trap set by money-hungry women.
The very first article, written by a PR expert and friend of Hefner's, was titled, Miss Gold Digger of 1953, and subheaded, When a modern-day marriage ends, it doesn't matter who's to blame.
It's always the guy who Pays and pays and pays.
As Ehrenreich remarked, quote, Playboy was hardly subtle about it.
Bert Zollo, the PR expert and friend of Hefner's I mentioned, wrote in a later article for the magazine, Take a good look at the sorry regimented husbands trudging down every woman-dominated street in this woman-dominated land.
Check what they're doing when you're out of the town with a different dish every night.
Don't bother asking their advice.
Almost to a man, they'll tell you marriage is the greatest.
Naturally.
Do you expect them to admit that they made the biggest mistake of their lives?
I mean it's so interesting that like, because I do understand to a certain extent that, you know, Playboy isn't just a lifestyle that it's offering, it's a fantasy lifestyle.
Right.
Typically.
But it is like so interesting when you're reading stuff like this that 50% of its readership are married.
So they're like paying to read about how their life in particular sucks.
Yeah, but I think at the same time like what's really because I think that statistic was really really interesting and so I'm sort of wondering like what constituency they're sort of playing to in terms of I mean clearly they're sort of like pitting their audiences against each other and I don't know to me that's like it's as an editorial strategy it's quite interesting because Because they're not necessarily like valorizing, well at least in this passage doesn't feel like they're valorizing like the bachelor life.
they almost frame it as if like, no, the bachelor life is sort of a necessity
because if you get married and you sort of like do the whole family thing,
then you're gonna be this like regimented husband and you're gonna be in the situation where like,
you know, your wife is gonna have control over you.
So it's almost, they frame like, yeah, they frame these sorts of bachelors
not as kind of, not even as sort of positive, like here is like a better,
the bachelor life is like fundamentally better.
It's like, no, this is like the only way to protect yourself from, you know,
these women that will naturally just betray you.
I feel like it is kind of like one of those fantasies where it's like, well, this is just
me and my magazine.
Maybe, you know, I'm on the toilet or whatever.
My wife is like leaving me alone for a moment.
And here I can read the forbidden passage that tells me that yes, she is acting like a bitch.
And yes, she is a succubus, like, you know, basically taking all my money and energy away.
I was also going to say that, like, Yeah I'm sure we'll sort of get onto this like later in the episode but like looking for like validation in that way isn't necessarily on... I guess to me what's interesting having sort of watched a lot of like the kind of Manosphere content for when I used to work at a men's magazine and just like generally in terms of research,
Is this kind of idea that they sort of present the husband as kind of doing this noble sacrifice, you know, for the sake of, you know, for the sake of their families, for the sake of civilization, but they go unappreciated for that.
And so they read this magazine or like, you know, in kind of contemporary times, they watch this YouTube video, listen to this podcast and everything.
And they're still sort of being told the same message, which is that, like, fundamentally they are sort of being hard done by, and what's worse is that, like, they have to lie about, like, their sort of life condition.
They have to, like, say that, no, being married is, like, amazing and it's great.
You know, almost as if it's sort of, like, the civic duty to do it.
That's a really interesting point he's saying, because of course, you know, this is happening concurrent.
This article is being written concurrent to the women's movement.
Yeah, so that's a good point as well, yeah.
And so that's like a... I'm sort of saying, you know, why would these guys want to be told that their life sucks?
But actually, they're sort of being sold, I guess, what you're saying is a kind of flattering victimhood at the same time as, you know, the feminine mystique and stuff is happening, saying their wives are oppressed, you know?
Zolo wrote for Playboy under the pseudonym Bob Norman, presumably to avoid being associated with the beliefs his pieces espoused.
It's kind of hilarious that Bob Norman is the pseudonym and Burt Zolo is the real name.
Yeah, I know.
It's a real Travis View Logan Strain situation.
There was also the issue that Burt Zolo was a married man himself.
In an online obituary he wrote about his father, Zolo's son Paul said, For this famous first issue, he wrote an article called Miss Gold Digger of 1953.
It was a treatise on how not to allow a woman to trap you into marriage.
Of course, my father, and Hef, were both already married at this point.
During our childhood, he remained almost embarrassed by his Playboy connections, and never did we see this issue, or his story.
When I asked him about writing the story, he initially said he didn't remember writing it, which I didn't doubt.
But, he said, quote, I was just fulfilling an assignment.
But he did it well.
It was one of the first and most eloquent definitions of the Playboy male.
We joked about his bad call for decades, turning down Hef instead of becoming a partner in his new empire.
We joked about the fact that my brother and I could have taken over Playboy in the 80s, as did Hef's daughter, and could be sitting in the grotto right now with Playboy bunnies.
My dad loved to laugh about it.
Quote, I thought it was a terrible idea, he'd say with his big generous smile, inviting one and all to laugh at him.
But the truth is, my dad was not a Playboy.
He would not have been happy in that world.
Hef would have parties that started at 11pm.
Not my dad's thing.
Or my mom's.
And Playboy was Hefner's vision.
Not my dad's.
And so though he joked about missing out, I know he knew it was for the best.
So I love this portrait of Zolo as like, basically someone who was like, invited to inhabit a character.
Right?
And he just like, wiped it.
To his family, to everyone else.
It's like, nah, I never really did that.
It wasn't me.
I think the other interesting thing about this is his son is saying, but he did the writing well.
It's one of the first and most eloquent definitions of the playboy male.
But that article is just nonstop bitching about alimony.
Like there's no glamour.
It's just a vision of the wife as a kind of drain.
Yeah, it's defining itself against something.
Yeah, there's no glamour there, but it is the very first article in the very first issue.
So it has a really cool drawings in it of like a woman kind of like looming over this man and the man is is holding both of his pockets out.
He's just pulling them out to show there's nothing in here.
I'm turning.
I'm inside out!
Yeah, do you know, I actually think I've seen that image for a class on masculinity or something like that.
It's something else.
Yeah.
Regardless of the hypocrisy, Zolo and Hefner's words put forth an enticing argument for its male readers.
Men had been made into slaves through the ritual of marriage, a slavery enforced by an unfair pro-woman government.
But, Playboy magazine argued, you could break out of this matrix by simply opting out of marriage altogether and pursuing an archetype of masculinity defined by Hefner and co.
The Playboy.
Forget the outdated war-era austerity and the commitment to the nuclear family.
Get rich, live a life of pleasure-driven consumption, and fuck as many women as you can.
Erin Reich explains.
Through its articles, its graphics, and its advertisements, Playboy presented, by the beginning of the 60s, something approaching a coherent program for the male rebellion.
A critique of marriage, a strategy for liberation, reclaiming the indoors as a realm for masculine pleasure, and a utopian vision, defined by its unique commodity ensemble.
It may not have been a revolutionary programme, but it was most certainly a disruptive one.
If even a fraction of Playboy readers had acted on it in the late 50s, the breakdown of the family would have occurred a full 15 years before it was eventually announced.
Hundreds of thousands of women would have been left without breadwinners, or stranded in court fighting for alimony settlements.
The countercultural cachet that Playboy claimed for itself was entirely hedonic and jived perfectly with an individualistic consumer society.
It was a rejection of community and non-transactional interpersonal relationships.
Despite his editorial team in the 1960s being largely composed of married men, many of them quote-unquote squares, Hefner defiantly proclaimed, quote, I don't want my editors marrying anyone and getting a lot of foolish notions in their heads about togetherness, home, family, and all that jazz.
It's like, no, not that jazz.
This jazz.
And then you put on a cool phonograph.
Hugh Hefner wanted working men's disposable income to flow down a different route.
He wanted this new generation of Playboys to stay home and covet objects, but not in a womanly or queer way.
Aaron Reich explains.
For all its potential disruptiveness, Playboy was immune to the standard charges levelled against male deviants.
You couldn't call it anti-capitalist or un-American, because it was all about making money and spending it.
Hefner even told his readers in 1963 that the Playboy spirit of acquisitiveness could help, quote, put the United States back in the position of unquestioned world leadership.
You could call it immature, but it already called itself that because maturity was about mortgages and life insurance, and Playboy was about fun.
Finally, it was impervious to the ultimate sanction against male rebellion, the charge of homosexuality.
The Playboy didn't avoid marriage because he was a little bit queer, but on the contrary, because he was so ebulliently, even compulsively, heterosexual.
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