Damnit, I Told You This Was Serious: Hugh Hefner Laying Off Playboy Bunnies in Reaction to Worldwide Economic Turmoil

Seriously. That's not even spin.

Well, it is spin, but not mine.

It has to be noted that Playboy has kinda been dying and flirting with bankruptcy for some time. Penthouse and genuine hard-core pornography cut into the core business of the magazine pretty badly. For a while I think they made money off their cable tv soft (?) porn pay channel, but I'm guessing that's barely profitable now due to the fact that, um, you can get all the free porn you want on the internet.

Not sure what Playboy's draw is anymore. Yes, some of their chicks are hotter (though in that particular airbrushed Playboy way), but they're not doing anything overtly sexual. So you get not-really-porn with cute but airbrushed chicks, but, Hey!, you get that important editorial by Norman Fucking Mailer on how much America sucks every other month.

Interestingly, the core message of "the Playboy lifestyle" -- why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? -- is the business' undoing.

I think his daughter is just trying to keep this outdated business afloat long enough so that this Nasty Old Satyr still has his mansion when he dies. No greater love hath any daughter for her father and etc.

Still. Playboy bunnies. Being laid off. (Off, I said.)

The writers of The House Bunny just emailed me to say, "What, he couldn't have announced this two months ago?"

You Know Why Hugh Hefner Pisses Me Off? In order of increasing revulsion...

1) His cutesy attempt to brand a soft-porn rag as somehow classy by including advice about gold-stereo-cables and the occasional crappy article from a name writer who's obviously slumming and phoning it in for Playboy. Seriously -- have you read the "articles" in Playboy? Sometimes I've been happy to see a name author on the cover. But the article inside always turns out to be the crappiest, most autopilot piece of shit I've read by that author. When an author gets turned down for a piece by other respectable outlets, he turns to Playboy, which pays good rates and is always hungry to get a name on its cover to sell the idea it's a prestige magazine.

2) His odious libertine leftist politics. It should be noted that the sexual politics sold by Playboy only can possibly work for either 1) an 18-to-25-year-old male with a good job and lots of disposable income, who can really get away with the girl-a-week sexual adventurism Playboy preaches, 2) a millionaire Old Satyr like Hugh Hefner himself, or 3) a non-talent bitter dwarf who hangs out at 'The Mansion" all the time and takes advantage of young women who have somehow convinced themselves that the path to stardom runs through sucking Bill Maher's dick in the grotto.

3) And that segues into the worst thing of all: He's basically got young, kinda-dumb and starstruck girls working at his Mansion as informal-arrangement whores. Because he's duped them into thinking fucking Bill Maher and his fellow aging satyrs will somehow get them "discovered." And to sell this notion to gullible young woman -- most dirt poor and desperately trying to escape the lower class -- he hangs pictures of the three Playboy bunnies who ever got work outside Playboy itself or an escort service, Pamela Anderson, Adrianne Barbeau and Anna Niccole Smith.

There have been, who knows, 3 to 6,000 bunnies either photographed in Playboy or living as whores at the mansion. Three ( four? how many? no more than ten) have actually had their careers shoot up like a rocket enough to star in such high-budget movies as Creepshow, The Fog, Swamp Thing, Barb Wire, and whatever that excrescent Anna Niccole Smith/Andrew Dice Clay straight-to-DVD movie was called.

But on this thin reed, he hangs out the hope to all these very young, very poor, and very naive girls that if they just slip off to the Balloon Room with Bill Maher and give him a handjob, all their dreams will come true.

This part of it is simply nasty. That's immoral -- and I don't mean the sex. I mean taking advantage of these women with gross lies.

And encouraging them to blow the venomous pockfaced mutant dwarf Bill Maher.

posted by Ace at 04:43 PM

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