While every liberal journalist and their sister is busy flogging the desperate "binders full of women" attack meme against Mitt Romney today, MediaBistro's Peter Ogburn took time to note that Playboy is ginning their election season push against the former Massachusetts governor and his alleged "war on your sex life." Ironically, Playboy is the original mass-marketed binder full of [naked] women, a pioneer in the pornification of the culture and the objectification of women.
For his part, of course, Ogburn joshes around about nudie mag giving a platform to "author and activist Nancy L. Cohen" -- who back in September suggested on AlterNet that Romney is a "Mormon militant" -- a platform to lambaste the supposed puritanical, asexual Romney with her laughably ludicrous prediction of what America will look like sexually in 2014 (emphasis mine):
Cohen tries to make the case that Romney wants to take us back to the dark ages of sex. What’s her prediction? Playboy says, “As Americans ready themselves for another presidential election and watch the Rio Olympics, most of the old porn-friendly computers have been sent off to the scrap heap of history. In half the nation abortion is illegal and birth control is rare. The average age of marriage has plummeted to 20. The notion of casual sex is a fantasy, the sexual revolution history. The sexual counter-revolutionaries have won.”
Romney has five sons, so we know that he’s had sexual intercourse with Ann at least 5 times. He also looks like the kind of guy who actually calls it sexual intercourse in the middle of the act, so I don’t know if he greases that wheel very often.
As icing on the cake, Ogburn elected to accompany his story with an AP photo that appears to show a young schoolgirl ogling Mitt Romney's backside, a photo for which the news wire has apologized running, given its tastelessness.
Lefties like Ogburn and Cohen revel in joshing around about straight-laced Mitt Romney, mocking his and the Mormon faith's conservative sexual mores, while excusing the libertine and woman-abusing sexual ethics of Playboy.
But life in the Playboy Mansion is hardly a sexually-liberated girl's dream come true, as many an ex-Hefner "girlfriend" has informed the press. In fact, it's the sort debauchery from the "dark ages of sex" you'd expect from a Caligula or Xerxes.
From the UK's Daily Mail -- no prudish newspaper it (emphases mine):
One by one they have revealed what life was like behind the glittering façade of the Playboy Mansion. According to them, it disguises a grubby world where some girls feel they are no better than prostitutes, paid pocket money by an octogenarian obsessive who funds plastic surgery to turn them into his physical ideal, and yet must still take huge amounts of Viagra to manage sex with them.
The portrait of Hefner painted by Izabella St James is deeply unappealing. A pretty blonde law graduate, she was 26 when she met him in a Hollywood nightclub in 2002. Soon, he invited her to move in with him and seven other official ‘girlfriends’.
Hefner likes to have anywhere between three and 15 girlfriends at any one time. One of the group will be chosen to be Girlfriend No 1. She will share Hefner’s bedroom at all times, while the others are merely visitors.
[...]Many girls, it seems, endured these living conditions for the chance of becoming a centrefold in Playboy magazine — an invaluable career boost for any glamour model.
Others admitted that they stayed only for the cosmetic surgery to which Hefner treated them as a birthday presents, keeping a running account with a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.
But St James — with big university debts — was more interested in the weekly pocket money which Hefner paid all his girlfriends. ‘Every Friday morning we had to go to Hef’s room, wait while he picked up all the dog poo off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance: a thousand dollars counted out in crisp hundred-dollar bills from a safe in one of his bookcases,’ she says.
‘We all hated this process. Hef would always use the occasion to bring up anything he wasn’t happy about in the relationship. Most of the complaints were about the lack of harmony among the girlfriends — or your lack of sexual participation in the “parties” he held in his bedroom.
‘If we’d been out of town for any reason and missed one of the official “going out” nights [When Hefner liked to parade his girls at nightclubs] he wouldn’t want to give us the allowance. He used it as a weapon.’
The allowance was also withdrawn if there was any infringement of the strict rules imposed by Hefner on all his girlfriends.
‘Little did I realise that by moving into the mansion I was losing all the freedom I associated with the Playboy lifestyle,’ says St James.
Ogburn and Cohen might argue that printing an article in Playboy is not necessarily an endorsement of Hefner's lifestyle nor his misogyny, but when Cohen's article is aimed at attacking Romney's conservative sexual ethics and screaming Chicken Little-like about the end of recreational sex, it's worth noting the contrast between the happy life and marriage of Ann Romney with the bevvy of used-up, disillusioned and discarded beauties that Hefner has churned through since the start of his porn empire.
