rednecksvilletown

I'm in Alberta now, at my uncle's house, having ridden my decrepit bike over four finger-numbing mountain passes. I have decided to celebrate this event by blog-publishing an article by a man named Ted Byfield, originally printed in the Alberta Report on December 2, 1985 and republished in a hardback entitled, The Book of Ted: Epistles from an Unrepentant Redneck. This is appropriate because Alberta, as everyone knows, is populated almost entirely by rednecks. So here we go...






The Playboy Revolution's Bitter Legacy of 'Freedom'






The western world learned last week, with a yawn, that one of the great revolutionary figures of the late twentieth century was ill, perhaps mortally ill. How callous we are. The news itself merited only a tiny squib in the back pages of the papers. Nobody, in other words, gave much of a damn. However this yesteryear revolutionary was not a person. It was, in fact, a magazine - Playboy by name. It is going very broke, and may fold. But, after all, nonchalant indifference to the historical moment - and to just about everything else, for that matter, was the sine qua non of the Playboy view of life was it not? "What kind of a man reads Playboy?" its promotion ads used to ask. The answer was an empty-headed ass, but it has taken thirty terrible years to figure that out, and the price has been beyond description.


To lay all the ills of our sick and sickening era on a single magazine and its publisher is, of course, a bit much. Hugh Hefner was nothing more nor less than a perceptive merchandiser, the man with the right product for the right market at the right moment. The moment was the mid-Fifties whose inhabitants for at least two generations had been hearing the liberal whining about fetters and censorship and taboos and "the personal freedom to choose." But the fetters, as Mr Hefner well knew, had already gone. Religion had been debunked by secularism, inhibition had been debunked by psychology, decency had been debunked by cynicism, and human responsibility had quietly retired in favour of something called human rights. The market was the middle-income, middle-aging male who was, as always, resentful of the social bond under which he laboured and endowed with an extraordinary capacity to feel sorry for himself. The product was as ancient as the species. It is called sex.


I was there when Mr. Hefner's half-clad ladies appeared in the Fifties, followed in the Sixties by ladies not clad at all. To denounce it as disgusting would be, I'm sure, the right thing to do. It would also be a lie. Certainly the conscience put up its case, but the case was lost in the raw extravaganza of the event. The grand no-no, the thing one dast not see, the curtained delight that lay hidden behind every smock, bodice and tight sweater, there i twas, all of it, for a mere buck, on every newsstand every month, a veritable seraglio of the most awesome pulchritude the imagination could possibly ask. How had that earthy Mr. Donne described it?


Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothe'd must be,
To taste whole joys.


There were the foreseeable prosecutions as the law of the state struggled in vain to replace the law of human nature and failed, as usual, to do so, as it has been failing ever since. Mr. Hefner, duteous defender of the Right to Choose, piously made his way to the bank.

There were, however, problems, chief among them the fact that the product was a fraud, the ultimate fraud of the unfulfillable fantasy. Pictures, unhappily, are not people. Mr. Hefner was not as it turned out actually in the business of sex. He was in the business of thrill. Thrill required novelty, and novelty required an inexorable slide into the slime. It was a descent Mr. Hefner, something of a romantic, one suspects, decided to forgo. Others, less inhibited began stealing his customers with the kind of photography we, as enterprising 12-year-olds in Washington, D.C., used to secretly seek out in the human anatomy section of the Smithsonian Institute. Thrill, however, demanded more yet. So the revolution went from there into the candid depravities that are now on sale in the magazine shelves of every corner store.

Pornography, however, is not the worst disaster occasioned by the Playboy revolution. It is the mere companion of another consequence of far graver dimension. For the appearance in the Fifties of Mr. Hefner's seemingly abandoned ladies was a signal to the simple-minded male of the day that the old rules had at last been lifted. Life-long vows no longer obtained. Familial obligation now negotiable. Fidelity had been repealed. To walk out, to choose one's "freedom," was no longer disreputable. It had become you might say, almost noble. The term "single parent" entered the vocabulary, and the single parent was nearly always a single mother.

The woman's reaction to this new-found male enlightenment was prompt, understandable and devastating. By the Sixties feminism had burst in all its fury. If the man would not sustain his share of the marital contract, then why should the woman? She, too, had rights. She, too, would have a "career". She called it freedom from servitude to the man. But it soon became clear that the worst oppressor was not the man. It was the child. It was from the child that she really sought escape. If need be, she would deny it the right to live, even if its life had already begun within her.


So now in the Eighties we have a stand-off between the two halves of the species. Since vows are considered worthless, we have trial marriages. We have public schoolrooms in which two out of three children are being raised by one parent. We have the highest divorce rate in history, a suicide rate that defies explanation, and a birth rate so low that a number of western nations fear virtual extinction within three generations. Finally, we have tens of thousands of bitter people facing old age alone and in crescent despair. They are, that is, "free", free of every human bond, of anything, in fact, that ultimately makes the difference between a life of all-encompassing purpose and one of total futility. Moreover they have produced to support them an alarmingly diminished generation. The discover themselves dependant on the children they did not have.


To attribute all this to poor faltering Mr. Hefner is, as I say, absurd. But to attribute it to the spirit and attitude of the age that produced him, and that he and his magazine eloquently espoused, is altogether accurate. He called it the "Playboy Philosophy." That philosophy has failed us, and miserably.

- Ted Byfield, December 2, 1985