what men want

today's ny times mag had a short q & a with hugh hefner. he of the silk pyjamas and still, at 84, banging the blondie bunnies in his big bed in his big house. proof that living your life the way you want is best, but that's not where i'm a-going here.

he was interviewed by deborah solomon and this is just a snip:


In the meantime, Playboy’s ideal of feminine beauty has become passé. Contemporary models don’t go for that old voluptuous hourglass shape.

Obviously women are taller, healthier, more athletic today than they were before. That certainly is a slimming down, but I don’t think there’s been a great deal of change in terms of perception of beauty.

The look now is more androgynous, flatter.

I question that seriously. When has the notion of flat-chested come in since the 1920s?

You’re referring to flappers?

That was the last time that small breasts were popular.

we've all seen pix from old playboys, including the iconic marilyn monroe "red velvet" shot, that was hef's first centerfold and his jackpot. the women were slim, certainly, but there was s a softness, a plushness, as the owner might say, that was very feminine. women like jane russell and sophia loren put the danger in the curves.

over the decades, both miss america and miss july have gotten thinner. waist measurements of title winners of the former went from just under 26 inches (1920) to around 24 inches (1980s). from 1979 to 1988, 69% of playboy models and 60% of miss america contestants weighed 15% or more below the expected weight for their age and height category.

i don't know that i've seen an actual playboy mag since i was a teen, but the pop-up porn site pix that pester net-browsing all seem to feature the same cartoon girl: big blonde hair, miles of eye-liner, puffed-up trout-pouts and lean bodies with bolted on-basketballs for breasts. pageant girls look less whorishly-exaggerated, yes, but still with the fake tans, fake boobs and extra white veneers.

contrast these images with the female reporter's conjecture of the feminine ideal. are men fapping to the bags of bones that faint or die during fashion week? methinks not so much. those girls succumb to the tyranny of mostly gay male designers who favor androgynous types as strutting clothes hangers to showcase the drape and hang of the outfit.

yet in solomon's head, it's the jutting hips and i'll-cut-you clavicles of the daughters of heroin chic-sters like kate moss (seen her lately? from cover-girl to crone. jeebus.) that haunt men's dreams. solomon, btw, looks just as you imagine a middle-aged manhattan writer would/should. you can just as easily hear her beating the horse of women as oppressed victims of an unrealistic ideal. an argument not without merit, but i see it as the opposite side of her coin. (not to mention the reality of over 60% of women being overweight. how many are truly starving themselves to waif-land and not wallowing in dorito-ville?)

hef made a life and fortune reading and feeding men's fantasies. if somebody knows what men want, i should think it's him. not her.