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In Reply to: RE: No, it would not, because you have an attitude problem that has lasted more than 4 hours posted by John Marks on October 11, 2014 at 09:34:26
JM,
It is an easy call to agree that Playboy played a not insignificant role in shaping the aspirational ethos of post WWII, white middle class males during the 1950s.
I specifically refer to the generation of white middle class,'Baby-Boomer kids who came of age in the early 1960s to the mid 1970s.
I would suggest that the Playboy aspirational life style ethos and view of the world was, in any practical sense, absent, if not anathema, to the life style of the aforementioned kids. They were, in fact, the adolescents and young adults who were in active revolt against their parents and who formed the core soldiers of the political and cultural struggles of those times. I remember the struggles of those times quite well. Music propelled the struggle. We bought audio equipment. Playboy was as dead as the proverbial door nail, just, as we thought, was our parents way of life; the former was a solid truth; the latter, well, we learned a lot about ourselves and attempted to pick and choose among the bones of what we rejected and arrived at our middle age a wiser lot.
Follow Ups:
I distinctly remember that not all Baby Boomer kids were the same. Indeed there were the rebels or the *progressive* kids, but there just as many who were traditional consumerists happy doing whatever it took to keep the finances and the flow of goods rolling. For every kid who struggled against the legacy of former generations, there was at least one other who carried the torch onward - even though it may have been "uncool" to admit doing so.Soon, the yuppie wasps would arrive (L.L. Bean catalogs in tow) in swarms, stinging and biting all in their path. The internet was ready to explode, and explode it did.
Today, we see that almost everyone is the same.
Edits: 10/12/14
To better understand the people involved in this topic it would help to know there age, where they resided between 1960-1969, their educational and draft/military status at the time. While many of us were united socially and politically the transformation (or when one may have dropped acid) occurred at different times.
In very broad terms the social changes between 1960-65 were different from those between 1964-69. Ones opinion of when the 'Summer of Love' actually took place and was that the West Coast or the East? Beat or Hip? Elvis or the Beatles and on and on? Regardless, it seems everybody at least flipped through Playboy regularly.
During that decade there was very little in the way of commonly available audio orientated periodicals and Playboy, regardless of its other lifestyle content, was providing the Jazz Poll and a usually interesting photographic look at the rapidly growing High Fidelity industries offerings beyond Heathkit.
Look at age breakdowns in the 1968 and 1972 national elections. Nixon got lots of young voters. Arguably, they were his margins.
You are lapsing (I think) into the mindset that when a year ending in "9" ends and a year beginning with "0" starts, it is like flipping a light switch. In most cases, not so.
All one has to do is look at Playboy's still-astonishing circulation and ad revenue figures from the 1960s through the mid-1970s, when Penthouse began spanking Playboy's rear for its complacency.
Indeed, the "real" Playboy died with the early death of Auguste Comte Spectorsky, the guy who was able to get world-class writers to swallow their pride while pocketing their check. Hef wandered around in his satin bathrobe while Specs put out a world-class general-interest magazine that also featured bare boobs.
Anyone who lived through that era (I still can hardly believe with the bad lottery number I got, I was not sent to Vietnam) can remember (selectively) what they wish to, in however self-congratulatory a way.
I not only lived through it, I studied it at the college level and have continued my studies in History and Material Culture and Technology as academic subjects, life-long. I am currently reading a Niall Ferguson essay on chaos and determinancy in History, and, frankly, it's hard work.
Indeed, later in life I met and was influenced by an important member of Shure Brothers' outside ad agency in the 1960s and 1970s, and for them, Playboy was a supremely important "get." And I don't think they were living in the past, they were reading the sales reports. Playboy's circulation in that time frame was more than TEN TIMES Stereo Review's!!!
Let us not forget that counter-cultural as they were, The Grateful Dead splurged on McIntosh amplification for their PA system. The revolution might not have been televised, but they like them their nice stereos.
JM
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