QAA Podcast - Manclan Episode 7: Playboys Take the Godpill feat Hussein Kesvani (Sample)

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

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 When you subscribe for $5 a month you'll get access to the full Manclan mini-series as it comes out (+ all episodes of Trickle Down with Travis View + an extra episode of QAA every week + access to our entire archive of premium QAA episodes) 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, for 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 Klan. We are your Alpha hosts and Paragons of Masculinity. Annie Kelly and Julian Field. This week's Sigma guest is Hussein Kisvani, journalist and co-host of the Trash Future.

and 10,000 post podcasts. Hussein, how, how is your regimen of testosterone boosting supplements being? I'm no-sat. I'm about my no-supp life. Well, because the thing is, like, Ramadan finished a couple of weeks ago. And I would like to think that, like, my testosterone is higher. Not because of, like, any sort of religious contention, but because usually during that month, you're like, 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 word, which, you know, retention, I'm going to feel really sick saying it. 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 feat 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, published in December of 1953.

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. No, 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.

Kelly paid her 50 bucks or approximately $565 in today's money. Playboy never photographed Monroe nude. They simply licensed Kelly. these 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 naval 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, 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 Aaron Reich, 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 Brunton called it, quote, the Bible of the beleaguered male. Playboy readers taped the centerfolds up in their basements, affixed the rabbithead insignia to the rear windows of

their cars, join the Playboy clubs if they could afford to, and even if they lived more like babbets 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 sub-headed 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 Aaron Reich remarked, quote, from the beginning, Playboy loved women, large-breasted, long-legged young women, anyway, and hated wives.

Playboy was hardly subtle about it. Bert Zolo, 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,

boy 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 a It's as an editorial strategy, it's quite interesting because they're not necessarily like valorizing, or 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 going to be this like regimented husband and you're going to be in the situation where like, you know, your wife is going to have control over you. So it's almost they frame like, yeah, they frame these sorts of bachelor's not as kind of, Not even a sort of positive, like here is like a better, you know, 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 succubis. Like, you know, basically taking all my money and energy. away. I was also going to say that like, you know, 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

my use 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's being written concurrent to the woman'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, they're, you know, the feminine mystique and stuff is happening, saying their wives are oppressed, do you know?

Zolo wrote for Playboy under the pseudonym Bob Norman, presumably to avoid being associated with the beliefs his piece is espoused. It's kind of hilarious that Bob Norman is the pseudonym and Bert Zolo is the real name. Yeah, I know. It's a real Travis View-Logan-Straign situation. There was also the issue that Bert Zolo was a married man himself. In an online obituary he wrote about his father, Solo's son, Paul, said, For this famous first issue, he wrote an article called Miss Golddigger of 1953.

It was a treatise on how not to allow a woman to trap you into marriage. Of course, my father and Huff, were both already married at this point. During our childhood, he remained almost embarrassed by his Playboy connection. 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, If I did it, it wasn't my idea, it was Hefner's. 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 Heff 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 Heff's daughter, and could be sitting in the grotto right now with Playboy Bunnies. 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.

Heff would have parties that started at 11 p.m., 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, no, I never really did that. It wasn't me.

And then 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 Mail. 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 looming over this man and the man is holding both of his pockets out. He's just pulling them out to show there's nothing in here. I'm turning inside out.

Yeah, do you know, I actually think I've seen that image for like 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. Aaron 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 program, 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 Heffner 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 leveled against male deviance. 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 63 that the Playboy's 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 abulently, even compulsively, heterosexual. You've been listening to a sample of Manclan, a ten-part series that is being published on QAA's premium podcast feed, which you can get access to for just five bucks a month by going to patreon.com non-anonymous. You'll also get access to all of Travis View's first season of trickle-down, as well as an extra episode of QAA for every regular one, and access to our entire archive of premium episodes. Join the Manclad.