That’s a sentence from this article about Playboy’s 50th Anniversary. Here is a longer excerpt:
… At the same time that the company is adding harder-core material to its TV networks and Web sites, the anniversary issue trumpets the Playboy Foundation’s history of legal battles in support of birth control, sex education, reproductive choice and equal rights for women, which for Playboy Enterprises, Inc. seems to be as much cause-related marketing as social altruism. (It should be acknowledged that Playboy is not an uncharitable organization; its foundation has provided support over the years to defenders of free speech (the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Coalition Against Censorship), family planning (Planned Parenthood Federation of America), breast cancer awareness (Bosom Buddies, Inc. and Associates for Breast and Prostate Cancer Studies) and filmmakers, including producers of women-themed documentaries.)
Hef seems steamed about women’s ingratitude about it all, saying in Fortune Small Business that by the early 1980s “the feminist movement had embraced a kind of anti-sexual, anti-Playboy attitude. It was the beginning of political correctness.”
The Playboy Forum in the anniversary issue comments that “Sadly, the feminist movement was hijacked during the 1980s by a fringe element that felt that pornography, [was the target] not the pious, subjugated women.” …
Yep, I’m definitely ungrateful. Can’t help noticing though that the Playboy Corporation seems to derive good value from the money it invests in the ACLU. Nadine Strossen, who seems unaware that soldiers can receive mail and access the Internet, is quoted here for the proposition that if the Pentagon doesn’t directly sell a wide range of pornography to soldiers, “We’re asking these people to risk their lives to defend our Constitution’s principles … and they’re being denied their own First Amendment rights to choose what they read.” Nothing hyperbolic there or anything.
Here’s something else I hate about Playboy: the way it markets its trademark to young girls.
–Ann Bartow
