Delia Kane, age 14 at The Exchange Luncheon, Why is her photo up here on this thread? Well, it'll become more apparent below, but we now know that the Playboy mansion had a minor who grew up in it, and whose fell into vice about it, tried to write about it, and who had those writing suppressed by Playboy. Additionally, from other sources, which won't receive as much press as the current A&E documentary, Playboy actually promoted the sexualization of female minors in its early history to such an extent that the result of an independent European study caused this to cease before it became a matter they addressed. This was apparently through its cartoons, but it's worth nothing that apparently at least one Playboy model was 17 years old at the time of her centerfold appearance and another, who later killed herself, was a highschool student, albeit a married one. Girls and young women were accidents of unfortunate labor early in the 20th Century. But the late 20th Century, they were the target of pronographers and sex explotiers. Which is worse?
This is a documentary currently running on A&E which is an exposé on Hugh Hefner. The A&E show summarizes itself as follows:
Hugh Hefner sold himself as a champion of free speech who created the Playboy brand to set off a sexual revolution that would liberate men and women alike, but over the years he used Playboy to manipulate women to compete for his favor and silenced whistleblowers
I frankly wouldn't normally bother to watch this show, but I did, in part because of my opinion on Hefner and in part because my wife was watching it. Her interest was sparked because she had been a follower of the "real life" show that followed Hefner and three of his later prostitutes, and let's be blunt, that's what they are, which was a fairly popular show at one time. Indeed, this documentary includes the last three notables of that lamentable group among those interviewed, with Holly Madison, the principal one, being a major, and very damaged, personality in the show.
Let me be start by being blunt. Hugh Hefner is one of the worst and most despicable figures of the 20th Century.
I know that's making quite a statement for a century that included among its notables such individuals as Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Mussolini, but it's true. Just as those figures were dedicated enemies of Western civilization and values abroad, Hefner was at home. In the end, the West prevailed over all of these political figures, but it didn't prevail against Hefner. The destruction he caused is vast and ongoing.
I'm not going to give a full biography of Hefner as I don't know it, and I'm not going to bother to look it up. What I can relate is that he was from the Midwest, served stateside in the U.S. Army during World War Two, and then went to work for one of the then existing girly mags after the war. Apparently according to his own recollection and that of his friends, he was jilted by a girl while in high school (with there being video footage of her, she was quite attractive and very intelligent looking), and then reformed his central personality into the early Playboy image as a result.[1] There's more than a little room to doubt that, but what seems clear is that he was a man who was essentially devoid of morals and driven principally by lust and its monetization, although what came about first is questionable. The love of money is indeed the root of all evil, and it's possible that he loved money first and came into lust as a result.
Anyhow, in the early 1950s he went out on his own with a brilliant marketing idea that became Playboy magazine
Dirty magazines of all sorts had existed for a while, and indeed, while I haven't published on it, it's pretty clear that there was a trend towards more and more risqué treatment of women in print starting wth the advancement of photography in the first quarter of the 20th Century. It was still the case well into the first 1/3d of the century that illustrations, rather than photographs, dominated magazines, but even by the 1920s black and white salacious magazines existed. By the 1930s, trends overlapping from the 1920s were such that magazines of all types were more and more willing to take risks with female figures for magazines and magazine covers. By the late 1930s the female figure with a tight sweater was a pretty common feature on magazines of all types and one of the major magazines featured Rita Hayworth in 1940 in a pose so risqué that it rivaled anything put on the cover of Playboy early on. So the trend was on.
At the same time, this trend also started, and indeed was much advanced, in the movie industry, until the Hays Production Code put the brakes on it in 1922.
Something happened in the World War Two timeframe that's really not terribly clear to me, other than it seems to me that it was there. At one time, I would have been inclined to attribute the 1953 introduction of Playboy nearly entirely to the Second World War, but that's unfair. Going into the war, it was already the case that pinups were around.
During the war, however, millions of unattached young men spent years away from home at a time when that was quite uncommon, and that had some sort of accelerating impact. Keep in mind that an unmarried man in his 20s or even 30s likely lived at home, with his parents, prior to the war, and indeed again after the war. During the war, this wasn't true at all.
As a result, during the war, the girly mag and related publications received a big unrestrained boost. So did prostitution and other sexual vices as well. And the seeping of sex into things in general, at least in the service, did. Quite a few U.S. Army Air Corps crewmen flew into combat in World War Two in bombers with paintings of top heavy naked women on the fuselages of their planes, or painted on their flight jackets.
The genie might not have been fully out of the bottle by war's end, but the cork was loosened. At the same time, a famous study by Kinsey was conducted during the war, which ostensibly revealed that the average sexual conduct of American men was libertine. It's now known that Kinsey himself was plagued with sexual oddities, and like a lot of people in such a position, he sought to justify them. His study, as it turned out, largely focused on the incarcerated, hardly a representative slice of American men, and it went so far as to essentially force some minor males into sexual acts. It's flaws, to say the least, and was perverted to say more.
That study, however, was released after the war and formed an inaccurate pseudo-scientific basis to challenge Western sexual morality. And that's where we get back to Hefner. Unlike the girly mags that had come before Playboy, Hefner's rag was able to claim to be mainstream.
Slickly published with high production values, Hefner took the pinup of the 1940s and published her in centerfold form, starting with purchased photos of Marilyn Monroe for the introductory issue. It was an incredibly misogynistic publication, darned near outright hating women while celebrating an extremely exaggerated example of the female form. Like nose art on World War Two bombers, all the 1950s examples of Playboy centerfolds were hugely top-heavy. They were also all young, and portrayed as blisteringly stupid and willing and eager to engage in unmarried sex. They were also all sterile. Playboy didn't run articles on young women getting pregnant.[2]
In the climate of the time, just out of the Second World War, just following Kinsey's study, and in the midst of the Korean War, the magazine was an instant hit. It began to immediately impact American culture and became accepted, if still regarded as dirty, as a publication. It crept into male dominated settings of all types, there virtually not being a barbershop in the United States that didn't have it. Women in popular media came to rapidly resemble, to some degree, the centerfolds who appeared in the magazines, and by the late 1950s the US was in the era of large boobed, blond haired, probably dumb (in presentation) starlets.
Playboy had this field all to itself for quite some time and in the 1960s it really expanded. While the early magazine was sort of weirdly conservative in away, the explosion of the counterculture and the introduction of the pill were tailor-made for its expansion. While in the 50s, the suggestion was that the Playboy man could have all of these big breasted girls next door for himself, by the 60s it was an outright free for all.
Around that time, Hefner himself began to essentially live that way. By the 70s it was completely open, with the Playboy Mansion His big, and creepy, parties were a cause célèbre in the entertainment community. It meant you were somebody to be invited, and many such celebrated figures of the era were, such as Bill Cosby. . . .
Yeah. . .
Well, anyhow, in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s being invited to the party of a pornographer wouldn't have been something a person wanting a public career would want. By the 70s, the opposite was true.
And that meant, in essence, the new sexual libertineism advocated by Playboy was essentially the American, and indeed Wester World, standard. Even where not outright accepted, it seeped into being. The magazine was everywhere, including in many middle class homes, sending the message to boys that lusting after big chested girls was not only normal, but desirable.
It's been a disaster.
Now we're reaping what Playboy helped sew, although the entertainment industry still hasn't quite figured that out. Women want out of the sex object status that Playboy foisted on them but don't quite know how to get there. The "Me Too" movement is part of that.
Part of things being corrosive is that they corrode. You can't just corrode a little bit. That's happened to society, and as we are now being told, a little late in the day, that happened to Hefner.
As this series reveals, all things Playboy were gross. The life inside the Playboy Mansion as one of Hefner's concubines was controlled, gross and revolting, including to at least some of the subjects of his loveless attention. One resident, whose father lived there, and who practically grew up in the mansion, not too surprisingly had turned to teenage lesbian sex with one of the female inhabitants and later tried to write a book about what she'd experienced in her early years. It was pretty clearly suppressed, once released, by the declining Playboy empire. Another former male employee was basically threatened if he went public with what he knew.
Suicides of Playboy models were a feature of its earliest days, with at least one of its most famous centerfolds (already a teenaged wife by the time she posed) being one example. According to this show, however, other suicides featured among the women of Playboy with the news being hushed. At least one well known centerfold was the victim of a murder, and a murder was referenced in the show without it being clear to me if that was the same figure or not, as I don't know the names of the characters involved.
Playboy was declining by the early 80s, a victim of its own success. Penthouse came in, and started to erode its market share by being grosser. Hustler came in and was grosser yet. A race to the bottom ensued. Then the Internet arrived, and they all rocketed into the gutter. People weren't willing to pay for the smut they could access for free.
At the same time, however, it seems like there's some effort to crawl back out of the gutter. The Me Too movement is part of that. Its members are clear that they know that they're being treated wrongly, if they can't quite figure out how to define why they're being treated wrongly, and what the origin of the standard they are grasping for is. And the depths of the salacious portrayal of women on magazine covers arrested in the 1970s. At that time, the nearly bare breast of a model could appear on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, and Farah Fawcett could be seen nearly falling out of her swimsuit on the cover of Time. Advertisements in magazines don't feature minors in nearly pornographic poses anymore. That era is over.
What isn't over is the decline of television, however and movies, which remain sex fixated. They may be behind the curve on this, or not. Having embraced the descent, however, they can't get out of it as easily as print can and has. The Me Too movement might be helping it to do so, however, as now actresses are expressing regret over nude scenes they've done in conventional films, and some are clear that they outright will not do them.
What also isn't over is the sex fixated nature of certain aspects of Americans culture, even while it is over in other areas. It's interesting. We see both sides at the same time, with part of the American left simply defining itself by sexual desires in a literal sense, while at the same time, posts like this have become amazingly common on Twitter.
if someone could marry me that would be great thx
That girl isn't looking for the Playboy man, and she sure isn't the Playboy "Playmate" bimbo.
So how do you undo six decades of destruction.
Well, it probably won't be easy, but if Playboy's story teaches us anything, it seems that at certain tipping points things can and do happen quickly. Playboy wouldn't have been a success in 1943, but in 1953 it suddenly became one, and it changed views pretty quickly. That came in the wake of two world wars, a smaller hot war in the Cold War, nearly universal male conscription, and the flooding of the universities with a massive number of young unattached people. It also came just before a massive cultural rejection by one generation of the values of prior ones, and a massive infusion of money into society at an unheard of level. And it followed a bogus scientific revelation followed by a genuine scientific pharmaceutical introduction.
But there was some tipping point that was reached before the wave started to crest. Another one seemingly might be getting reached now.
We haven't fought a big war for a long time, even though we've fought some smaller ones. Our military is at its smallest level since 1939. A lot of the glamour of university life has worn off, and the post Boomer generations face economic realities that resemble the pre-1940 situation more than the post 1945 one.
A seeming rediscovery of values is going on as part of that.
Cont. part 3
Part 3 of this documentary aired last night, focusing this time on the Playboy Clubs.
Other than being aware of the existence of the clubs, at one time, and the demeaning costumes the "Playboy Bunnies" wore at them, I really didn't know much about them. This episode did a good job in providing the details.
Basically, I guess, we could term these as nightclubs with the hostesses dressed in skin tight costumes featuring bunny tails and rabbit ears. An interview with Hefner on the costumes had him note that he'd adopted the rabbit symbol as rabbits had a certain reputation at the time he did, which was a coy way of noting that rabbits engaged in the "act" constantly. The rabbit in the symbol is portrayed as male, and of course his real world female subjects were that, female.
This may say all that you really need to say about Playboy. The entire Hefner bullshit line about caring about women and women's right's was simply cover for their being viewed as living, dumb, objects of sex. That's it.
The episode showed that's in fact how Playboy Bunnies ended up being viewed. Rules for members of the Playboy Clubs, and you had to pay $25.00 initially to be a member, were strict. You couldn't touch a bunny. . .at the club. But outside the clubs, rapes of the women who worked there were common. A request by a "bunny mother" for security or at least male assistance for the hostesses leaving the clubs at night was for instance rejected.
That's bad enough, of course, but at the VIP level of membership the rules in practice evaporated. One Bunny noted that she was raped by a VIP member who was in fact immediately expelled, but another woman who later worked as a "bunny mother" noted how the bunnies were frequently sodomized with it being traumatic for them not only because it occurred, but also because in that less pornified era it was a shock for them, this act being common due to a fear that the perpetrators would get the women pregnant.
Two instances of kidnapping were noted, with women being kidnapped and raped. In one instance it can't really be blamed on Playboy, which then restricted women at that club, which was a resort, to dorms which they basically couldn't leave on their off hours, but another detailed the kidnapping by the late Don Cornelius, a VIP member who was the host of Soul Train. In that instance two new bunnies who had spent an evening with a Cornelius entourage ended up held for a couple of days in his house, being subject to abuse there, before one was able to call out. The police were not called and Cornelius did not lose his VIP membership. Cornelius killed himself in 2012 at age 75, apparently suffering from the onset of dementia, and therefore like Hefner escaped any earthly implications of his conduct.
This episode principally revealed, once again, the misogynistic nature of Playboy and Hefner. Hefner portrayed himself as a lover and defender of women, but in reality, they were tools and objects to him, and he made them the same to a wider male audience.
One thing of note there, and a significant one, this third episode featured, like the prior two, interviews with Hefner that were done by some very major figures. These include a female interviewer I somewhat recognize but can't place a name for, George F. Will, and William F. Buckley. It may not be fair to comment on the interviews overall, as they haven't been shown, but what is obvious is that he was treated like a significant figure and at least in the questions asked, he was pretty much thrown softballs or was allowed to get away with non answers that nobody would tolerate in a serious interview now. Essentially, society was winking at him.
Cont, part 4
This entry was posted earlier, then evaporated for some reason when I tried to post it. For some reason updating this thread has been a bit difficult.
Episode 4 dealt with two figures who lost their lives in connection with Hefner. One was Hefner's executive secretary who was arrested outside the mansion with cocaine on her person and later killed herself, and the other was a bunny who killed herself. Both were mixed up with drugs, and the suggestion was that they were both "mules" who were supplying illegal drugs to the mansion.
It was clear that illegal drugs were very much a thing in the mansion, in spite of Hefner's claims to the contrary. One of his girlfriends of the period made that very clear and confessed to being a mule herself.
A suggestion was vaguely made that both of the women featured may have come to bad ends externally, but there was no real evidence to suggest that, and the better evidence is to the contrary.
On a final note, it's hard not to notice that Hefner in this period has the appearance in interviews of a person whose suffering from drug withdrawals. He's highly figity, jumpy and underweight. He didn't look right during this period.
Cont, part 5
I'll make this entry relatively short, even though in some ways it may be the most telling and illustrative of the story of Hefner and the Sexual Revolution he was part of.
Part 4 of this series deals mostly with going ons in the Playboy Mansion from 1976 to 1981 and Hefner's then "girlfriend". The girlfriend immediately before that was Barbi Benton, who left in 76. The show deals hardly at all with Benton, so far, but the suggestion is vaguely made that even though Benton tolerated Hefner having serial sex partners, she kept the lid on things descending into outright depravity.
When she left, the next one, Sondra (Theodore?) entered the picture. She wasn't a centerfold originally, unlike Benton, but a 19-year-old who attended a party at the mansion with a high school friend. Hefner seduced her that night, although it seems pretty clear she allowed that to occur, and she rapidly went on to being his principal concubine.
As one of those interviewed, with Sondra Hefner was allowed to do things that he wouldn't be allowed to do with "a grown ass woman". The house descended into complete and disgusting depravity, the likes of which I'll generally omit, with Hefner often forcing what amounted to a show of which he was the voyeur.
There's a real lesson in here. Hefner claimed, during his lifetime, that he wanted to be part of a movement of his age redefining society's relationship with sex, but he never had anything deeper than that to say about it. It's pretty clear he was just a self-centered egotistical weirdo, and in fact at one point was interviewed praising being self-centered. With the rails off, which seem to have come fully off with Benton's departure, he collapsed into full scale depravity of the grossest sort. To a very large degree, the same thing has happened with American society.
Being fascinated with a person's own lust really isn't an ethos, but a recipe for destruction. That happened to Hefner's character, and it was inflicted on a lot of those around him. It couldn't have happened but for independent developments in the 1960s, including pharmaceutical ones. The central figure of this episode, his girlfriend from 76 to 81, was frank that she never recovered from her experience in those years. A larger societal recovery may be going on, but it hasn't fully occurred by any means yet.
Continued, Episodes 6, 7, 8 & 9.
I haven't updated this for some time for a variety of reasons, including that the war in Ukraine has been going on, and we're tracking it on the blog, which takes up more blogging time than a person might suspect.
Additionally, however, these episodes seemed to flow together in some ways, so I held off. Indeed, in doing that I might have messed up as I'm losing track of the count of the episodes. Nonetheless, what I'll note is that this series remains well worth watching.
What we've learned since the last reviewed episode is as follows.
Episode 6 dealt with corporate Playboy. I'll confess that this seemed unlikely to interest me, but it did turn out to be interesting. Playboy, in reaction to protests against it by feminist in the 1970s, claimed to be supportive of women as part of its propaganda, but not surprisingly, working for the company as a woman was a nightmare.
That episode particularly focused on the story of Micki Garcia, who was heavily interviewed for this episode and who appears in others. Highly articulate and obviously very intelligent, she made a career decision to go from modeling over to Playboy as it seemed like an economically wise decision, becoming one of the first Hispanic centerfolds. Following that, she worked into being head of Playboy productions, which sent playmates and bunnies out as rented window dressing for events.
Garcia revealed in an earlier episode that she was raped at one such event herself. In turn, and not surprisingly, she found that her charges were continually subject to everything from heavy sexual pressure to outright rape, with one model who was featured having been kidnapped for a time. She attempted to bring this to the attention of management and was, in turn, marked as a bit of a pariah inside the organization. She finally broke with it and testified to a Congressional committee about the true nature of the organization, and how its charges were subject to such things, as well as the drug use that went on. She became its outright enemy, which was a subject of the following episode, number 7.
P. J. Marston was also featured in episode 6, detaining how she transferred to Playboy headquarters for a time in Chicago. She also protested in favor of her charges, Playboy bunnies, and as a result was transferred to New Jersey where she wouldn't be a problem. She detailed how certain figures at the corporate headquarters routinely grouped and whatnot the female employees. She also detailed being raped by a corporate employee while employed there. In the following episode, she detailed having been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby.
Episode 7, which we've led into (if I have the numbers right) dealt principally with events inside the Playboy mansion, which were horrific. An epicenter of drugs and perverted conduct, the show started off with the suicide of a centerfold to whom something had happened, but which effectively covered up. She left a message directed directly at Hugh Hefner, but the story did not become known at the time. From there, drug use, voyeurism of Hefner, really perverted sexual conduct, and the individual abusive conduct of some guests to the mansion were discussed. Physically abusive conduct by James Brown, the former football star, and the now well known weird conduct by Bill Cosby were discussed. Photos of Roman Polanski showed up, and while there was nothing directed connected with him in regard to the mansion, the attitude of men towards underage girls was noted, with it being asserted that Hefner had taken advantage of a 16-year-old friend of his daughter.
The following episode dealt with a series of "mini mansions" that were satellites of the central one. These seem to have come about during a period of time during which the main mansion was under control during one of the periods of time during which Hefner was married, and accordingly his centerfold wife put a halt to the conduct at the main mansion. At the satellites, however, the conduct carried on, with the women features at them principally being young women who were lured into them, often drugged while there, and induced with claims that they'd be given modeling contracts. The daughter of Hefner's physician who lived in the mansion claimed in one of these that one such young woman, an Eastern European, died during one such party and her body was removed, and she was basically never heard of again, with her father showing up some time later about her whereabouts.
In this episode there was speculation, and that is what it was, that the relationship between Hefner and his physician was itself sexual. It was all speculative in nature, but Hefner did not in an interview that was run that he had experimented with homosexuality. The physician is still living, and married, and denies that there was any sexual relationship.
Overall, what these series of episodes demonstrated was an ongoing highly abusive view of women, with all sorts of outrages perpetrated against them. Garcia commented in the end of this series of episodes that she thought Hefner hated women. Playboy certainly doesn't treat them as human beings, but as objects, indeed destructible toys.
These episodes do bring up, however, a point we've noted on this blog earlier. Garcia and Marston were willing participants for at time in the horror that they saw going on. Granted, they tried to address it, and are trying to do so now, but nonetheless to at least some degree they were facilitating the abuse that they saw occurring. How they allowed this to occur is hard to understand. At least Marston seems to have convinced herself that she could do good within the organization and that its underlying mythology wasn't a lie. Garcia seems to have been much less deluded and became marked within the organization as a result. Still, it's hard to grasp.
Episode 10
Episode 10 was clearly meant to be the final installment of this series, although there are now two additional ones. We'll deal with those as epilogues.
This episode focused on the story of Dorothy Stratton, a Playboy model who was murdered in 1980. Her story was used to tell the story of rape at the Playboy mansion, with the rapist being Hugh Hefner.
Stratton was regarded as an exceptional beauty when she was introduced to Playboy by a boyfriend, and she was undoubtedly a very beautiful woman of a certain type. Like many in her category who fell into this world, she ended up a resident of the Playboy mansion, where she drew the unwanted attentions of Hefner. At the same time, she drew the attentions of Peter Bogdanovich, the direction and actor, who cast her in the film They All Laughed. However, just shortly after it became clear that she's become a major Playboy model, if not more, she married her boyfriend, thereby setting up an odd love triangle, as Bogdanovich's interest in her quickly became romantic.
According to Bogdanovich, who later wrote a book about her, something forced and gross happened to Stratton at the Playboy mansion. Discounted at the time, in his book he condemned Hugh Hefner broadly, blaming him for Stratton's psychological decline and Hefner for a wider decline in American culture. In this episode, what happened to Stratton is developed, with a former butler at the mansion detailing having witnessed her rape by Hefner and confirming that the lights just went out of her after that. Ultimately, she was murdered by her estranged husband.
The lights going out of women and rapes were not limited. Another former model, who discussed her experiences in earlier episodes, related in this one that she too was a resident of the mansion. Her photos were taken when she was still 17, and then run when she turned 18, at which time she became a resident of the house. She related that at some point she was drugged and woke up with Hefner on top of her. Telling the chief Playboy photographer at the time about what occurred, she was told it was no big deal.
That victim had been a victim of childhood rape, and her recollections were chilling. An obviously religious woman, she described Hefner's face during the rape ad demonic, a description she meant literally and not figuratively, and related it to the same appearance her grandfather had when he had raped her. An obviously highly intelligent woman, she appears to still be struggling with what occurred.
Yet another model who was Hefner's main girlfriend for a time, and who has also been a major focus of the documentary, recollected Hefner taking her down the hall, opening a woman's bedroom, and raping the girl while she watched. Hefner dismissed the entire action with the comment that surely a women wouldn't stay there and not expect to have sex.
Overall, descriptions of how the mental status of young women in the mansion went from lively to burned out due to their experiences there. And the point was made and demonstrated that Hefner had no respect for women at all. Indeed, in reality, what Micki Garcia claimed seemed well established, in some fashion he seemed to hate women.
In the very first episode of the series, it was briefly discussed that Hefner related his founding of the magazine to having been rejected by a girl in high school for a date. While psychoanalyzing the dead is always hazardous, it seems that there may be something to it. That, in some fashion, may have lead to a warped and hateful attitude towards women in which they were merely objects.
The magazine presented that view to the world, and unfortunately, helped the culture to accept it.
Footnotes
*It's admittedly unusual for us to start a review of any kind prior to a series being completed, but here we've done so as the points made, and the horrors revealed, are sufficient to do so. Additionally, given schedules and what not, its very possible that we may not view the reamining parts of the series.
On this topic, it could legitimately be asked why review this documentary at all, on this site. Actually, however, its one of the very sorts of things this blog was designed to examine.
The very first entry here claimed the purpose of the blog as follows:
Lex Anteinternet?
The Consolidated Royalty Building, where I work, back when it was new.
What the heck is this blog about?
The intent of this blog is to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?
Part of the reason for this, quite frankly, has something to do with minor research for a very slow moving book I've been pondering. And part of it is just because I'm curious. Hopefully it'll generate enough minor interest so that anyone who stops by might find something of interest, once it begins to develop a bit.
How does this to comport?
Well, the blog has clearly gone beyond "the practice of law prior to the current era" and, as noted before, it theoretically is a sort of blog based research for a very slow moving novel I'm theoretically writing.
Part of that research has been to take a close look at how life really was in the 1910s, and that's expanded out to how life really was in prior eras. And part of that is social history.
That's why this topic is very relevant.
All too often, portrayals of the past are based on our concepts of values and outlooks of today, which are very often wildly off base. For this reason, particularly for badly based historical depictions, social views are expressed from a fully current. . . I wouldn't call them modern, point of view. As modern in the Western world are blisteringly fascinated by sex, and frankly a pornographic concept of sex, this sort of view is extremely common in works that are ostensibly works of historical fiction. It isn't limited to this, however. This also tends to be the case with other common aspects of society, ranging from the roles of women in society, the attitudes towards that, and frequently matters of religion as well.
As somewhat minor examples, just recently I was flipping through the channels and one of the more modern Westerns was on, complete with a female gunfighter wearing trousers. Well, not very likely. When women started to actually wear trousers, right around 1900 or so, it was somewhat of a controversial matter, and it required, to put it delicately, an evolution of undergarments.
To give another example, there is a popular television show on Vikings where they are the celebrated protagonists. To the extremely limited extent I've seen it, which is extremely limited, it not only is completely historically inaccurate, but it's also somewhat hostile to religion, by which would have to mean Catholicism as there was only one Christian Church at the time, divided into east and west though it was. In reality, the Viking era was heroically Christian and obviously so, so much so that the Vikings themselves, by the end of the Viking age, were Latin Rite Catholics.
On the topic at hand, television and Hollywood have really endorsed a sort of combined Cosmopolitan/Playboy view of women in recent historical dramas, or tend to. The women tend to libertine and more often than not sterile, in an era when neither was anywhere near true. Indeed, the irony is that many of our ancestors would regard our current conduct in this arena as not only shocking, but appalling. The further irony is that in large part the Me Too movement seeks to reach back into this prior era, where the standards they're reaching for were the social standard, even if widely ignored.
1. It's interesting that to be a "playboy" was originally a type of insult, and remained so to some degree when I was young. In its original sense it meant a superficial male who played women. It was sort of a nicer and more superficial way of saying that somebody was a womanizer.
2. Prior magazines were pretty clearly depictions of prostitutes, with all the nasty vice and lack of personal knowledge that goes with that, or of what were essentially burlesque models, whom the vieweres knew that they could look at, but never touch.
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