LAST OF THE FAMOUS INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOYS

A small chance exists, just possibly, that I might be able to grasp and comprehend Post-Post Modern.

(I already missed -- completely misapprehended or misperceived -- Post-Modern.)

Listening to “Little Steven” Van Zandt’s radio show on his Sirius XM Underground Garage channel yesterday, the host carried on at very great length and approvingly about Hugh Hefner and his so-called “Playboy Philosophy.”  He read in his distinctive voice from Hef’s interminable hoary vanity writing tracts, which in olden days uselessly crowded out Playboy magazine’s pictorials, and were clearly  exercises in "boss's prerogative."

For as long as I can remember (dating back to the Modern era and certainly extending through so-called Post-Modernism), Hugh Hefner and Playboy were considered retardataire, sexist and beneath contempt by feminists and other cognoscenti, i.e., the uptight, supposedly enlightened cohort with whom I was expected and encouraged to peer-bond.

The stiffs had a point, of course.  Hugh Hefner was essentially an uber-successful pornographer -- never the most esteemed profession -- but a filth merchant with zeitgeist marketing imagination (for me, limited to the electronic revolving circular bed) luckily born into the right zeit.

But Steve Van Zandt, the most “politically correct” man ever to walk the earth, was definitively and actively embracing, extolling and promoting Hefnerism from a self-identified progressive/feminist point of view in March 2014. 

His relaxed demeanor and easy delivery clearly showed that he wasn’t  intending on making waves either, but because like television, radio is a passive audience medium, the artist/proprietor was simply palliating his audience with the latest market-tested idée donnée et reçue.

Little Steven, Hugh Hefner, unfunny comedian Bill Maher (a prefect, I believe, at the Playboy Mansion) and most recently the distasteful Duke University freshman porn star Belle "I'm a slut who needs to be punished" Knox.  A "Murderer's Row" of Post-Post Modern feminists?  

These slugs do not define or even relate to the concept of feminism for me, except to demonstrate further (i.e., Beyond Ban Bossy, beyond the ruins of N.O.W.) that the concept is either dead or bereft of any current meaning or significance.  (My idea of feminism was always absolute gender-blindness in terms of conferring professional or personal advantage based on sex, but I’ve been told off and rejected on that score so many times.)   

The Post-Post-Modern Worm has turned (and that isn't a disparaging remark about Little Steven’s personal appearance) and withered in the earth. 


Cognitive dissonance confronts The Hum (Link) and cognitive dissonance rules and reigns.

By the way, Little Steven runs a wonderful radio network and presents a very good show. 

Proof positive: "Playboy" by The Marvelettes (Link)