Sunday, February 27, 1944. The Khaibakh Massacre

Weather prevented over 700 Chechen villagers from Khaibakh from being convoyed in the Soviet mass deportation of Chechens, meaning they could not meet the absurdly short deadline set by Lavrentiy Beria so they were shot.  The order was given by Mikhail Gvishiani, an officer in the NKVD.

Beria, a loyal Stalin henchman, was a first class weirdo who was also a mass rapist, something his position allowed him to get away with.  He fell after Stalin's death, was tried, and executed for treason.

Gvishiani survived the fall of Stalin, but probably only because his son, Dzhermen Gvishiani, was married to the daughter of Communist Party Central Committee member Alexei Kosygin.

It was the start of National Negro Press Week.

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services commenced Operation Ginny I with the objective of blowing up Italian railway tunnels in Italy to cut German lines of communication.

The OSS team landed in the wrong location and had to abandon the mission.

Hitler ordered the Panzerfeldhaubitze 18M auf Geschützwagen III/IV (Sf) Hummel, Sd.Kfz. 165, "Hummel" renamed as he did not find the name Hummel, i.e. bumblebee to be an appropriate name.

You would think that Hitler would have had other things to worry about at this point.

The Grayback was sunk off of Okinawa by aircraft.

Wednesday, September 11, 1923. The British Empire in Southern Africa.

Southern Rhodesia became a British colony when the British government took it over from the British South Africa Company due to a 1922 referendum.  Prior to that time, it had been informally been known as Zambesia, based on the Zambezi River. It would form a government on October 1 and would retain its status, sort of, as a British colony until 1964.  

Flag of Southern Rhodesia.

Southern Rhodesia, massively British in terms of its colonial character, saw itself in that fashion, and its white residents had been highly supportive of World War One.  They would be again of World War Two.

Flag of Northern Rhodesia.

In 1953, it was confederated by the British with Northern Rhodesia, which had a larger landmass.  In the 1950s, it began to fall apart with the rise of African nationalism.  Northern Rhodesia became independent and changed its name to Zambia in 1964, interestingly changing its name during the course of the Olympics, and therefore entering the games with one name and exiting it with another.

Flag of Zambia.

When Northern Rhodesia became independent, with the cooperation of the British government, it struck fear into Southern Rhodesian whites, and the country, which was controlled by them, issued its Unilateral Declaration of Independence as Rhodesia in 1965.  The winds of change already well set in, Rhodesia, while it had cooperation from various countries, was unrecognized by any.  It fought an increasingly losing battle against African nationalist forces in the 60s and 70s, and returned to British colonial status brief in 1979, before becoming the current state of Zimbabwe.

Rhodesian flag.

Unfortunately, since independence its history has not been a happy one, as it fell to one party rule under Robert Mugabe, something it only recently overcame.  Zambia, spared a post-colonial war, has fared better, and indeed uniquely for a post colonia African nation, had an Acting President in recent memory who was of European (Scottish) descent.

Finnair, the Finnish national airline, was incorporated as Aero O/Y.

The Convention for the Suppression of the Circulation of and Traffic in Obscene Publications was signed in Geneva by members of the League of Nations. The anti pornography treaty is still in effect, accepted and amended by the United Nations, although a person would hardly know it.

Bulgaria arrested 2,500 Communist suspected of plotting an uprising.

Blog Mirror: TV Dinner Anniversary. A great day in history.

 I loved these as a kid, back in the pre microwave day.

TV Dinner Anniversary

Tuesday, June 12, 1923. Trouble in China.

The remaining eight hostages taken by train bandits in what became known as the Linceng Outrage were freed.  The payment of ransom by Shanghai mobster Du Yuesheng to Sun Meiyao of the Shandong Outlaws resulted in the final freedom of what originally had been 300 such hostages.

Du Yuesheng, who controlled the Shanghai opium trade, would become a significant supporter of Chiang Kai Shek, and has been honored with a memorial in Taiwan, where he died.

Sun Meiyao would be executed by the Chinese Army in December.

On the same day, Chinese general Feng Yuxiang issued an ultimatum to Chinese President Li Yuanhong to resign.  He himself would go on to briefly lead the country, and then support the Nationalist as well, before becoming, in later years, a critic of it.  While a Christian, he was comfortable with the Communist regime and was honored by it when he died in 1953.

Juneau Alaska, June 12, 1923.

Tuesday, November 3, 1942. The 1942 Election.

Today was election day in 1942.  Overall, the nationwide election saw an increase in Republican office holders.

In Wyoming, the following occurred:

1942.  Lester Hunt, DDS, the sitting Wyoming Secretary of State and a Democrat narrowly defeated Governor Nels H. Smith.

Lester C. Hunt.

Hunt would serve as Governor for two terms before going on to becoming Wyoming's Senator.  He killed himself in 1954 after Washington D. C. policy picked up his son in 1953 for soliciting a male prostitute.  The scandal was kept quiet for awhile, but political opponents threatened to use it against him as a threat to keep him from engaging in a 1954 bid for office.

In the Senate Hunt had been an opponent of Joe McCarthy.

In the same year that Wyoming went from Republican to Democrat for the Governor's mansion, the state went in the opposite direction for the Senate.  Edward V. Robinson defeated incumbant Harry Schwartz.

Robinson.

Robinson's election was part of a nationwide treand that year that saw a Republican increase.  He's serve only one term and lose a bid for reelection.  He was Welsh and had served in the British Army in the Boer War, and is little remembered as a Wyoming politician.

Hunt's death, it should be noted, remains an enduring tragedy of the McCarthy Era, and one which, at least in some Wyoming circles, came to define McCarthyism and certain right wing elements of the press.

More on Hunt:

Baseball, Politics, Triumph and Tragedy: The Career of Lester Hunt

Robinson, on the other hand, gives us a rare example of a nearly completely forgotten Wyoming politician.  In some ways, that's a shame, as his life story was one that was somewhat typical of the era in that he was an early, post Frontier Era, immigrant to the state when a person could still enter ranching, which he did, in spite of having an engineering background.  Following his defeat for reelection he ultimately retired to Pendleton Oregon in 1958, where he died in 1963. 

 The Marines and Army begin an offensive on Guadalcanal at Koli Point.

Marine Corps pack artillery in action at Koli Point

Wednesday, October 21, 1942. Mark Clark's Mission, Eddie Rickenbacker's plight.

Clark in November, 1942.

Today in World War II History—October 21, 1942: Maj. Gen. Mark Clark lands by submarine at Cherchel, Algeria, for a clandestine meeting with the Vichy French in preparation for the upcoming Allied invasion.

From Sarah Sundin's blog.

The photogenic Clark was a favorite of the Press during the early part of World War Two. This event, resulting in the beginning of the formal separation of the French military from Vichy, may have been the high point, in real terms, of his career.  His later command in Italy, where he was in command until the war's end, has been subject to less impressive analysis by historians, and he was held in bitter contempt by veterans of the 36th Infantry Division who had taken huge casualties trying to cross the Rapido.  The sought, and received, a post-war Congressional investigation of that incident, for which Clark was cleared.

During the Korean War he was commander of the United Nations forces following the command of Matthew Ridgeway.  He occupied that role from May 12, 1952 until the armistice was signed on July 27, 1953.  He retired that following October, after which he became president of The Citadel.  He died in 1988, at age 84.

That last item is worth considering.  It means, for example, that when Clark was dispatched to negotiate with the French, he was 41, and when World War Two ended he was 44, younger than we often imagine World War Two generals to be.  In reality, in the U.S. Army, they tended to be relatively young.

Sundin also reports that a B-17D provided by the Army to Eddie Rickenbacker went down in the Pacific.  Rickenbacker was on a tour of Pacific air bases to review operations and living conditions.  Faulty navigational equipment caused the plane to go widely off course and run out of fuel over the open ocean.  The crew was adrift thereafter for twenty-four days before being picked, with one of the men dying from dehydration.  Ultimately, the men split up in lift rafts at sea, but they were found.

The experience caused the Navy to alter life raft equipment to incorporate fishing equipment in them.

She also notes that the Revenue Act of 1942 went into effect in the US, which increased individual income tax rates and corporate tax rates, with top tax rates going from 31% to 40%.  The act also reduced personal exemptions.  An excess profits tax of 90% was also put in effect.  Medical expenses became a deduction for the first time.

The war ushered in an era of generally high upper tax rates that remained in effect for the next couple of decades, meaning that they remained high during the boom years of the 1950s.  The concept that American tax rates were unfairly high really didn't come about until Ronald Reagan's presidency.

Secrets of Playboy

 

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.

Related Threads:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Throwing rocks at Hugh Hefner . . . I'm not alone in that.

Maybe the biggest unanswered question about the Harvey Weinstein story is. . .

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Ross Douthart of the New York Times says what I did, more bluntly.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh

Is it just bad male behavior, or. . .

Accidentally getting an argument right for the wrong reasons. Alyssa Milano discovers the connection between sex and babies.

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

Maybe the biggest unanswered question about the Harvey Weinstein story is. . .

Prostituting their image

Depictions, Mispreceptions, Objectification, Shame, Shamelessness, Progress and Regression.

And yet. . .

 I ran an old editorial cartoon a couple of days ago from an August 23, 1920 newspaper.

August 23, 1920. Portents

From the Sandusky Ohio Star Journal, August 23, 1920.  "The Sky Is Now Her Limit".

I also cross posted that on Reddit's 100 Years Ago subm where somebody made this observation:

Pretty much everything has been ticked off except presidency and it’s looking like that will likely change soon as well!

I hadn't thought of that, but that's correct.

Which makes me wonder why item number one on the rungs is still around.  The slavery one, that is.

Now, this isn't going to be a feminist manifesto proclaiming that something like marriage is slavery, or some other such nonsense.  No, rather, by slavery, we're referring to concubinage.

That may sound odd, and even impossible in the modern context, but it isn't in this one.  

A concubine, as well all know, is a species of prostitute, the prime thing being different from conventional prostitutes is that their services were bound to a single master rather than simply sold to everyone and, therefore, I am perhaps being polite here.  By way of movies, television, magazines and, most importantly now, the internet, thousands upon thousands of women prostitute their images to those unknown and by extension putting their entire gender into a type of ongoing concubinage.

We've dealt with this before.  Starting in 1953, when Playboy magazine brought photographic prostitution into the mainstream, starting first with Marilyn Monroe.  Monroe managed to overcome the scandal, through the intervention of Life magazine which published her naked photographs first, but she was never really able to overcome the image.  She'd always be, in the eyes of thousands of men, about to take off her clothes, no matter how clothes she might really be.

The way we'd probably like to remember Marilyn Monroe, if we could. We really can't, however, as she built her career on her figure in a more revealing way than still rather obvious here (with a nice Yaschaflex camera by the way).  From this earlier thread here.  Playboy's co-opting of her body, sold several years earlier to a calendar photographer when she was unknown and desperate, nearly ruined her career, which was saved only by Life magazine determining to beat Playboy to the punch and publishing it first.  Life's parry saved her from an immediate ruined career, but the overall publicity launched Playboy.  In the end, of course, she'd be only one of the lives effectively ruined by Playboy, although her own selling of her image in less graphic form, combined with an early tragic history, played a larger measure in that.

Anyhow, since that fateful 1953 publication date, the prostitution of the female form has expanded enormously.  And hence the slavery.

Every Kate Upton who appears for the viewing pleasure of thousands of unknown men strikes a blow at women of achievement.  There's no two ways about it.  So that first rung remains one to be overcome.

And, of course, in some direct ways, the portrayal of young women in anonymous pornography is actual slavery, aided along by drugs, desperation, and social decay.

Novella d'Andrea, a professor in law at the University of Bologna and daughter of canon law professor Giovanni d'Andrea, who gave her lectures from behind a screen lest her beauty distract her students.  Both of Giovanni's daughters were professors of law.  What?  You didn't think that possible in the 1330s and 1340s. . . well it was.

No matter how far women come, until their routine selling of their images ceases, and until women themselves stop participating it when they voluntarily do, and until its no longer tolerated by men and women, true equality will never really be achieved.

Oh no, it can't be that. . .

The Birth of A Nation, D. W. Griffith's 1915 cinematic piece of trash.  It came right as the second Klu Klux Klan was experiencing a nationwide revival.  The film can't be blamed for racial violence in the 1910s, but it certainly contributed to the rise of the KKK in that era and to an atmosphere that set the background for events like the Red Summer of 1919.

On the very day I published this:

Lex Anteinternet: Disaffection and Violence: I've written here repeatedly about the cause of American incidents of mass violence, noting in each that actually we live in the most...

The Tribune had an article with this headline:

No, there's still no link between video games and violence

Yeah, bull.

One of the strongest tendencies in American society is to believe that license, of any type, can't possibly be the source of excess, of any type.

It is, and it's demonstratively so, keeping in mind that the impact of things is collective for the most part, and very rarely individual.

Sure, it's absolutely the case that individual video games are not likely to inspire most of the viewers to act out violently.  But most of the viewers will be impacted, and some will be impacted enormously.  We've already conducted an experiment on this for a 70 year period and we know the answer.  

The test set was pornography.

We've dealt with this ad nauseum (or I'm sure that's how our limited audience probably feels in part) but that is in fact the test we've conducted and we know the results.

In 1953, as readers here know (and probably with they weren't reading about again) Playboy Magazine came out with its first edition.  By 1963 it was firmly established as the okay, unless you were in your early teens, American men's magazine, quite an accomplishment for a publication of a type that heretofore was sold in brown paper bags in the dingy part of towns.  By 1973 it was a major American publication, taken seriously and interviewing Presidential candidates.  By 1983 it was in trouble, but not because men had grown tired of naked over endowed women, but because it had been copied and its followers had taken its photographed prostitution further down the road.  Penthouse and Hustler were cutting into it, as they were more "graphic".  Now the magazine is in a great deal of trouble financially and its copiers are no longer in print at all, having moved to the Internet, but that too is significant. The Internet is a sea of pornography.

The way we'd probably like to remember Marilyn Monroe, if we could. We really can't, however, as she built her career on her figure in a more revealing way than still rather obvious here (with a nice Yaschaflex camera by the way).  From this earlier thread here.  Playboy's co-opting of her body, sold several years earlier to a calendar photographer when she was unknown and desperate, nearly ruined her career, which was saved only by Life magazine determining to beat Playboy to the punch and publishing it first.  Life's parry saved her from an immediate ruined career, but the overall publicity launched Playboy.  In the end, of course, she'd be only one of the lives effectively ruined by Playboy, although her own selling of her image in less graphic form, combined with an early tragic history, played a larger measure in that.

But during that time period its frankly the case that pornography crossed over into the mainstream.  In the 1950s, a film like Some Like It Hot was regarded as salacious. It features Marilyn Monroe, Playboy's first centerfold, but it doesn't feature any nudity at all.  Spring forward and you can nearly be guaranteed that any major movie featuring a young woman, no matter how gigantic her star status, and there's a really decent chance that the film will show her nude simply to do it. 

We know this had a big impact on a lot of thing, some of them being the most basic of all.  The spread of pornography helped fuel social change that helped increase the divorce rate and helped lead to the massive increase of "single mothers".  It resulted in the phenomenon of pornography addiction which, ironically, has in turn lead, according to respected sociologists, in a decrease in sex itself and a decrease in satisfactory male/female relationship. 

It also lead to violence.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s this was hotly debated, but it really isn't much now.  It's clear that early exposure on the part of some to Playboy and its fellow travelers lead to a permanently debased view of women to those victims.  Some just went on to lesser lives, but it's also clear that what it did to some is to fuel an increase for more and more "graphic" pornography and, in turn, to violent pornography to eventually acting out violently.  At least one serial killer has related this in his own case.  And its certainly well established that an addiction to pornography on the part of some leads them to other acts, the least of which might be hiring prostitutes to preform what they've been viewing in other media.

So our point about video games?

Arguments about video games have and are taking the exact same trajectory.  Early on Playboy argued that it was just good clean smutty fun.  It turned out not to be, to the enormous determent of women, causing massive sociological and even medical problems we haven't worked out way out yet.

Men and women au natural, but not in the way that Hugh Hefner and his fellow travelers would have it.

Now, sex is different than violence, sort of, in that it taps right into one of our most basic instincts and violence. . . . oh wait.

Actually, not so much. . . at least in the case of men.

Men are more violent than women. There's no doubt about it.  Modern social engineers may like to pretend that there's no psychological or biological difference, but there most definitely is.  Violence is frankly built into men, undoubtedly in a evolutionary biology sense, in a way that its not built into women.  Most men won't act inappropriately violent, of course, but that men seek recourse to violence in any setting in which violence can arise cannot be realistically doubted.  There's a deep seated, and as noted, basic biological reason for this.  Indeed, those who have studied it note that men have a different violence curve, if you will, being more likely to get suddenly made and violent, than women do, who generally rise slow in anger and who have anger very slowly retreat.  Indeed, men are often very baffled by the retained anger of the women they're close to, not experiencing it in the same way as women do at all.

It's no accident that the sort of crimes that have been focused on here recently such as in the thread above are committed by males.  I know of only one instance recently of the contrary.*  Women can and do commit violent acts, to be sure, but they tend to be of a different character.  A self defense argument, for that reason, for a woman in defense of the charge of First Degree Homicide is a lot more likely to be regarded as credible than it is for a man.  We see those form time to time in the form of the "I just couldn't take it anymore. . . .".  Doesn't work that well if a guy says it (and frankly it doesn't work very well as a defense for a woman either, and isn't a legally cognizable defense in and of itself anywhere).

A culture of justified violence, or a subculture of one, does have an impact on a society or some of its members.  That's why some governments, movements, or political parties, embrace it.

By the late 1920s and 1930s the propaganda associated with the KKK had been so successful that it was able to use its violent imagery openly for other purposes.  Oddly enough, the KKK was a strong proponent of Prohibition.  Why this is the case isn't clear to me, but an element of it may have been that beer was strongly associated with Catholic Irish, whom the KKK detested.

Indeed, that's why even now, in spite of the absolute horror it represents, the stirring imagines of some hideously evil causes are still visually attractive.  And if they are now, they were even more so when they were first released.

Common German portrayal of member of the SS.  The SS was a branch of the Nazi Party itself, like the SA, and while the means by which it acquired members varied, an element of it was trying to appeal to young men with very manly looking portrayals.  Indeed, the Nazis were very deeply into visual portrayals of all types, including uniforms, and were very effective at it. They were much less effective in terms of written propaganda, which was often disregarded, and quite ineffective in terms of music, with the Germans retaining a fondness for music that the Nazis didn't really approve of.

And indeed, this is the very nature of visual propaganda, to stir emotions.  If that can't be done legitimately, it can be done visually.

French poster of Che Guevera from the 1968 uprisings.  Guevera was a detestable butcher who deserves to be remembered in that fashion, but even now this iconic depiction is the way he's commonly remembered.

And doing this visually not only means doing int artistically in posters, something that would frankly appeal very little to most people today as you don't normally go somewhere in which posters are routinely encountered, but in terms of images.

North Vietnamese poster of the Vietnam War depicting an actual female combatant heroically circa 1972.  In reality by the end of the war the NVA was down to teenage troops and even had to take recaptured deserters back into service.  Only a tolerance for the utter destruction of any human life, including that of the North Vietnamese, allowed North Vietnam to prevail in the war.

The moving pictures ability to inspire and be used as propaganda has long been known.  Nazi cinematic propaganda was so effective that it won an Academy Award for cinematography prior to World War Two for the film Triumph Of The Will.  That a body that has never been sympathetic to fascists of any stripe, and which frankly prior to World War Two contained a number of barely closeted Communists, and which indeed was so left leaning that even highly Catholic film maker John Ford could release a pretty lefty The Grapes Of Wrath, really says something.

Which takes us to "Slam" Marshall.

I've dealt with S.L.A. Marshall before here.  He was the bulling U.S. Army historian who came up with the complete crock that soldiers in combat don't shoot their weapons (in reality, they shoot too much).  While Marshall's thesis was a dud, and he should be another recipient of the Defense Boobie Prize for Strategic Doltery award, it was widely accepted and the military, among other things, has invested in video game technology for years and years now.

The purpose of those games is combat environment desensitization and familiarization.  That's the purpose of a lot of military training.  To get you used to the really bad stuff.  It's why soldiers of every army spend a lot of time practicing war, in part.  Combat is distracting and the Army, every army, wants its soldiers to be able to do their jobs.  In the case of the U.S. military, video games have been part of that for quite some time.

So do video games have a link with violence?

Undoubtedly.

Will video games make everyone who plays them violent?

No.

Will they impact every player in some fashion?

Undoubtedly again.

The same is true, we'd note, of what we've otherwise noted here, and we can and should expand on that.  Viewing pornography doesn't turn everyone who views it into a rapist.  But it's part of the pathway for a lot of rapist (the correlation is in fact quite high).  Watching episodes of Friends won't lead everyone to think that they need to shack up with a girlfriend, but it will have that bar lowering impact on some, maybe most, who view it.**

Add to that, the impact of movies.

In the current era the rating system has been reduced to what is basically a joke.  In an era in which "basic cable" includes all the violent and pornographic fare that a person could possibly imagine, ratings effectively do nothing whatsoever.

As an example, the other day I was flipping through the movie lists on television, which I'll occasionally do to see if there's something I'm inclined to watch on.  There usually isn't, which sends me off to a book or perhaps this machine (which is another topic).  However, in this instance I saw a brief snippet for Red Sparrow, which in reading it portrayed the film as a late Cold War spy thriller. I like some films of this genera, so I hit it.

It isn't what I was expecting.  It certainly wasn't The Third Man and its not The Americans either.  It's basically a violent pornographic movie featuring Jennifer Lawrence, famous for The Hunger Games, which I haven't seen. Ostensibly with a theme somewhat related to that of The Americans, but involving Soviet agents trained to seduce their targets as it turns out, it's really just violence and sex and, for its young probably mostly male viewers, a chance to see Jennifer Lawrence naked.***  The accents are, by the way, horrifically bad.****  Anyhow, after about five minutes of this and it being plain that it isn't a spy thriller, but a porno flick, I turned it off and moved on.*****

But that's the point.  When the motion picture rating system came in during the 1960s, I'm pretty sure that this film would have been rated X.  And the blue content of the film doesn't serve a point, like the violence in the highly violent 1969 film The Wild Bunch does. That '69 Peckinpah film sought to strip away the good bad guy image of Western criminals that was so common in prior films and American culture, and shock the audience by showing us that we (again, probably mostly men) are attracted to the violence of those men because they are violent, not for some higher redeeming reason.  Now, with films like John Wick and the like, we don't make that pretension much, at least not in what we might regard as lower films.

As part of that, and as noted above, cinematic portrayals of American troops have reached the near Marvel hero movie of the week level. 

Portrayals, particularly American ones, of soldiers have usually portrayed them heroically, with some films made in the 1960s being a notable exception.  Any portrayal of war tends to glamorize it no matter what, and no matter what the intent, however.  Indeed, one Vietnam War era reporter noted in response to a question that it was impossible not to glamorize war, no matter how horrific it is.

Make no mistake about it, being in a war is not glamorous.  It's horrific.  People who experience war are about as negative about that experience as it is possible for a human being to be, and in ways that are completely impossible to explain.  Even being in the military, for a lot of people, is far from glamorous even if nothing actually occurs during their service.  But irrespective of that, it's impossible, for some deeply elemental reason, not to have portrayals of war come across as glamorizing it.

Even real attempts to avoid this generally fail.  Platoon, for example, is hardly a pro war film, but lots of young viewers watch it with fascination and it remains the most popular of the Vietnam War films.  How many movie viewers (again, almost certainly mostly male) have watched the 1st Cavalry helicopter assault scene of Apocalypse Now again and again.  Apocalypse Now may be an anti war film, and a critique of the Vietnam War, but its Robert Duvall's shallow minded Col. Kilgore who is reduced to a meme with "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" and "Charlie don't surf" being the catch lines that people (men, again) like to repeat.  And telling again, if you prefer Full Metal Jacket, the scenes that are likely to be remembered are R. Lee Emery's portrayal of a drill sergeant, which is very effectively and accurately done, and the line most recalled is likely to be the Vietnamese prostitutes "Me so horny. . . " line.^

Indeed, in regard to anti war movies, in my view, only two are really effective in that genera, that being one I've really criticized here from time to time, The Deer Hunter.  Whatever its faults, The Deer Hunter is a very effective anti war film if you can stand to sit through the entire thing, with its concluding scene being hugely tragic.  Perhaps Paths Of Glory might be another, the most unromanticized portrayal of World War One I've seen.  Not even All Quiet On The Western Front can compare. 

Lesser movies in recent years have really taken the American soldier as hero depiction the next miles.  The Baby Boom generations depictions of their fathers, having recovered from depicting them as dolts in the 60s, definitely took a turn in this directly with Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, both of which are excellent and realistic and which certainly don't seek to glamorize war.  Those movies are first rate, but after that there are a lot of war films, particularly very recent ones, which are simply action pictures, think Fast and Furious, in military garb.  Twelve Strong and Lone Survivor, the last of which isn't bad, are examples of this.  The soldiers perform physical feats and combat feats which are frankly impossible, and they adhere to the strict American movie rule that all American soldiers are crack shots and all our opponents are horrible shots.

The point isn't that any one of these films causes violence.  Most people, and again these movies are watched a lot more by men than women, could sit through anyone of them and not be impacted.  But they do have impact, in concert what we've noticed above, for the marginalized.

And that's where any one item isn't the cause of anything, maybe, but the sum total of them are.  Sure, playing World of Improbable Heroism II all day won't turn most people into violent loners.  An entire day sat in front of photographs of nameless young prostitutes (which is almost certainly what most are) uploaded to the net won't turn a person into a rapist.  A steady diet on the television of violent super American military heroics or Jennifer Lawrence stripping in the name of Soviet glory won't make a person into a debased lone wolf either. . . well it probably actually will, but maybe not one who acts on it.

But put this all together, and then put it in front of young men who have nothing. . . no friends, no work, no girlfriends, no meaningful existence, no skills of any value. . . and sooner or later, you're going to get some very bad results.^^

Could society act on this?  Of course it could.

But will American society act on it?

Probably not.  Doing so would be hard.  It would require deep thinking.  It might likely mean restoring old standards, in full or in part, that we abandoned in the 1960s and all the responsibilities that went with them.  And it might mean banning, limiting  or curtailing things that most Americans make frequent access too, rather than just a few, such as violent and sex based entertainment and depictions.  It would mean asking a lot of hard questions about "progress", the nature of men and women, the illusion of perpetual growth and the illusion of limitless benefits of technology.

Yes, it would require a lot of deep thinking about really deep topics.

And deep thinking isn't what we're into.  We're into simple solutions and blaming the machine. And, frankly, at the end of the day, no matter what Americans say about "Me Too" this or that, or instilling values that uplift people, we'd generally rather see Jennifer Lawrence naked and violent and are willing to pay the price for that, as long as we personally aren't the ones paying.

Even though we are.

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*It might be worth noting here that one woman who is commonly depicted as a cool killer likely really wasn't, that being Bonnie Parker.  Parker is a sad case and she obviously tolerated murder, but there's no real reason to believe that she ever committed one.

The only woman that I personally know, and only barely at that, who committed a homicide was a young woman that I vaguely knew who was repeatedly molested in the worst fashion by her father.  She ultimately committed what clearly amount to First Degree Murder but was never prosecuted. That's worth noting here, however, as its demonstrative of the anger curve noted above.

**Indeed just recently I heard, on NPR, an interview with a young man who was distressed that his adult life doesn't match that depicted in How I Met Your Mother.  I didn't watch that television drama, but what he noted, and what is obvious from even the short snippets of it I've seen, is that it depicts 20 somethings hanging out with a tight group of friend in bars.

There's really some truth to that, quite frankly.  Young people still do hang out at bars and much of young life remains as traditional as ever in regard to socialization.  Indeed, the bigger change has really been for older people, particularly middle age and older professional people, for whom casual socialization has massively declined.  But at the same time, something that has also altered is the economic demographics of that and how that works.

Dropped out of the picture pretty completely are those who aren't either students or those who aren't relatively well employed.  For those without a post high school education or who aren't fairly well employed, economic means for everything are pretty limited and people are quite isolated.  An additional aspect of that is that the economics of earlier eras simply forced people out of the house and into work, whether they lived in their parents homes or not, and as there wasn't all that much to do that wasn't labor related at home, home conditions also lent themselves to getting out of the house and into some sort of society.  It might be noted that even terrorist in the pre television days were rarely pure loners but were part of some sort of society.

***"Honey pot" type espionage traps by the Soviets were a real thing, to be sure, but the technique aspect of that is almost certainly less sophisticated and less debased than portrayed (to the extent I saw it) in Red Sparrow or, for that matter in The Americans. The Americans is very well done, but frankly in my view it pushed that aspect of the plot line a lot further than was justified.  At any rate, according to something I recent read, the recent Maria Butina episode may have involved this angle, apparently reluctantly on Butina's part.

****As in worse that Bullwinkle cartoon bad.

*****The degree to which things have really descended, cinematically, is well demonstrated by this film.  The 1960s film Barbarella nearly destroyed Jane Fonda's ability to be taken seriously as an actress and while Brigette Bardot was only ever partially taken seriously in the first place, her more revealing films of the period reduced her quickly to a character.  Lawrence's career, in contrast, will continue on without a blip in spite of having now appeared in this film.

^Note that in Full Metal Jacket, irrespective of its status as an anti war film, none of the important characters get killed, the American military wins, the Communist lose, and the tiny Vietnamese prostitutes are available at all times.  This is remarkable in regard to a war which we lost and the Communist won.  Only in The Deer Hunter do we lose, the Communist win, and the Vietnamese, including the prostitutes, are treated tragically with real human functions.

^^As noted above, this thread isn't on gun control at all, and I've barely touched on firearms here whatsoever.  That's because the factors noted above are the underlying cause of what we've been exhibiting here.

But here's where this links back in, in a weird sort of way.  The same sort of exaggerated glorification of the military and combat that's occurred in the last two decades has also occurred in regard to combat firearms.

Technologically, as we've noted here in depth before, firearms have changed very little for a very long time.  The basic technology that pertains to semi automatic firearms has existed it more or less present form for nearly a century.  The AR type weapon that seems to figure so prominently in the discussion in the media has existed since the early 1960s.  The AK type weapons that's also mentioned has existed since 1947.

We dealt with the rise of the status of the AR in a prior detailed thread.  The reason we note it again here is that the odd status that this old weapon has acquired in the popular imagination, including the imagination of the disaffected class we're speaking of here, contributes to part of the overall odd zeitgeist.