Saturday, September 30, 2017

A Bunny's Tale: Part 2

The first part of Gloria Steinem's report on the Playboy Club, New York, was published in May, 1963. As I have mentioned, it was supremely funny, as it depicted the process of being inducted into Bunny dom, much like David Sedaris describing the initiation into the world of being a Santa's elf at Macy's department store.
Oh, wouldn't you want to be him? 

The dissonance between the fantasy of Santaland and the reality is what gave a charge to Sedaris's tale; the same is true of being inducted into becoming a Bunny, a group which Hugh Hefner's marketing described as highly intelligent, college educated, beautiful, sexually excitable women who were making three times what they had made in their mundane 9-5 jobs as they played the role of unattainable but ultimately desirable sex objects, waiting tables and serving drinks at the Playboy club.

But the second installment, five months before John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, paints a far grimmer picture.  The world of glamour in the Playboy club, was an illusion, just as Kennedy's Camelot was built on superficial glossiness with a seamy underside.

As Steinem talks with the women who came to work at the Playboy Club, it turns out few or none of them were, like Steinem, college educated, with lots of other options. Most of them are uneducated, with no better options, trained for nothing. For some, their highest hope was marrying some body who would provide them with an escape from the dreary, wearying life as low paid waitresses working in Bunny suits.

The club promised big money--$200 a week (in 1963 dollars, roughly $2000 in today's dollars) but few if any ever made anything like that.  Like the coal mines, the "girls" find their employer demands they buy certain equipment to the job but the Bunnys were required to pay this stuff, up front: False eyelashes, required makeup, three inch high heels. They were directed to a  contractor which was clearly a racket set up with the Club to share in this scheme and, in the end, the girls discovered they were lucky to take home $100 after expenses. They quit in droves and the Club had a difficult time coping with the turnover. 

There are some understated vignettes: Steinem staggers out the employees' exit door, feet swollen feet from hours in 3 inch heels, out into the night, where taxi cabs are parked. It is 4 AM and although she lives close enough to walk home, Steinem pauses near a cab. The cabbie waves a dollar bill through his window and tells her there's three more if she'll come and have sex with him. 
She rebukes him. 
 Stung, he says, "Well, you work in there, don't you?"
Are we having fun yet?

What he is saying is she is selling her body and her sexuality in one way already, why not another?
She walks home along Fifth Avenue and sees a high class hooker sitting in a Jaguar along the way and thinks, well, the hooker at least is honest about what she is doing.

The Bunnies are not allowed to date or have sex with the customers who are constantly propositioning them, but these are just the hoi polloi customers.  They can and do have sex with the "Number one key" members, who are men Playboy wants to cultivate, mainly restaurant and media critics and famous entertainers.  Playboy advertises itself as being the hottest club in New York, where the rich and famous live the high life and where everybody who's anybody wants to be seen. The truth is, Steinem rarely sees anyone above the level of visiting businessmen, middle managers from the Mid West or Queens. 

Bunnies are also encouraged to go to off premises "parties" at the home of the New York honcho who runs the New York club, who has sex with many of the Bunnies, These Bunnies are frank about their willingness to have sex with the honcho: each  hopes to profit eventually, financially from the relationship.
All the girls love a playboy!

The Bunnies are told repeatedly they don't have to do anything they don't want to do when it comes to sexual services, but woe unto any of them to tries to cheat the Club of money, tips which might come their way, which the Club wants to keep. The Club management constantly nickels and dimes them, does not pay for the 12 hour work shifts they have to do as "trainees." 

There is also the very honest revelation that the women, on some level, enjoy the power of being able to titillate the men. Two black janitors remark to Steinem, they feel sorry for the "girls" but they also perceive part of the non cash benefits of the job is the ego boost the Bunnies get from being ogled/ adored. 

But, for most of the women, that grows old in a hurry. After all, look at who these men are. The Bunny's privately call them "suckers" and "jerks."  Steinem details their gauche behavior tellingly. 

Almost all the men who are doing the ogling are turn offs. They make Steve Martin and Chevy Chase in their inane SNL swinging Czech brothers skit look suave. 

I was reminded of that scene in "Apocalypse Now" where Playboy Bunnies arrive to entertain the troops, and Vietnamese peasants watch from behind wire fences at the bizarre and grotesque sight of the troops and sailors finally storming the stage and the helicopter which bore the Playmates in, has to whisk them off to safety, while men howl and fall into the water below.

Oddities are quickly mentioned: Some men bring their wives to the club and Steinem sees the wives comparing themselves to the Bunnies who attract their husbands, a competition the wives cannot win. So why would a man bring his wife to a virtual brothel? 
Can you hold yourself back?

Against the work a day, low pay, exploitation, Steinem juxtaposes text from the Playboy philosophy: Bunnies are seeking a place in a very high class world most women would kill to enter; men are entering a world in which beautiful women are simply part of high quality liquor, stereo systems, expensive cars, fine cigars--the good life of the highest quality things which American wealth can offer.

But this fantasy is constantly contrasted with images of laborers in their working clothes, pressing their faces up against the two story glass walls, gawking at the Bunnies who walk down the spiral staircases on display in their working clothes. Steinem is told  to walk down the staircase again to "give the boys a treat." 

Of course, watching the "bathing suit" contest at the recent Miss America, one wonders what this meat on the hoof tradition in America really says about us.

Having such a good time

As for the women, Steinem suggests they need to join the waitresses union but one of them quickly says, "Unions just take your money. And they won't let you work double shifts." In that single scene, we see the rise of the Republican-con party. 
One of them says, scandalized, "They treat us like waitresses. We are Bunnies."

Steinem reports the sense of exhilaration she has being hired, plucked from a throng of competitors and when she is told, after several grueling days, she has done well as a Bunny, she admits:  "I was elated."
We are the every man's fantasy?

Steinem, of course, makes it clear, she has more options than just about any of the Bunnies she works with. She can go back to her real career. The best they can hope for is a prince charming. 
Once in a great long while a Playmate, whose photos have appeared in the magazine, turns up as a Playboy Bunny, but this turns out to be simply a fall from grace. This is where old Bunnies go to molder. In the clubs, they must fend off grotesque overtures from repulsive customers and likely will join the majority of women who, disillusioned, quit Bunny hood and get easier jobs in more conventional restaurants and offices.



Friday, September 29, 2017

A Bunny's Tale: Ding Dong Hefner is Dead

The first time I heard David Sedaris coming across my radio on NPR doing "Santaland Diaries" I nearly drove my car off the road, I was laughing so hard.

I would love to hear Gloria Steinem reading "A Bunny's Tale," which is available on the internet in written form, but it's not easy on the eyes, small font.

Her take is every bit as funny as Sedaris's and pre dated his.

I think you got yourself a job, Honey.

Her carefully constructed new identity to infiltrate the Playboy Club with a new name and story about her background. The application required three references but Steinem couldn't swing three fake references so she created a story--she'd been waitressing in Europe so she had only one work reference from a magazine editor in the U.S..
It turns out they weren't much interested in reading letters of references at the Playboy club. What they cared about was how you looked and Gloria got swept right in, given her looks.
They took Polaroid photos of her in a Bunny outfit, that was her ticket to the job.
Who needs references?
More obstacles arise she hadn't planned for: The Club demands a birth certificate and her Social Security card, which, of course would be in the name "Gloria Steinem," not her nom de guerre, "Marie Ochs."
But until the deadline for the documents arrives, she can squeeze into her Bunny outfit and work the scene. 

Then they sent her home with the Bunny Bible, otherwise known as the employees' manual in which they made it abundantly clear no Bunny was allowed to "date" (i.e. have sexual intercourse with) any customer; nor was any Bunny allowed to pimp for another Bunny.

Hugh Hefner was hyper aware that the Playboy Club was presumed to be a high class brothel and he expected investigators, city cops, FBI to be all over his club so he wanted Bunnies to be pure as the driven snow, when it came to interactions with club customers. No trafficking in the Playboy Clubs. They were there to enhance his empire not to sell sex on an individual basis.
And I can write, too.

He explicitly warned all new Bunnies that he'd hired private detectives to pose as customers seeking sexual favors and they would  approach the Bunnies, and they had better not respond.

Steinem is at her best describing her training: How to lean forward over a table without having your breasts fall out of the costume. (A straight back is the trick.)
And the camaraderie of the Bunnies is touching and pathetic  When the head mother Bunny finds herself short an over 21 Bunny to man the hat check after midnight (when the 18 year old Bunnies had to go home) Steinem saves the day by filling in even though her shoes did not match her Bunny suit, putting her at risk for incurring demerits.

Hefner did help change the American tendency toward blue nose repressiveness concerning sex to an attitude that sex is not dirty, but healthy, not necessarily an expression of undying devotion but sometimes just a moment's pleasure, which a woman might enjoy as much as a man.
Nothing wrong with a little sex appeal.

Seen with 21st century eyes, Hefner is something of a sad joke, with his silk "smoking jacket" his wonky pipe and his black silk pajamas.  He does not look like any kind of real man--he doesn't really work.  He looks like some pimply creep out of "American Graffiti" trying to look hip, but looking nerdy instead.

Anyone who ever saw "Apocalypse Now" will know the role "Playboy" magazine played in the psyche of the American male in the mid twentieth century, but that was then.

People grow. Men even can grow up.



Sunday, September 24, 2017

Indian Summer

Neighbors of mine have been growing all summer.
We never talk politics, these neighbors and me.  I know none of them voted for Donald Trump--they are too young to vote, although, to hear Kris Kobach tell it, maybe they were registered and voted illegally in New Hampshire.




The Death Row Turkeys are getting bigger by the day. They spent most of the summer just huddled together and pecking at the feeding troughs, while the wild turkeys, just on the other side of the wire fence, fed from the ground, the green shoots and grass. Every time I stop to take their picture, the white Death Row Turkeys pick up their heads and scurry over to me, mistaking me for the bipedal mammal who feeds them, farmer Hurd.
These are "free range turkeys" but they are nowhere near as adventurous and free as the flocks of wild turkeys we are seeing all over our yards and emerging from the woods.

No coops for these birds
Rush Limbaugh would say this is what happens when you give people free feed, rather than making them find their own--they just get lazy and cluster around the feeding trough. Judging from photos of Rush, he knows a thing or two about the feeding trough.


But they do like hanging out together 

Their fellow farm animals, across the road, the pink pigs have grown a lot over the past few weeks as well. They also think I am farmer Hurd, and come right up to the fence in hopes of edibles.

Apples are bagged and ready in Applecrest farm.  The Macuns, a tart variety I favor, are just in this weekend. Crowds were lined up to buy farm produce.

Smutty Nose brewery just half a mile down from my house, has new creations in for the fall.

Today, it was 84 at the beach, and Plaice Cove looked like a mid July weekend, the lot nearly full.

The lawns on our street have finally recovered from last summer's drought, all the bare spots finally filled in. It takes me an hour and a half to hand mow the lawn, but I get all the swirls and patterns I like, so it's worth it.


But the leaves are starting to turn.

The joke is there are four seasons in New Hampshire: Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter and Road Repair Season. Days like this remind me this is stuff we tell other people to keep them from moving here. 

Nature survives round these parts. Nice to be alive in New Hampshire today.
Horse farm, Kensington

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Iceland

My first impulse was to title this post, "Let's all move to Iceland," but that would horrify the 330,000 people who live on this amazing island--there are 1000 times that many Americans.



So many fine things recommend Iceland, but one is certainly the endless supply of hot, steamy, high pressure showers available in every home and lodging virtually for free, thanks to the hydrothermal sources running under the surface of this land, which the Icelanders engineer into all homes and offices and buildings. If you love guilt free hot showers, you will find your nirvana in Iceland.


Also adorable blonde children.

And liberated women.



Indifference to organized religion and staid old institutions like marriage.
The occasional Troll. 

Great fly fishing. Lots of sheep. 

Fresh seafood. Whale watching  just offshore. Lava fields and dramatic beaches.

Wonderful sweaters. Dazzling design from opera houses to seaport sculptures.





Really, can you ask for more? 

They all speak English and they laugh at Donald Trump, who is an endless source of amusement. 

What a great country.