Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America

Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America PDF

Author: Elizabeth Fraterrigo

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-11-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780199739486

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Playboy was more than a magazine filled with pictures of nude women and advice on how to mix the perfect martini. Indeed, the magazine's vision of sexual liberation, high living, and "the good life" came to define mainstream images of postwar life. In exploring the history of America's most widely read and influential men's magazine, Elizabeth Fraterrigo hones in on the values, style, and gender formulations put forth in its pages and how they gained widespread currency in American culture. She shows that for Hugh Hefner, the "good life" meant the freedom to choose a lifestyle, and the one he promoted was the "playboy life," in which expensive goods and sexually available women were plentiful, obligations were few, and if one worked hard enough, one could enjoy abundant leisure and consumption. In support of this view, Playboy attacked early marriage, traditional gender arrangements, and sanctions against premarital sex, challenging the conservatism of family-centered postwar society. And despite the magazine's ups and downs, significant features of this "playboy life" have become engrained in American society.

The End of Love

The End of Love PDF

Author: Sabrina Strings

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2024-01-30

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0807008621

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From Playboy to Jay-Z, the racial origins of toxic masculinity and its impact on women, especially Black and “insufficiently white” women More men than ever are refusing loving partnerships and commitment, and instead seeking out “situationships.” When these men deign to articulate what they are looking for in a steady partner, they’ll often rely on superficial norms of attractiveness rooted in whiteness and anti-Blackness. Connecting the past to the present, sociologist Sabrina Strings argues that following the Civil Rights movement and the integration of women during the Second Wave Feminist movement, men aimed to hold on to their power by withholding love and commitment, a basic tenet of white supremacy and male domination, that served to manipulate all women. From pornography to hip hop, women—especially Black and “insufficiently white” women—were presented as gold diggers, props for masturbation, and side-pieces. Using historical research, personal stories, and critical analysis, Strings argues that the result is fuccboism, the latest incarnation of toxic masculinity. This work shows that men are not innately “toxic.” Nor do they hate love, commitment, or sex. Instead, men across race have been working a new code to effectively deny loving partnerships to women who are not pliant, slim, and white as a new mode of male domination.

The Short Writings of Nelson Algren

The Short Writings of Nelson Algren PDF

Author: Richard F. Bales

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2022-09-08

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1476681325

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Nelson Algren was a renowned Chicago writer known for his social commentary and his novels like The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Although he continues to be remembered almost exclusively for his novels, this book aims to highlight the value and influence of his short form works. Before he died in 1981, Algren had amassed a genre-defying body of work, including short stories, articles, poems and book reviews. The present book features a comprehensive analysis and discussion of Algren's lost literature, including everything but his novels. One of the pieces covered is a masterpiece of race relations written in 1950, more than 60 years before the galvanization of the Black Lives Matter movement. Another is a scathing poem about Algren's transatlantic love affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Both items are reprinted in the book courtesy of the Algren estate. This book also includes references to Algren's works that have yet to be studied by Algren scholars.

Reducing Bodies

Reducing Bodies PDF

Author: Elizabeth M. Matelski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-25

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 113481027X

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Reducing Bodies: Mass Culture and the Female Figure in Postwar America explores the ways in which women in the years following World War II refashioned their bodies—through reducing diets, exercise, and plastic surgery—and asks what insights these changing beauty standards can offer into gender dynamics in postwar America. Drawing on novel and untapped sources, including insurance industry records, this engaging study considers questions of gender, health, and race and provides historical context for the emergence of fat studies and contemporary conversations of the "obesity epidemic."

Easy Living

Easy Living PDF

Author: Elizabeth A Patton

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2020-07-17

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1978802242

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How did Americans come to believe that working at home is feasible, productive, and desirable? Easy Living examines how the idea of working within the home was constructed and disseminated in popular culture and mass media during the twentieth century. Through the analysis of national magazines and newspapers, television and film, and marketing and advertising materials from the housing, telecommunications, and office technology industries, Easy Living traces changing concepts about what it meant to work in the home. These ideas reflected larger social, political-economic, and technological trends of the times. Elizabeth A. Patton reveals that the notion of the home as a space that exists solely in the private sphere is a myth, as the social meaning of the home and its market value in relation to the public sphere are intricately linked.

Sex and the Office

Sex and the Office PDF

Author: Julie Berebitsky

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-03-27

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 0300183275

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In this engaging book—the first to historicize our understanding of sexual harassment in the workplace—Julie Berebitsky explores how Americans’ attitudes toward sexuality and gender in the office have changed from the 1860s, when women first took jobs as clerks in the U.S. Treasury office, to the present. Berebitsky recounts the actual experiences of female and male office workers; draws on archival sources ranging from the records of investigators looking for waste in government offices during World War II to the personal papers of Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem; and explores how popular sources—including cartoons, advertisements, advice guides, and a wide array of fictional accounts—have represented wanted and unwelcome romantic and sexual advances. By giving sex in the office a history, she provides valuable insights into the nature and meaning of sexual harassment today.

He Thinks He's Down

He Thinks He's Down PDF

Author: Katharine Bausch

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2020-06-01

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0774863757

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The end of the Second World War saw a “crisis of white masculinity” brought on by social change. As a result, several prominent white male pop culture figures sought out and appropriated African American cultural trappings to benefit from what they believed were powerful black masculinities. In He Thinks He’s Down, Katharine Bausch draws on case studies from three genres – the writings of Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, advertising and aesthetics in Playboy magazine, and action narratives of Blaxploitation films – to illustrate how each one engaged with black tropes while simultaneously doing little to change the racial and gendered stereotypes that perpetuated the power of white male privilege.

Dress and Identity in America

Dress and Identity in America PDF

Author: Daniel Delis Hill

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-12-14

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350373923

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Dress and Identity in America is an examination of the conservatism and materialism that swept across the country in the late 1940s through the 1950s-a backlash to the wartime tumult, privations, and social upheavals of the Second World War. The study looks at how American men sought to recapture a masculine identity from a generation earlier, that of the stoic patriarch, breadwinner, and dutiful father, and in the process, became the men in the gray flannel suits who were complacently conventional and conformist. Parallel to that is a look at how American women, who had donned pants and went to work in wartime munitions factories or joined services like the WACS and WAVES, were now expected to stay at home as housewives and mothers, dressed in cinched, ultrafeminine New Look fashions. As the Space Age dawned, their baby boom children rejected the conventions of their elders and experimented with their own ideas of identity and dress in an emerging era of counterculture revolutions.

Screen Interiors

Screen Interiors PDF

Author: Pat Kirkham

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1350150592

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Covering everything from Hollywood films to Soviet cinema, London's queer spaces to spaceships, horror architecture and action scenes, Screen Interiors presents an array of innovative perspectives on film design. Essays address questions related to interiors and objects in film and television from the early 1900s up until the present day. Authors explore how interior film design can facilitate action and amplify tensions, how rooms are employed as structural devices and how designed spaces can contribute to the construction of identities. Case studies look at disjunctions between interior and exterior design and the inter-relationship of production design and narrative. With a lens on class, sexuality and identity across a range of films including Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913), The Servant (1963), Caravaggio (1986), and Passengers (2016), and illustrated with film stills throughout, Screen Interiors showcases an array of methodological approaches for the study of film and design history.

Mr. Playboy

Mr. Playboy PDF

Author: Steven Watts

Publisher: Turner Publishing Company

Published: 2009-03-23

Total Pages: 662

ISBN-13: 0470501375

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Spans from Hefner's childhood to the launch of Playboy magazine and the expansion of the Playboy empire to the present Puts Hefner's life and work into the cultural context of American life from the mid-twentieth-century onwards Contains over 50 B/W and color photos, including an actual fold-out centerfold

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