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Hugh Hefner marries his “runaway bride”

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:46:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Hugh Hefner's celebrating the new year as a married man once again.

The 86-year-old Playboy magazine founder exchanged vows with his "runaway bride," Crystal Harris, at a private Playboy Mansion ceremony on New Year's Eve. Harris, a 26-year-old "Playmate of the Month" in 2009, broke off a previous engagement to Hefner just before they were to be married in 2011.

Playboy said on Tuesday that the couple celebrated at a New Year's Eve party at the mansion with guests that included comic Jon Lovitz, Gene Simmons of KISS and baseball star Evan Longoria.

The bride wore a strapless gown in soft pink, Hefner a black tux. Hefner's been married twice before but lived the single life between 1959 and 1989.

Why is Hef getting hitched?

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:34:00 +0000

It looks like those two crazy kids are going to settle down at last. In a relationship marked by more fits and starts than Carrie and Big's nuptials, 86-year-old media magnate Hugh Hefner and his 26-year-old lady friend Crystal Harris have spent the past few days making some very public noises that they're back together. Is this yet another attention-getting stunt from the rapidly becoming obsolete Playboy brand, or is this what love conquering all looks like?

It's an unusual twist: The two ended their engagement in 2011, when Harris got cold feet a mere five days before the scheduled nuptials. A Playboy cover featuring "Mrs. Crystal Hefner" had to be hastily slapped with a "Runaway Bride" label. Last summer, however, she moved back into the mansion and confirmed she and Hef were "back together."

How porn became a civil right

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

How would you feel if your partner brought pornography home? That was the question history professor Leigh Ann Wheeler asked her students 15 years ago at the University of Minnesota. Almost every female student responded that she was "uncomfortable" with pornography, but that she wouldn't violate her partner's right to free speech by prohibiting it.

Wheeler, now a professor at Binghamton University, found this curious. In her new book, "How Sex Became a Civil Liberty," she writes, "At the end of the 20th century, these students equated criticizing pornography and exercising control over their private space with advocating censorship, eliding, in the process, critical distinctions between private conduct and state action." Just a few decades earlier it was unthinkable that sexual rights could be protected by the Constitution. But here her students were conflating "personal opinions, private relationships, and civil liberties," she says.

Playboy coming to India as “aspirational lifestyle brand”

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:41:00 +0000

Playboy, a brand that's built an entire industry on sex appeal, is coming to India, a nation that remains very shy of sex appeal. Although the magazine is still banned in India, a Mumbai-based company has licenses to promote the Playboy brand with hotels, bars and clubs, the first of which will open in mid-December at Goa's Candolim Beach--albeit with an Indian twist.

According to the Daily Mail, the head of the Indian club, Sanjay Gupta, wants to "separate the powerful Playboy brand from its adult associations" and turn it into "an aspirational lifestyle brand for the growing Indian middle class." "We will dissociate from nudity completely," said Gupta. "We are positioning it around lifestyle, aspiration and glamor." (Even the iconic Playboy bunny costume will be toned down, "keeping in mind Indian sensibilities").

But Nikhil Desai, Goa's director of tourism, remains unconvinced that Gupta can make the Playboy club a wife-friendly place, as he claims it will be: "Assuming there is going to be vulgarity and activities that are not in tune with the Goan culture, their proposal will not be granted permission." He added, "However, they could be setting up a perfectly decent club."

PB Lifestyle has plans to open another Playboy club in Hyderabad, India in 2013.

India’s first Playboy bunny, under siege

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:56:00 +0000

Sherlyn Chopra is making naked lady history by being the first Indian woman to pose nude for Playboy. And she’s getting a lot of criticism for this–not because she is supporting a misogynist publication that perpetuates ridiculous standards of sexy. No, that’s not why. Instead, she is getting criticism because some people believe she is hurting the view that Indian women should be modest and pure.

Playboy has always had this awkward relationship to feminism. Hefner is a sexist pig that lives off the objectification of women’s bodies and posits nudity as faux-empowerment–since you get paid for it! (He ignores the part where it is a sexist marketplace that believes a women’s greatest asset is that booty which allows for this “empowerment”).

But there’s also this awkwardness: Playboy has made visible types of sexuality and expression that were never seen before, and with that came some diversity, and the opening up of social conventions around sexuality. They just weren’t ones that were predicated on the equality of women.

Jenny McCarthy’s Playboy spread hurts older women

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 12:00:00 +0000

This month, Jenny McCarthy will reprise the stunt that helped her get her start. No, not hosting a wacky MTV dating show, but appearing on the cover of Playboy, where she was crowned Playmate of the Year almost 20 years ago in 1993. When this month’s cover was revealed, so followed press-release-y accolades: Jenny’s almost 40, and she’s lookin’ good at any age! Not just from gossip mags like People (which wrote, “just months away from hitting the big 4-0, Jenny proves she’s still got it”). Not even from lite news sources like USA Today (which echoed McCarthy’s claim that the photos are “really elegant”).

Even the Washington Post had something to say, using a quote from the Playboy piece as a bald traffic-generating soundbite. The quote, on what McCarthy says her female fans often say to her: “You’re on my husband’s list. I hear that a lot.” Ew. (The “list” is, presumably, of women said husbands are allowed to bone without penalty, should the opportunity present itself. Which it won’t. Ever.)

Before Nora was Nora

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The following originally appeared on John Blumenthal's Open Salon blog.

Nora and I worked at Esquire at the same time -- she as a columnist, me as a lowly fact-checker. It was 1973. We'd passed each other in the halls occasionally, perhaps rode an elevator together, but she had no idea who I was, and I wasn't quite bold enough to tell her. Not that she would have cared.

Esquire was my first editorial job, and I was lucky enough to serve under the magazine's legendary editor, Harold Hayes, who plucked me out of obscurity from a job as a house painter and whale's tooth polisher on Nantucket Island. Esquire paid me exactly $65 a week, which, even in those days, was chump change.

One day, Nora stalked into the fact-checking area -- a large room containing the four of us who made up the overworked department. It wasn't hard to discern that she was unhappy. For some reason, she chose me to snap at. I forget what it was about, but I snapped back, and she strode angrily out of the room.

The Senate and Grammys condone domestic abuse

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:50:00 +0000

It's a great time to be a domestic abuser. Just last week, not a single Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act -- a law that in 2000 and 2005 swept easily through the renewal process. While saying he "supports this law, always has," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, did helpfully offer some changes – including, according the New York Times, "a huge reduction in authorized financing, and elimination of the Justice Department office devoted to administering the law and coordinating the nation’s response to domestic violence and sexual assaults." Surely those contentious new provisions that would offer protection to gay, lesbian and transgender victims as well as undocumented aliens wouldn't have anything to do with the holdup. Writing for GOPUSA last Tuesday, the perennially terrible Phyllis Schlafly crowed that the move was "a refreshing indication that Republicans are no longer intimidated by feminist demands" over a law that was "promoting divorce, breakup of marriage and hatred of men." Well, thank God we dodged that bullet. Now just fend for yourself dodging the real bullets, ladies.

Attention starlets: Please stop channeling Marilyn Monroe

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Just in case you thought the news that occasional morgue worker, temporary L.A. jail resident, and all-around train wreck Lindsay Lohan posing for Playboy wasn't agonizingly predictable enough, the magazine has announced that the photos will be a "classic tribute inspired by the original Tom Kelley nude pictorial of Marilyn Monroe." Oh, please, make it stop.

Of all the dead idols that we keep digging up, Marilyn Monroe crushes all competition. Sorry, Elvis. Sorry, James Dean. There's only so much to be done with sparkly jumpsuits and nice black pullovers. But Marilyn? She's almost inexhaustible. Note: almost.