I actually love this
Wasn’t Play Boy rather progressive at all times? What’s the broken clock?
I really hate peoples’ misconstruing of attraction with objectification. The presence of nudity doesn’t make something bad, exploitative, or wrong. The presence of someone attractive does not mean that is the entire point.
Good lord no, playboy was always super misogynistic. Hugh Hefner was MASSIVELY problematic lol.
I won’t defend Hefner, but the articles genuinely were (and are) as far to the left as you’ll see in any widely circulated publication. Being associated with porn gave them cover to write whatever they wanted.
Penn Jillette was a writer for playboy, and Margret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, Roald Dahl
Like tons of famous autrhors.
The joke itself does a kind of bait & switch, it makes you think it’s going to be a trans joke, but then the last line sort of subverts expectations. The trans portion is necessary for the setup, as the punchline doesn’t make much sense without it, but it’s more a gender inequality joke.
Attitudes about gays and transgenders actually got worse coming from the 1960s into the 1980s. The sexual revolution actually created a generation far more open and accepting, and the culture that lead to things like the Satanic panic, war on drugs, and resurgence of patriotism and religiosity in the United States actually made things worse for gay and trans.
Indeed, and in a broader view, humanity has literally always had trans people as long as it has had a concept of gender. So “in the 80s” is emphasizing the cultural lie that acceptance is a recent phenomenon, when actually bigotry about it is the recent phenomenon. The 80s were certainly not an amazing time for LGBTQ folk, but Playboy at least would have been sex-positive and accepting.
So this isn’t a “stopped clock is right twice a day” situation, because sex-positive spaces and media would have been more reliable clocks than the culture at large, when it came to this subject.
“Not offensive” fucking narcissist lol. It doesn’t offend the trans community, no, instead it raises one of the biggest problems that 49% of the population has, for which there is no reason beyond that our meritocracy - not all, just ours - operates on sexist principles. If it doesn’t offend you you aren’t paying attention to what’s really important, which of course is always the problem with the sex obsessed.
I mean, it’s a good joke, but to call it not offensive is to self identify as male.
