NEW INFO 5 Results from share redemption are posted. Less than .2% redeemed. Very bullish as investors are showing extreme confidence in the future of PLBY.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/playboy-mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-120000721.html
NEW INFO 4 Definitive Agreement to purchase 100% of Lovers brand stores announced 2/1.
https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Playboy+%28MCAC%29+Confirms+Deal+to+Acquire+Lovers/17892359.html
NEW INFO 3 I bought more on the dip today. 5081 total. Price rose AH to $12.38 (2.15%)
NEW INFO 2 Here is the full webinar.
https://icrinc.zoom.us/rec/play/9GWKdmOYumjWfZuufW3QXpe_FW_g--qeNbg6PnTjTMbnNTgLmCbWjeRFpQga1iPc-elpGap8dnDv8Zww.yD7DjUwuPmapeEdP?continueMode=true&tk=lEYc4F_FkKlgsmCIs6w0gtGHT2kbgVGbUju3cIRBSjk.DQIAAAAV8NK49xZWdldRM2xNSFNQcTBmcE00UzM3bXh3AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA&uuid=WN_GKWqbHkeSyuWetJmLFkj4g&_x_zm_rtaid=kR45-uuqRE-L65AxLjpbQw.1611967079119.2c054e3d3f8d8e63339273d9175939ed&_x_zm_rhtaid=866
NEW INFO 1 Live merger webinar with PLBY and MCAC on Friday January 29, 2021 at 12:00 NOON EST link below
https://mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/press-release-details/2021/Playboy-Enterprises-Inc.-and-Mountain-Crest-Acquisition-Corp-Participate-in-SPACInsider-ICR-Webinar-on-January-29th-at-12pm-ET/default.aspx
Playboy going public: Porn, Gambling, and Cannabis
!!!WARNING READING AHEAD!!! TL;DR at the end. It will take some time to sort through all the links and read/watch everything, but you should.
In the next couple weeks, Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp is taking Playboy public. The existing ticker MCAC will become PLBY. Special purpose acquisition companies have taken private companies public in recent months with great success. I believe this will be no exception. Notably, Playboy is profitable and has skyrocketing revenue going into a transformational growth phase.
Porn - First and foremost, let's talk about porn. I know what you guys are thinking. “Porno mags are dead. Why would I want to invest in something like that? I can get porn for free online.” Guess what? You are absolutely right. And that’s exactly why Playboy doesn’t do that anymore. That’s right, they eliminated their print division. And yet they somehow STILL make money from porn that people (see: boomers) pay for on their website through PlayboyTV, Playboy Plus, and iPlayboy. Here’s the thing: Playboy has international, multi-generational name recognition from porn. They have content available in 180 countries. It will be the only publicly traded adult entertainment (porn) company. But that is not where this company is going. It will help support them along the way. You can see every Playboy magazine through iPlayboy if you’re interested. NSFW links below:
https://www.playboy.com/
https://www.playboytv.com/
https://www.playboyplus.com/
https://www.iplayboy.com/
Gambling - Some of you might recognize the Playboy brand from gambling trips to places like Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Cancun, London or Macau. They’ve been in the gambling biz for decades through their casinos, clubs, and licensed gaming products. They see the writing on the wall. COVID is accelerating the transition to digital, application based GAMBLING. That’s right. What we are doing on Robinhood with risky options is gambling, and the only reason regulators might give a shit anymore is because we are making too much money. There may be some restrictions put in place, but gambling from your phone on your couch is not going anywhere. More and more states are allowing things like Draftkings, poker, state ‘lottery” apps, hell - even political betting. Michigan and Virginia just ok’d gambling apps. They won’t be the last. This is all from your couch and any 18 year old with a cracked iphone can access it. Wouldn’t it be cool if Playboy was going to do something like that? They’re already working on it. As per CEO Ben Kohn who we will get to later, “...the company’s casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth.” Honestly, I stopped researching Scientific Games' sports betting segment when I saw the word ‘omni-channel’. That told me all I needed to know about it’s success.
“Our SG Sports™ platform is an enhanced, omni-channel solution for online, self-service and retail fixed odds sports betting – from soccer to tennis, basketball, football, baseball, hockey, motor sports, racing and more.”
https://www.scientificgames.com/
https://www.microgaming.co.uk/
“This latter segment has become increasingly enticing for Playboy, and it said last week that it is considering new tie-ups that could include gaming operators like PointsBet and 888Holdings.”
https://calvinayre.com/2020/10/05/business/playboys-gaming-ops-could-get-a-boost-from-spac-purchase/
As per their SEC filing:
“Significant consumer engagement and spend with Playboy-branded gaming properties around the world, including with leading partners such as Microgaming, Scientific Games, and Caesar’s Entertainment, steers our investment in digital gaming, sports betting and other digital offerings to further support our commercial strategy to expand consumer spend with minimal marginal cost, and gain consumer data to inform go-to-market plans across categories.”
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tMDAA1
They are expanding into more areas of gaming/gambling, working with international players in the digital gaming/gambling arena, and a Playboy sportsbook is on the horizon.
https://www.playboy.com/read/the-pleasure-of-playing-with-yourself-mobile-gaming-in-the-covid-era
Cannabis - If you’ve ever read through a Playboy magazine, you know they’ve had a positive relationship with cannabis for many years. As of September 2020, Playboy has made a major shift into the cannabis space. Too good to be true you say? Check their website. Playboy currently sells a range of CBD products. This is a good sign. Federal hemp products, which these most likely are, can be mailed across state lines and most importantly for a company like Playboy, can operate through a traditional banking institution. CBD products are usually the first step towards the cannabis space for large companies. Playboy didn’t make these products themselves meaning they are working with a processor in the cannabis industry. Another good sign for future expansion. What else do they have for sale? Pipes, grinders, ashtrays, rolling trays, joint holders. Hmm. Ok. So it looks like they want to sell some shit. They probably don’t have an active interest in cannabis right? Think again:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/09/24/playboy-gets-serious-about-cannabis-law-reform-advocacy-with-new-partnership-grants/?sh=62f044a65cea
“Taking yet another step into the cannabis space, Playboy will be announcing later on Thursday (September, 2020) that it is launching a cannabis law reform and advocacy campaign in partnership with National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), Last Prisoner Project, Marijuana Policy Project, the Veterans Cannabis Project, and the Eaze Momentum Program.”
“According to information procured exclusively, the three-pronged campaign will focus on calling for federal legalization. The program also includes the creation of a mentorship plan, through which the Playboy Foundation will support entrepreneurs from groups that are underrepresented in the industry.” Remember that CEO Kohn from earlier? He wrote this recently:
https://medium.com/naked-open-letters-from-playboy/congress-must-pass-the-more-act-c867c35239ae
Seems like he really wants weed to be legal? Hmm wonder why? The writing's on the wall my friends. Playboy wants into the cannabis industry, they are making steps towards this end, and we have favorable conditions for legislative progress.
Don’t think branding your own cannabis line is profitable or worthwhile? Tell me why these 41 celebrity millionaires and billionaires are dummies. I’ll wait.
https://www.celebstoner.com/news/celebstoner-news/2019/07/12/top-celebrity-cannabis-brands/
Confirmation: I hear you. “This all seems pretty speculative. It would be wildly profitable if they pull this shift off. But how do we really know?” Watch this whole video:
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/playboy-ceo-telling-story-female-154907068.html
Man - this interview just gets my juices flowing. And highlights one of my favorite reasons for this play. They have so many different business avenues from which a catalyst could appear. I think paying attention, holding shares, and options on these staggered announcements over the next year is the way I am going to go about it. "There's definitely been a shift to direct-to-consumer," he (Kohn) said. "About 50 percent of our revenue today is direct-to-consumer, and that will continue to grow going forward.” “Kohn touted Playboy's portfolio of both digital and consumer products, with casino-style gaming, in particular, serving a crucial role under the company's new business model. Playboy also has its sights on the emerging cannabis market, from CBD products to marijuana products geared toward sexual health and pleasure.” "If THC does become legal in the United States, we have developed certain strains to enhance your sex life that we will launch," Kohn said. https://cheddar.com/media/playboy-goes-public-health-gaming-lifestyle-focus Oh? The CEO actually said it? Ok then. “We have developed certain strains…” They’re already working with growers on strains and genetics? Ok. There are several legal cannabis markets for those products right now, international and stateside. I expect Playboy licensed hemp and THC pre-rolls by EOY. Something like this: https://www.etsy.com/listing/842996758/10-playboy-pre-roll-tubes-limited?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=pre+roll+playboy&ref=sr_gallery-1-2&organic_search_click=1 Maintaining cannabis operations can be costly and a regulatory headache. Playboy’s licensing strategy allows them to pick successful, established partners and sidestep traditional barriers to entry. You know what I like about these new markets? They’re expanding. Worldwide. And they are going to be a bigger deal than they already are with or without Playboy. Who thinks weed and gambling are going away? Too many people like that stuff. These are easy markets. And Playboy is early enough to carve out their spot in each. Fuck it, read this too: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimosman/2020/10/20/playboy-could-be-the-king-of-spacs-here-are-three-picks/?sh=2e13dcaa3e05
Numbers: You want numbers? I got numbers. As per the company’s most recent SEC filing:
“For the year ended December 31, 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s historical consolidated revenue was $78.1 million and $101.3 million, respectively, historical consolidated net income (loss) was $(23.6) million and $(4.8) million, respectively, and Adjusted EBITDA was $13.1 million and $21.8 million, respectively.”
“In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Licensing segment contributed $44.2 million in revenue and $31.1 million in net income.”
“In the ninth months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Direct-to-Consumer segment contributed $40.2 million in revenue and net income of $0.1 million.”
“In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Digital Subscriptions and Content segment contributed $15.4 million in revenue and net income of $7.4 million.”
They are profitable across all three of their current business segments.
“Playboy’s return to the public markets presents a transformed, streamlined and high-growth business. The Company has over $400 million in cash flows contracted through 2029, sexual wellness products available for sale online and in over 10,000 major retail stores in the US, and a growing variety of clothing and branded lifestyle and digital gaming products.”
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF
Growth: Playboy has massive growth in China and massive growth potential in India. “In China, where Playboy has spent more than 25 years building its business, our licensees have an enormous footprint of nearly 2,500 brick and mortar stores and 1,000 ecommerce stores selling high quality, Playboy-branded men’s casual wear, shoes/footwear, sleepwear, swimwear, formal suits, leather & non-leather goods, sweaters, active wear, and accessories. We have achieved significant growth in China licensing revenues over the past several years in partnership with strong licensees and high-quality manufacturers, and we are planning for increased growth through updates to our men’s fashion lines and expansion into adjacent categories in men’s skincare and grooming, sexual wellness, and women’s fashion, a category where recent launches have been well received.” The men’s market in China is about the same size as the entire population of the United States and European Union combined. Playboy is a leading brand in this market. They are expanding into the women’s market too. Did you know CBD toothpaste is huge in China? China loves CBD products and has hemp fields that dwarf those in the US. If Playboy expands their CBD line China it will be huge. Did you know the gambling money in Macau absolutely puts Las Vegas to shame? Technically, it's illegal on the mainland, but in reality, there is a lot of gambling going on in China. https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/10/19/magic-johnson-and-uncle-buds-cbd-brand-enter-china-via-tmall-partnership/?sh=271776ca411e “In India, Playboy today has a presence through select apparel licensees and hospitality establishments. Consumer research suggests significant growth opportunities in the territory with Playboy’s brand and categories of focus.” “Playboy Enterprises has announced the expansion of its global consumer products business into India as part of a partnership with Jay Jay Iconic Brands, a leading fashion and lifestyle Company in India.” “The Indian market today is dominated by consumers under the age of 35, who represent more than 65 percent of the country’s total population and are driving India’s significant online shopping growth. The Playboy brand’s core values of playfulness and exploration resonate strongly with the expressed desires of today’s younger millennial consumers. For us, Playboy was the perfect fit.” “The Playboy international portfolio has been flourishing for more than 25 years in several South Asian markets such as China and Japan. In particular, it has strategically targeted the millennial and gen-Z audiences across categories such as apparel, footwear, home textiles, eyewear and watches.” https://www.licenseglobal.com/industry-news/playboy-expands-global-footprint-india It looks like they gave COVID the heisman in terms of net damage sustained: “Although Playboy has not suffered any material adverse consequences to date from the COVID-19 pandemic, the business has been impacted both negatively and positively. The remote working and stay-at-home orders resulted in the closure of the London Playboy Club and retail stores of Playboy’s licensees, decreasing licensing revenues in the second quarter, as well as causing supply chain disruption and less efficient product development thereby slowing the launch of new products. However, these negative impacts were offset by an increase in Yandy’s direct-to-consumer sales, which have benefited in part from overall increases in online retail sales so far during the pandemic.” Looks like the positives are long term (Yandy acquisition) and the negatives are temporary (stay-at-home orders).
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921006093/tm213766-1_defa14a.htm
This speaks to their ability to maintain a financially solvent company throughout the transition phase to the aforementioned areas. They’d say some fancy shit like “expanded business model to encompass four key revenue streams: Sexual Wellness, Style & Apparel, Gaming & Lifestyle, and Beauty & Grooming.” I hear “we’re just biding our time with these trinkets until those dollar dollar bill y’all markets are fully up and running.” But the truth is these existing revenue streams are profitable, scalable, and rapidly expanding Playboy’s e-commerce segment around the world.
"Even in the face of COVID this year, we've been able to grow EBITDA over 100 percent and revenue over 68 percent, and I expect that to accelerate going into 2021," he said. “Playboy is accelerating its growth in company-owned and branded consumer products in attractive and expanding markets in which it has a proven history of brand affinity and consumer spend.”
Also in the SEC filing, the Time Frame:
“As we detailed in the definitive proxy statement, the SPAC stockholder meeting to vote on the transaction has been set for February 9th, and, subject to stockholder approval and satisfaction of the other closing conditions, we expect to complete the merger and begin trading on NASDAQ under ticker PLBY shortly thereafter,” concluded Kohn.
The Players: Suhail “The Whale” Rizvi (HMFIC), Ben “The Bridge” Kohn (CEO), “lil” Suying Liu & “Big” Dong Liu (Young-gun China gang). I encourage you to look these folks up. The real OG here is Suhail Rizvi. He’s from India originally and Chairman of the Board for the new PLBY company. He was an early investor in Twitter, Square, Facebook and others. His firm, Rizvi Traverse, currently invests in Instacart, Pinterest, Snapchat, Playboy, and SpaceX. Maybe you’ve heard of them. “Rizvi, who owns a sprawling three-home compound in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a 1.65-acre estate in Palm Beach, Florida, near Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, moved to Iowa Falls when he was five. His father was a professor of psychology at Iowa. Along with his older brother Ashraf, a hedge fund manager, Rizvi graduated from Wharton business school.” “Suhail Rizvi: the 47-year-old 'unsocial' social media baron: When Twitter goes public in the coming weeks (2013), one of the biggest winners will be a 47-year-old financier who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his photos from the internet. In IPO, Twitter seeks to be 'anti-FB'” “Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia looks like a big Twitter winner. So do the moneyed clients of Jamie Dimon. But as you’ve-got-to-be-joking wealth washed over Twitter on Thursday — a company that didn’t exist eight years ago was worth $31.7 billion after its first day on the stock market — the non-boldface name of the moment is Suhail R. Rizvi. Mr. Rizvi, 47, runs a private investment company that is the largest outside investor in Twitter with a 15.6 percent stake worth $3.8 billion at the end of trading on Thursday (November, 2013). Using a web of connections in the tech industry and in finance, as well as a hearty dose of good timing, he brought many prominent names in at the ground floor, including the Saudi prince and some of JPMorgan’s wealthiest clients.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/technology/at-twitter-working-behind-the-scenes-toward-a-billion-dollar-payday.html Y’all like that Arab money? How about a dude that can call up Saudi Princes and convince them to spend? Funniest shit about I read about him: “Rizvi was able to buy only $100 million in Facebook shortly before its IPO, thus limiting his returns, according to people with knowledge of the matter.” Poor guy :(
He should be fine with the 16 million PLBY shares he's going to have though :)
Shuhail also has experience in the entertainment industry. He’s invested in companies like SESAC, ICM, and Summit Entertainment. He’s got Hollywood connections to blast this stuff post-merger. And he’s at least partially responsible for that whole Twilight thing. I’m team Edward btw.
I really like what Suhail has done so far. He’s lurked in the shadows while Kohn is consolidating the company, trimming the fat, making Playboy profitable, and aiming the ship at modern growing markets.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-ipo-rizvi-insight/insight-little-known-hollywood-investor-poised-to-score-with-twitter-ipo-idUSBRE9920VW20131003
Ben “The Bridge” Kohn is an interesting guy. He’s the connection between Rizvi Traverse and Playboy. He’s both CEO of Playboy and was previously Managing Partner at Rizvi Traverse. Ben seems to be the voice of the Playboy-Rizvi partnership, which makes sense with Suhail’s privacy concerns. Kohn said this:
“Today is a very big day for all of us at Playboy and for all our partners globally. I stepped into the CEO role at Playboy in 2017 because I saw the biggest opportunity of my career. Playboy is a brand and platform that could not be replicated today. It has massive global reach, with more than $3B of global consumer spend and products sold in over 180 countries. Our mission – to create a culture where all people can pursue pleasure – is rooted in our 67-year history and creates a clear focus for our business and role we play in people’s lives, providing them with the products, services and experiences that create a lifestyle of pleasure. We are taking this step into the public markets because the committed capital will enable us to accelerate our product development and go-to-market strategies and to more rapidly build our direct to consumer capabilities,” said Ben Kohn, CEO of Playboy.
“Playboy today is a highly profitable commerce business with a total addressable market projected in the trillions of dollars,” Mr. Kohn continued, “We are actively selling into the Sexual Wellness consumer category, projected to be approximately $400 billion in size by 2024, where our recently launched intimacy products have rolled out to more than 10,000 stores at major US retailers in the United States. Combined with our owned & operated ecommerce Sexual Wellness initiatives, the category will contribute more than 40% of our revenue this year. In our Apparel and Beauty categories, our collaborations with high-end fashion brands including Missguided and PacSun are projected to achieve over $50M in retail sales across the US and UK this year, our leading men’s apparel lines in China expanded to nearly 2500 brick and mortar stores and almost 1000 digital stores, and our new men’s and women’s fragrance line recently launched in Europe. In Gaming, our casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth. Our product strategy is informed by years of consumer data as we actively expand from a purely licensing model into owning and operating key high-growth product lines focused on driving profitability and consumer lifetime value. We are thrilled about the future of Playboy. Our foundation has been set to drive further growth and margin, and with the committed capital from this transaction and our more than $180M in NOLs, we will take advantage of the opportunity in front of us, building to our goal of $100M of adjusted EBITDA in 2025.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company
Also, according to their Form 4s, “Big” Dong Liu and “lil” Suying Liu just loaded up with shares last week. These guys are brothers and seem like the Chinese market connection. They are only 32 & 35 years old. I don’t even know what that means, but it's provocative.
https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1832415.htm
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-ii-002600994.html
Y’all like that China money?
“Mr. Liu has been the Chief Financial Officer of Dongguan Zhishang Photoelectric Technology Co., Ltd., a regional designer, manufacturer and distributor of LED lights serving commercial customers throughout Southern China since November 2016, at which time he led a syndicate of investments into the firm. Mr. Liu has since overseen the financials of Dongguan Zhishang as well as provided strategic guidance to its board of directors, advising on operational efficiency and cash flow performance. From March 2010 to October 2016, Mr. Liu was the Head of Finance at Feidiao Electrical Group Co., Ltd., a leading Chinese manufacturer of electrical outlets headquartered in Shanghai and with businesses in the greater China region as well as Europe.”
Dr. Suying Liu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp., commented, “Playboy is a unique and compelling investment opportunity, with one of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, its proven consumer affinity and spend, and its enormous future growth potential in its four product segments and new and existing geographic regions. I am thrilled to be partnering with Ben and his exceptional team to bring his vision to fruition.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company
These guys are good. They have a proven track record of success across multiple industries. Connections and money run deep with all of these guys. I don’t think they’re in the game to lose.
I was going to write a couple more paragraphs about why you should have a look at this but really the best thing you can do is read this SEC filing from a couple days ago. It explains the situation in far better detail. Specifically, look to page 137 and read through their strategy. Also, look at their ownership percentages and compensation plans including the stock options and their prices. The financials look great, revenue is up 90% Q3, and it looks like a bright future.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF
I’m hesitant to attach this because his position seems short term, but I’m going to with a warning because he does hit on some good points (two are below his link) and he’s got a sizable position in this thing (500k+ on margin, I think). I don’t know this guy but he did look at the same publicly available info and make roughly the same prediction, albeit without the in depth gambling or cannabis mention. You can also search reddit for ‘MCAC’ and very few relevant results come up and none of them even come close to really looking at this thing.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gOvAd6lebs452hFlWWbxVjQ3VMsjGBkbJeXRwDwIJfM/edit?usp=sharing
“Also, before you people start making claims that Playboy is a “boomer” company, STOP RIGHT THERE. This is not a good argument. Simply put. The only thing that matters is Playboy’s name recognition, not their archaic business model which doesn’t even exist anymore as they have completely repurposed their business.”
“Imagine not buying $MCAC at a 400M valuation lol. Streetwear department is worth 1B alone imo.”
Considering the ridiculous Chinese growth as a lifestyle brand, he’s not wrong.
Current Cultural Significance and Meme Value: A year ago I wouldn’t have included this section but the events from the last several weeks (even going back to tsla) have proven that a company’s ability to meme and/or gain social network popularity can have an effect. Tik-tok, Snapchat, Twitch, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. They all have Playboy stuff on them. Kids in middle and highschool know what Playboy is but will likely never see or touch one of the magazines in person. They’ll have a Playboy hoodie though. Crazy huh? A lot like GME, PLBY would hugely benefit from meme-value stock interest to drive engagement towards their new business model while also building strategic coffers. This interest may not directly and/or significantly move the stock price but can generate significant interest from larger players who will.
Bull Case: The year is 2025. Playboy is now the world leader pleasure brand. They began by offering Playboy licensed gaming products, including gambling products, direct to consumers through existing names. By 2022, demand has skyrocketed and Playboy has designed and released their own gambling platforms. In 2025, they are also a leading cannabis brand in the United States and Canada with proprietary strains and products geared towards sexual wellness. Cannabis was legalized in the US in 2023 when President Biden got glaucoma but had success with cannabis treatment. He personally pushes for cannabis legalization as he steps out of office after his first term. Playboy has also grown their brand in China and India to multi-billion per year markets. The stock goes up from 11ish to 100ish and everyone makes big gains buying somewhere along the way.
Bear Case: The United States does a complete 180 on marijuana and gambling. President Biden overdoses on marijuana in the Lincoln bedroom when his FDs go tits up and he loses a ton of money in his sports book app after the Fighting Blue Hens narrowly lose the National Championship to Bama. Playboy is unable to expand their cannabis and gambling brands but still does well with their worldwide lifestyle brand. They gain and lose some interest in China and India but the markets are too large to ignore them completely. The stock goes up from 11ish to 13ish and everyone makes 15-20% gains.
TL;DR: Successful technology/e-commerce investment firm took over Playboy to turn it into a porn, online gambling/gaming, sports book, cannabis company, worldwide lifestyle brand that promotes sexual wellness, vetern access, women-ownership, minority-ownership, and “pleasure for all”. Does a successful online team reinventing an antiquated physical copy giant sound familiar? No options yet, shares only for now. $11.38 per share at time of writing. My guess? $20 by the end of February. $50 by EOY. This is not financial advice. I am not qualified to give financial advice. I’m just sayin’ I would personally use a Playboy sports book app while smoking a Playboy strain specific joint and it would be cool if they did that. Do your own research. You’d probably want to start here:
WARNING - POTENTIALLY NSFW - SEXY MODELS AHEAD - no actual nudity though
https://s26.q4cdn.com/895475556/files/doc_presentations/Playboy-Craig-Hallum-Conference-Investor-Presentation-11_17_20-compressed.pdf
Or here:
https://www.mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/default.aspx
Jimmy Chill: “Get into any SPAC at $10 or $11 and you are going to make money.”
STL;DR: Buy MCAC. MCAC > PLBY couple weeks. Rocketship. Moon.
Position: 5000 shares. I will buy short, medium, and long-dated calls once available.

Go ahead and type “I lost all my money at the casino” on a random search engine. You will see hundreds of results – this is one of the common search phrases of all gamblers. We all play, we all win, but we also all lose: Lost money at casino is a situation that will happen to you too sooner or later.
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Since we cannot escape from it, let’s try to look at this problem from different angles: Why did we lost a lot of money at casino? How can we cope with lost money at casino situation? And more importantly, how to get back money lost at casino, is it possible? In this article, you will find the answers to these questions and more.
Why You Lose Money at the Casino
Casinos can be a great pastime. They have something for everyone. If the thrill of spinning slots isn’t your thing, maybe you’d prefer doubling down at the blackjack table. When you win, it feels awesome; that’s the appeal that brings people to the casinos in the first place.
While it’s fun to win, we all have our losing streaks. Sometimes we lose a lot. I once lost $100 in 10 minutes at a video poker machine. We’ve all heard of the house edge, but is it possible to increase your own edge? We’re about to shed some light on the situation. With a little luck, you’ll be able to turn your fortune around. Here’s why you lose money at the casino.
Your Bankroll Management Isn’t What It Should Be: Managing your bankroll is the most important thing you can do at the casino. We all want to bet big on the games. After all, the bigger the bet, the bigger the win. The problem is you can’t guarantee a win every time. You can’t even guarantee a win every dozen games. If you have a bankroll of $60 and lose three $20 bets, you just blew through your whole budget in two minutes.
Take into consideration how long you want to play. If you’ve got a bankroll of $60, why not split it into smaller bets of $1 per hand? At least this way, you’ll get to play 60 rounds and stand a stronger chance of winning. The rewards may be smaller, but you’ll get a lot more entertainment playing two hours than two minutes.
You’re Playing the Wrong Games: This may seem like a silly thing to say, but you might be playing the wrong games. If you’re losing every time, you might want to try something new.
When you’re selecting a casino game, it’s important to consider the house edge. In general, finding a game with a lower house edge gives you better chance of winning. If you’re used to luck-based games like slots or roulette, you might want to try skill-based games like blackjack or video poker.
In fact, video poker is a really good choice for machine players. Slot machines can vary in regard to house edge, ranging between a low of 5% and a high of 30%. With Jacks or Better video poker, you will recover 99.54% of your money throughout your lifetime. Add in a lifetime of comped drinks, and you’ve made out like a bandit.
You’re Using a Failing Strategy: Many people search for casino game strategies. You’ve probably done it yourself at one time or another. The problem with a lot of strategies is that you either have to be an expert player with a spreadsheet of numbers in your head, or you need a massive bankroll.
Don’t fall into the mindset of thinking, “Well, if I use this system, it’s bound to work in the end.” We do not recommend counting cards or increasing your bet after every loss. Unless you’re a billionaire with a near-unlimited bankroll, those are losing strategies. Unless you have unlimited money, you cannot beat the house, period.
Casinos know these strategies don’t work. You can almost see the curt smile on the dealer’s face as you double your bet again and again. Instead of using a strategy like this, manage your bankroll in the ways noted earlier. Be smart about it.
You’re Trying Too Hard to Regain Losses: While there are some skill-based games, casinos are all about luck. You’re going to suffer losses along the way. Even professional gamblers cannot guarantee they’ll always win, because gambling relies on a certain amount of luck. Don’t let a loss or a losing streak get to you.
It’s common for players to suffer a loss and then start throwing out higher bets without thinking. You need to remain logical and, again, manage your bankroll effectively. Casino gaming should be fun. If you get angry or stressed, it’s time to stop. Don’t throw away everything you have left in an attempt to get even. It’s not going to work. Never has, never will.
Cope With Gambling and Casino Loss
Coping with gambling loss can be challenging, especially if you are a beginner. Believe it or not, this can be as hard as grieving for the loss of a relative. In order to cope with your gambling losses, you must first accept that losing is perfectly normal while gambling. Everybody loses, even professional players. So accepting that losing money gambling is not the end of the world is important: This happens to every player out there. But if this is especially hard for you and you feel an urge to keep gambling, you may have an addiction problem. In this case:
Stop gambling immediately. There is no such thing as “less gambling” for addicts. You must stop gambling, period. Take advantage of the responsible gaming practices of online casinos. You can put self-exclusions on your account and limit your budget, game time, and even the game categories you can play. Use these tools to limit yourself.
Do not try to cover your losses by playing more games. We said “stop gambling” for a reason. The majority of addicts keep gambling because they think that “playing one more game will cover all of their losses”. This is wrong and a dangerous approach. If you continue to gamble, you may lose more: There is no guarantee that you will win this time. And continuing the same habit will just make the problem bigger.
Face the consequences. Losing money at gambling will have lots of consequences, especially if you surpassed your budget. Your stress levels will increase and you will have problems in relations with your loved ones. Almost 99% of addicts try to hide their losses but this will just make everything worse. Talk to your loved ones, make sure they know about the situation, and face the consequences. Yes, it will be hard but it is mandatory: Recognizing your problem and sharing it with your loved ones is the first (and most important) step of coping with gambling losses.
Get professional help if needed. No matter where you live, you can find an organization that is ready to help you with your problem. It can be Gamblers Anonymous, Gam Care, or Problem Gambling CA – there are professionals out there who are ready to help you, free of charge. Join one of these programs and don’t hesitate to ask for help.
Once again, the suggestions above apply to addicts – not casual gamblers. If you are fine with the fact that losing is a part of gambling and there is no way to avoid it, there is no problem: As long as you respect your budget and control yourself, gambling can be a fun hobby.
Will A Casino Give Your Money Back?
And now, let’s continue with the obvious question: How to recover lost money from casino? Is this possible? Can you still take something back for lost money at casino?
The short answer is no. And you already know this: No casino (or online casino) will refund your money just because you lost. Remember that these are called “games of chance” for a reason. The operators do not guarantee any winnings and you cannot take your losses back. Do you go to the betting booth after losing a sports bet and ask for your money back? It is the same principle: Lost money online casino (or land-based casino) won’t be refunded, period.
There is only one scenario in which the answer to how to recover lost money in casino question is yes: Fraud. If your account is hacked and a third party used your balance to play games, then yes, the casino may choose to refund your losses. However:
This is not mandatory. The casino may not choose to refund your losses even if you can prove that your account is hacked. Proving a hack is harder than you think. The majority of players who lost try to use this excuse, and we do not know even a single case where the casino accepted a hack really happened.
Hire a Funds Recovery Expert: Best Way to Recover Lost Money At Casino
You may be tempted to use a chargeback. But you know how chargeback option works: If you used a credit card to pay for something, you can always put a chargeback order and get your money back – as long as you did not receive the goods. In this case, the refund is done by the bank itself, not the merchant. So, is this a way to recover lost money at casino?
Simply put, no. Chargeback feature is useful, but only if you did not receive something for the payment you made. When such a claim is issued, the payment provider asks the merchant to send the proof of delivery. If you purchase a PC, for example, and the seller cannot prove that the delivery is made, sure, you can get your money back. Only a funds recovery expert will be able to help you recover money lost in casino.
Only a Funds Recovery Expert Can Help You Recover Your Money
The same thing goes for e-wallet payments too. They are even pickier than the banks, and we do not know of a single case where the e-wallet provider accepted the chargeback claim for gambling losses.
Overall, the best method that works everytime is hiring a Funds Recovery Expert, and the funds recovery expert we have personally used and recommend is - [email protected]. The answer to how to recover lost money in casino question is still “you can’t”. Use the chargeback bonus if you want constant refunds – that’s the only thing you can do. So send your request via email to - [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

TL;DR :–
· Me and why I was banned
· IWISK
· EVE CASINO
· CCP Security
· Tinfoil
· Shit Spelling

Dear Fellow Space Nerds,

For months I have been debating if I should write this piece and I warn you now it is long, I have written this and discarded it several times on the basis that it will just come across as a bitch or a whine. But as you may now tell I have left it long enough for many to not care, so this story will just be that, a story of bad spelling, bad punctuation and the worst grammar you have ever seen. But it is my story and I have decided to just tell it as the question “I thought you was banned” needed a point of reference I could send people to. Now I get you will be suspicious but I am telling it as I see it, and if you read all of this then bravo indeed! :)

Before we begin let me just say that the whole banning of gambling mechanisms from a video game I do support and that is my stance on it. It may just be for fun but does it hold a place in a sandbox from an external point of view, the answer is no and should be every time. However it can be incredibly innocent for the 99% that participate, it is however the 1% who may have been personally affected by the ability to gamble using IRL money via the forms of plex codes. My issue which you will read here, is how it was handled and how I was treated rather than the morals of gambling.

This story begins at the start of 2016. Between the dates of the 6th and 9th of January, approx 14 Bankers in IWISK was banned for suspected RMT. This was only several days after CCP Peligro (who will be referenced allot in this piece) had announced on Twitter that he was back to work. CCP Peligro has been a subject much recently on reddit and other channels (discord / IRC etc) and I figured I would give my experience with him and CCP as a whole. Now some devs from CCP are reading this and those who I have linked this too will agree with much that is written here.

Now the claims that the banning of IWISK bankers was due to SMA etc informing CCP Security of the 1 Dollar to 1 Billion isk that IWISK was selling, these were called Batts or batteries.. I know what you are thinking, why would CCP believe such an incredible story that 1 Billion equated to 1 USD... Now CCP Peligro was off on Christmas break when these emails were sent to [email protected] mailbox.

Well the simple truth is that they actually did! Team Security took this as an opportunity to jump on the IWISK RMT train which they failed to execute back in mid 2015 with the whole iwisk URL blacklisting from the in game browser. Now why would Team security hate IWISK? The answer is really simple and can be summed in a few bullet points :

• Several complaints over IWISK RMT which on reddit we saw around 20 threads claiming to have damning evidence but was never shared with anyone...
• Bankers actually had been caught prior to the ban wave (I think 2 but we shal say 3 for the sake of argument)
• IWISK is a blind spot for Security

So the complaints speak for themselves however the bankers who had actually been caught prior to this are simply the reaction of an individual acting alone. Some CCP Security caught and some we had emailed CCP Security of suspicious activity who had later been perma banned.

And lastly the blind spot... This for any organisation regardless of being a gaming company, this is just an almost impossible scenario to police and should never have been allowed to operate. But the fact is that it was and as such this was their own creation of a black zone. This black zone had existed for almost 7 years+ with 3rd partying websites. The actual Blackzone has technically always existed since the API was allowed for public use.

Now keep in mind this is not just IWISK related as ANY other gambling or website that allowed transactions to take place "legitimately" through a 3rd party site is a risk. The reason IWISK was such a risk was because literally hundreds of trillions flowed through it. IWISK could easily transact up to or approx 50 to an incredible 100 Trillion a month just by the master wallet alone! (may have been less but at its peak it really hit these numbers)

So IWISK was a massive risk to Security from an RMT perspective, and anyone could claim RMT, and to be fair to those who did, we could not prove that it was not happening. And I will explain why this is the case…

IWISK had a quick deposit method that allowed bankers to process isk by copying the transaction from the wallet into a field on the bankers backend. This allowed said banker to give the customer their virtual isk on the site within 8 seconds of sending the isk to IWISK Corp. This made us very popular as there was very limited wait times to gamble with your iskies.

However this system could be abused right? I simply could just copy a transaction from the wallet and wallah, I have given myself 1 bajjilion isk right... Yes this indeed is the scenario... IWISK or EEP mitigated this risk by adding a collateral to the bankers account. So if a bankers collateral was 10 billion, he could only quick deposit for players up to 10 billion isk. When the API ran after 30 minutes, these would be matched against the players transaction from the master wallet and the banker would be given his collateral back on the site.

So what the hell does that all mean.. well it means that a banker could amass profits as a banker and they could use those profits to RMT with. So If the banker had 20 Billion in his collateral wallet, the banker could sell 10 Billion to a player by just tweaking the transaction to their name, thus creating a fake wallet deposit in the database. The API runs and it will not match the in game wallet, and thus the banker is now down 10 Billion but you have "gifted" a player 10 billion isk to do what they want with.

So yes there was a loop hole in IWISK that allowed people to do this, but it was policed when discovered and this was one of the ways we caught people who thought they were smarter than the admins running IWISK or CCP security. I genuinely believed these bankers thought we could not catch them and that we would not shop them to CCP --- They were wrong.. --- I would often receive emails from players stating they just bought isk from xyz site and they got a iwisk email saying they had funds. So my response which can be verified by Security was always to inform CCP and if I catch who it was I would do the same.

So this is where it got a bit hard to navigate, I would often look at the person delivering the isk and be like "really this fucking guy is RMT'ing....". So when probed the banker denied it and I could not help but believe him. However I now had the issue of trying to work out who and how.. So this is really how the above loophole was discovered and the watching began to see who and how.. I never said or told people that we were watching them, simply just mailed everyone saying, if you are RMT’ing and using IWISK as a front we can identify you and you will be caught. Again this can be verified by CCP or a banker who kept these mails… We caught several bankers and details were sent to CCP and policing of that was now a task.

So back on track to the banning of the Bankers Jan 2016. After a month or so CCP un-banned all those involved. Except for one person “R00gle” who was in MC at the time. Now R00gle to this day denies any involvement in RMT and even went to FanFest to hang out with his buddies from MC. CCP Spoke to him and said they would look back into it, but they never did get in touch with him. Having now known R00gle for many years, If asked the question did he? I would say no every time and he was a scape goat for CCP Security to claim they got "their" guy from the ban wave in Jan.

Remember that CCP Security only answers to very few people in CCP and that would be Hilmar, and maybe Andie or Ned? IDK exactly who but this would be a reasonable assumption and really just speculation from other posts and channels I have poked around in. So on that basis, any communication directed at CCP Security is never going to give you a response, because CCP Security do not discuss with end client or in very rare cases they may, but not to the value add of the end user, and simply close your ticket with a no response. This you can find on Reddit hundreds of times and this is how they operate. This should come to many of you as no surprise regardless how shit the service is.

The so what to all that is, CCP Security hated IWISK from day one. Not just for the reasons above but also because they got told to let it go the first time around (mid 2015) and the second time around (Jan 2016). Most reading this will know about where CCP Burgtarist was open at FanFest and said he was over ruled and if he had his way everyone would have remained banned.

Now some numbers, because we all love numbers and spreadsheets! But sadly I do not have graphs... I could make one but then I would be just trying to buy the super nerds approval using graph pron!

This is the contribution of IWISK over 12 months to the RMT issue. So you can speculate that CCP Security spent hundreds of hours of no doubt, evidence gathering and data analysis which I know CCP Quant had to do. I am sure trying to map all that isk was a nightmare and the promo codes must have made it impossible to determine isk in vs isk out..

CCP released a figure stating that on average every day they ban 50 accounts for RMT or other activities etc... Now this same figure I have seen across reddit on a few occasions and I have used this number on occasion to make a point, and I believe it has comes from the 2014 FF video archive. If the figure is wrong let me know and I will recount my abbicus and update appropriately. But I think when you see the result the amount they ban per day will not change the outcome too much.

EDIT: Some facts for you... 2012 to 2013 30,202 Account banned total.

So 50 Accounts banned daily over 1 year

• 50*365= 18,250 accounts.
• IWISK accounts perma banned within 12 months = 4 people Jan 2016 to Jan 2017
• IWISK Contribution to the RMT problem

0.022%

Not suggesting that RMT is justified and belittling the issue at all, but numbers speak for themselves and the issue was tiny by comparison to what actually takes place in Eve if at all IWISK was RMT'ing. Now if you check these websites that are selling ISK and have feedback sections, you will see that they are still selling and moving the same amounts of isk. Soooo no sudden dip in ISK being RMT'd to the "black market"??? Think about that just for a minute and ponder if IWISK was such a massive RMT operation why has banning it had no effect on the 3rd party ISK Black Market? Smells like bullshit right...

So before I even get to what happened in Octoer 2016.. Several more points on RMT in Eve. It happens all the time and it is happening in alliances or inter corp constantly. Supers & Titans are being sold for RL $$'s all the time and accounts. CCP Tickets to FF / Vegas are being sold for isk along with Plane tickets / hotels and beer money.. Yes those going to Fanfest this year, there will be a few who have paid corp mates isk to fund their trip and hotel stays because they have soo much isk and some people have swag amounts of RL $$’s. I know many that have done this and even many CCP dev's know who these people are. This was discussed at a player meet on several occasions late last year. However this is not challenged or tackled because literally who gives a F, certainly the Devs attending did not give a F.

Hell I tried to buy a nice duder at FF but he refused to take my money and insisted he bought me the beer. So instead I said jokingly how about a plex as I will end up owing you? He said that is one cheap plex, but no you do not have to do that... Now some would have said hey, I buy beer and you gib plex K?... Little did he know that because he refused me spending my own money and just wanted to buy me a beer out of principle and in his own words "you have done a lot for many", when I got back to the UK @ home I sent him 20 plex's! Made me warm and fuzzy just for his reaction as he was gobsmacked. ♥ So If I am guilty here it is accepting a beer and paying 20 plex’s for the pleasure \0/ then yesh I deserve the banning. kek

So now we spin on to September 2016. Me and Eep had a few disagreements over several years and now looking back it was over trivial stuff and I decided that If I had stayed in IWISK our relationship would have devolved further. This being our friendship of 3 years was coming to an end and it genuinely made me sad and disappointed with myself. Regardless of what you may think of Eep or the way he reacts from time to time, he is a good guy and he takes way more flak than is deserved. He is down on his luck most of the time. He struggled with money and lived on very little, despite what you all thought, he was not rolling around in RL money living the dream, but sadly living month to month on most occasions and having to borrow money (which he repaid back to people). And I hope Gonz does not mind me saying that, but I just wanted to put it into context and disperse any ideas that he was rivalling yacht sizes with Mittens… If you really knew Gonz, you would know he had no money and if he had been RMT'ing then he would have been rich by comparison.

So I decided one day that enough was enough and if I stayed in IWISK one more day I would flip my sheet and my relationship with Gonz would be perma damaged. So I left to join Eve Casino who welcomed me along for their launch of a new casino that worked completely different to any of the others currently open. Now I did act badly here and I do regret my abuse of the in game mailing list IWISK had, I advertised me leaving IWISK and promoting a new Casino. As the Face of IWISK (streaming and Media) I tried to justify it as a bit of tongue and cheek on my way out, but it was a douche move. I figured Eep would take it two ways, badly or a challenge to step up IWISK 2.0 asap. Not one that I am proud of... But even after all that me and Eep have remained friends and we still talk from time to time. Some things are more important than space pixels, and I am happy to report he is doing ok and better off now than he was prior to IWISK being banned from EVE. The site is still thriving and makes more $$$$’s than it ever has.

So I am now with this new group ECAS / Eve Casino. The doors are closed for internal testing only and the website was pretty damn good I must say. I will not go too deep on ECAS as there really is not much to say, but the website was functioning but only to a point as it was only half finished, not ready for release. The planned release date was the week of Eve Vegas and much work was needed to get it finished.

So with that in mind that Eve Casino was not open to the public and not a single isk was moved through ECAS, the owner was banned along with myself Lenny and Eep. Here is the list of why's :

• Lenny – RMT.
• IronBank - Section 2.1 EULA Offence.
• Eep - EULA Offence / not sure as never saw it and cannot find reference.
• Adarics ECAS - EULA Breach of Development License.

Now Eve Casino was banned because they had used the Crest API for the login to the site as part of the "Evil Network" SSO. This included EOC TV and a few other tools that was being developed. The Crest API was not used for anything else other than the player to login and this was approved by CCP for use. Adarics had spoken with several developers who had given him the greenlight to use it as it was not being used to handle wallet information or any other part of the player. But CCP security banned him for said use. So now we have a classic situation of Part A of the org not talking to Part B. When this was produced to CCP Security they just closed the ticket and ignored him.

And yes you got it, CCP Peligro. So again even with Adarics doing everything by the book, asking for permission and clearing everything prior to deploying it or using it, CCP still screwed him over, or should I say CCP Security. Now it is my understanding that he took this information to Falcon who basically dismissed him and said it did not matter as the case was closed. Now Falcon was A) not interested or B) Cant do anything...

Now you might be thinking wait there must be more to this than what Iron is telling us... Nope that is it, and the so what to that.. Around 12 bankers who were helping test the website which had not transacted a single isk and was closed to the public had all their wallets reset to zero, and Adarics was banned for a first time infraction of a rule that had no effect on the game as the casino was closed even though he had a green light from the Developers.

To this day Adaric is still banned and all those bankers who joined ECAS never got their isk back. They had done nothing wrong, not a single isk moved around, not involved in any of the coding, and CCP just took trillions of isk from these players. Soo, abuse of Power you might say? Guess who did this >>> CCP Peligro Mr Team Security.

Next we move back to IWISK.. Lenny and EEP banned for the reasons above and the rest of the bankers had their isk stripped. So again bankers in IWISK who may have been or may not have been involved in RMT was stripped of their isk and that was that. CCP took between 25 and 30 Trillion isk from both of these orgs and claimed a victory over RMT.

Now it is not hard to fathom that a lot of isk was purchased with plex. I often was intrigued if people had been playing with Plex to fund their activities on IWISK, as to me this was fascinating. Take away the human part that people may have been spiralling out of control, this can be said not just for IWISK but for EOH EVE Bet and the "others" who probably had small amounts of traffic but nothing worth boasting :P (still getting those jabs in). I do not like to reference competition as it seems like a cheap shot, but as these are now all dead, it no longer matters to a degree… But yeah the point here is that all that isk taken which no doubt the players had purchased via EVE or Markee etc has disappeared.. Not even some sent to Plex 4 Good or used to reimburse players who had their stuff stolen in game etc.. CCP talk about an isk imbalance when they restore Items from stolen looted accounts, well they have a huge sink to use. But I guess this was taken and written off as profit rather than use what they took.

Whenever people think of RMT or gambling in Eve they will always pick the most known target. One because the most popular and two because law of averages state that yes it probably exists at some point. However this can exist across all of the casino's, but given the most popular will always be the focal point, you are always going to be under suspicion.

An example of RMT existing outside of IWISK I want to share with you is a guy we caught from Germany, who was trying to use IWISK to funnel money to another player. He was using the raffle system buying 50% tickets with player 1 and using a 2nd account on another machine connected via a VPN to mask himself from us and CCP. His 2nd account would purchase the other 50% of tickets. So he was washing his isk. Yes IWISK was taking a cut as the house would normally regardless, but unknowingly being abused by some tard or tards. I asked this guy if he used any other ways of doing this...

With a bit of poking he finally opened up and said he had access to alliance funds and also a corp accounts in B0T. Not B0T holding itself ofc but some renter corps within B0t... This allowed him to funnel isk into these corp accounts and the use of these funds to build supers etc which he then 3rd partied to make RL money. This seemed like an obvious way to funnel isk and I asked him how he never got caught. His response was CCP are not clever enough or lack the resources to catch him... I was a little surprised by this but I wanted more info on this guy. I was trying to catch him out by getting any info I could, but all avenues lead me to around 50 iP's which bounced all over the world across 7 or 8 VPN services which are easily obtained online & his hardware ID's were changing all the time. This guy was the master or RMT and seemingly from what he was claiming (because that is what it is just a claim) and I wanted to know more, hell who would not be curious.

So I asked him if he had ever used any other websites to facilitate washing isk or doing RMT trades. He said the best one was using EOH Poker (Sorry guys). He said that all he had to do was set up a Head to Head and just lose to the person he was selling to... Or use 2 accounts of his and wash the money across 20 accounts over a 3 month or 6 month period of which none could be connected to Physical hardware or software ID tagging. He told me he would biomass on mass accounts, and some accounts he has had for years without being banned by Team Security. So he in private could wash isk very easily via playing poker in sealed rooms. Thus utilizing EOH's system to wash isk very easily with little to no risk of another player sniping raffles from him. I could see his point and he said that he would only use IWISK for certain methods of washing or selling isk, but he would not tell me anymore, he felt spooked by a few people dropping in and out of the channel. Once really confident talking to us then suddenly not so much. So this encounter certainly opened my eyes on how these guys were abusing sites to do these trades and he was boasting of hundreds of thousands of Euros in profit from this.

This ultimately changed how I looked for patterns in the database. For example looking for players who go head to head on raffles of a value higher than x and then expanding this to a large date range to see how long this was going on for. To be honest it was hard to figure out who was who and if it was chance or just normal activity.. So I thought I knew or had the silver bullet in identifying anyone abusing the system, but reality was, I am now more confused over the data set than ever.

So that aside, that was September done and dusted and I have now moved over to EVE Casino. Hopefully I have given a decent overview of the before the final banning and demonstrated that RMT was happening everywhere, but because IWISK was the most prominent focal point of the gambling scene in EVE, it had become the centre of all RMT claims, even though every system could be manipulated regardless of reputation.

So October the 12th and the ban wave and EULA changes announced by CCP. https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/end-user-license-agreement-changes-coming-with-eve-online-ascension/

I am working night shifts and had been for a few days at this point. I woke up to hundreds of messages and tweets, skype, irc everything… I laid in bed and was like sigh this again!!! So I get out of bed, put on my slippas and go to the kitchen whilst reading all of the messages and a cluster barrage of confusion. I make a cup of tea (Earl Grey to be precise + 2 sugars dash of milk) and make my way to my PC. I was not worried as this had happened several times before and I have never been banned in 12 or 13 years. To be honest at that point I assumed it was just a IWISK the website had been blacklisted and all gambling was to cease, but to my genuine surprise, my account had been banned also.

When attempting to login I got the classic “Banned pending investigation, CCP Peligro”… I laughed out loud at first and then tried every account I owned. All 30 of them but alas to no avail. So I started checking my emails and literally as I opened my client, the email popped in.. It was from guess who, you got it – CCP Peligro

CCP Peligro (EVE Online) Oct 12, 15:22 UTC
Hi,
This mail is sent to inform you that your EVE Online accounts have permanently banned, in light of EULA violations. Specifically, you were found to be using your accounts "XYZ" and "XYZ1" for business purposes, in violation of the EULA, Section 2.A.
Your continued access to the System and license to play the Game is subject to proper conduct. Without limiting CCP's rights to control the Game environment, and the conduct of the players within that environment, CCP prohibits the following practices that CCP has determined detract from the overall user experience of the users playing the Game.
2.A "Accounts may not be used for business purposes. Access to the System and playing EVE is intended for your personal entertainment, enjoyment and recreation, and not for corporate, business, commercial or income-seeking activities. Business entities and anyone who is acting for or on behalf of a business or for business purposes may not establish an Account, access the System or play EVE. Accessing the System or using the Game for commercial, business or income-seeking purposes is strictly prohibited."

So I opened TS3 and those from IWISK was now back on my TS3 server and I started to understand what the damage was, and it was everyone, it was a swift attack from young Mr CCP Peligro.

So I noticed that a Petition had already been opened on my behalf by CCP, no doubt just for their tracking. So I responded saying “I have never RMT’d so I do not understand my ban”. Then as I sit there I read the email again, it was not for RMT as I had assumed... Because it came from CCP Peligro my assumption was that it must be ISK related as that is what he does right. But to my surprise it was no mention of RMT in my petition like Lenny’s. Now I had not spoken to Lenny at this point due to the TZ difference, but the guys on TS3 said his specifically stated RMT, yet mine was for a Section 2.A… So I jumped on IRC and started asking questions with some Devs at CCP, they said if it was not RMT then it should not have come from CCP Peligro, it should have come from another person at CCP. I cannot remember who the Dev is who handles violating of Section 2 of the EULA but we know that it is not CCP Peligro. So now I am confused as this info is coming from Devs and then a few days later I noticed that Nosy Gamer was talking about the same thing. (If anyone finds out who the Dev at CCP should have been let me know and I will update this to keep this accurate.)

So I respond to my petition basically saying, sorry I misread the petition, but I do not understand how I broke this section of the EULA. Can you explain to me what I did wrong…
But the classic silence now dawned upon this petition and not a single response. Few weeks later the petition is closed and not a single response nor explanation or even guidance on why and how to avoid going forward, just simply nothing.

I spoke with Falcon and we had traded a few emails. Not to go into them too much but the bottom line was that Security had concluded their investigation and as such the matter was closed. Nobody can do anything at CCP as the decision is theirs.

So no point except to maybe appeal to Internal Affairs at CCP. I did wait a while before doing this, & Not a single response.

The one good thing about going to Player events is you can meet Devs that you know or have never met. Meet people you have never met and share experiences. Even though I was super angry about what happened, I pulled up my big boy pants and put a smile on my face. I think because of my demeanour about the whole thing being happy go lucky and care free, nearly all the devs would speak openly with me about what had happened over a few shots and a giggle. Not giving too much away, but it did give away a few things that I was trying to understand. Why had I been banned as the reason given made no sense.

So take the email from CCP stating that my accounts had been banned for the reason “income seeking or for business” – Now given I know this is not RMT related as it would just say RMT and you are perma banned from EVE. Yet I am still allowed to play subject to proper conduct right? So it is not RMT as that is clear cut and nor should it be.

The only road I can go down is “Twitch” and the “Game Show” I was pixel space famous for. So I would ask these Devs when intoxicated, was I banned for the reason because of what I was doing on Twitch? The same response, sorry I cannot tell you but a smile & a wink was enough for me to know that I was on the right path.

Why all this effort and having to read between the lines, simple really, nobody at CCP would discuss any of this with me. Because they were kept out of the loop or those involved were told specifically not to discuss this with anyone at CCP or external. Drunk CCP best CCP :)

However not all employees will toe the line, so yes some expressed their disgust to me and apologised for their company & colleagues behaviours and some of the CSM contacted me saying they were appalled by this, and no I am not referring to Bobmon but “others”. It was comforting to know that despite the public flogging CCP gave me, people were still ready to call out CCP’s BS.

So now Its November and I kinda have a better understanding of the reason I was banned for. So I stream on Twitch like many others and the assumption from CCP or more specifically is that my channel is a cash grab based on massive amounts of ISK I have amassed from IWISK. (This was a comment made to me by a member of CCP GM's)

Now if you spent like 5 minutes in my channel like most critiques have in the past. You assume that I am trying to get subs and donations for the isk being given away. This could not have been further from the truth and if you have read this far congratulations…

The channel operated like this… If you are a subscriber you got “Iron” or points for every month that you were subscribed. So if you had been subbed for 1 month you got 500 Iron, and on month 2 you got 500 + 2000 for being 2 months, 3 months 500 + 3000 etc etc…

So the longer you are subbed the more points or “Iron” you got and this is known on Twitch as a loyalty system. You also got points for being idle in channel or being in channel when I was streaming.

Now if you are not subscribed you got no points at all, simply none as points are used to play in game channel games “roulette or Bank robbing” or entering Subscriber only giveaways / requesting songs etc. These giveaways were for Plex’s or other things which you could redeem via your EVE account management page.

I purchased these codes from Markee Dragons store or Greenman Gaming (Approved ETC or PLEX code retailers) and the money to buy these codes came from the sub’s money that I got from Twitch every month.

So I have been accused of Income seeking by CCP, and the reason I find this so ludicrous is that it was no secret of how this model operated. Hell every stream I would announce these code giveaways are only for subs because the subs effectively paid for them. And at this point I think nobody at CCP involved in my banning knew this, because they simply did not do their homework. I would love to be proven wrong, but that would require someone from CCP actually talking to me.

The other giveaways that was done on the channel follow’s CCP rules that everyone must have the same chance regardless of subscription type. This I followed to the letter and back story, I even asked for this to be made as a policy for streamers. The rules also state that this is for “in game items only” and Fozzie even reinforced that on Mittani’s Twitch channel days after this policy was released. He said if it is for anything out of game then do what you want with it, which reinforced the CCP policy on Streaming.

So I followed the rules to the letter and others on Twitch were still not following these rules… But hey I did not care as everyone has their own path to follow and if CCP really gave a hoot they would step in. I am no internet police vigilantly and I do not stoop to the same levels like DBRB for example. Yes DBRB I know what you tried to do and it failed.

Anyway back on track.. A little bit into the world of me and why income seeking is just utter nonsense.. I work as an IT Contractor and earn good money. Or at least I think it is good money. Approx 300 GBP a day or 380 USD a day not inc bonus etc. Not going to be a billionaire in RL, but enough to not worry financially about a mortgage or nice cars holidays etc.
So here is a rough example of what I got from Twitch every month and how those funds were spent. Sometimes it was less around 500 but it varied and at one point was as high as 720… This is puny compared to the likes of Zarvox etc but he does it full time and deserves every penny!

Twitch Income:

• 250 Subs @ 2.5 USD = 625 USD

Monthly Expenditure:

· Server VPS - 105 USD · Deepbot 10 – USD · 1ronbot 5 – USD · Plex Codes and Aurumn Codes Monthly Avg - 200 - 250 USD · X-Split – 15

Total Monthly Expenditure - 380 USD

So I make give or take a massive:

245 USD a month

depending on how many subs I have, and this does not even include the cost of Electricity / Hardware failures or equipment purchases to improve the stream. If I was to break it down further into that. But as these additional's I have not included are for personal enjoyment as well and I cannot or won’t include them. as it would be wrong to do so.

Also any paypal money left over in paypal get's spent at the end of the Year on a Christmas and New Years special Stream. I buy as many codes as I can to give away (2015 Christmas I spent over 1100 USD on codes alone). So I run my channel almost non profit or at least as best I could. And yes I take money for Beer and Nachos cuz Beer and Nachoz amright?

So I was banned for making around 200 USD a month and some change because… NOPE NOPE NOPE I do not get it also. Other streamers make more $$$’s than me easy in the Eve Category, but yep you got it, it was all they could use to ban me. Literally they used a BS excuse to ban me from the game and publicly flog me.

So yes I got F’d over royally because some fuck wit child in CCP Security had a grudge to settle. That is truly how I feelz about this and it is disgusting. If any of my staff members behaved like this, they would be out immediately without warning. And I know I am not alone when it comes to complaints about Peligro and his conduct…

To add insult to injury he even followed me on Twitter about 2 weeks prior to nuking my account, I guess he wanted my tears…

http://i.imgur.com/MtAxI0Y.png

But the funny part is, as soon as I mentioned and saw this connection I emailed CCP about his behaviour and that day he un-followed me on Twitter. Bad taste indeed sir.

Now I had tried to reach out and extend my hand with Peligro, as he followed me on Twitter prior to the first ban wave in Jan 2016. I used to feed him info on suspected people or anything else that I thought may have been an issue. See image and you will notice the dates..

http://i.imgur.com/bxATAfX.png << But as you can see I was trying every avenue to get these sec people to engage.

Around June he stopped following me, so I took that as a sign that CCP Security wanted nothing to do with me or to aid in catching RMT'ers. I have also emailed and raised petitions of bankers & players who I thought were dodgy. And I also captured one of the bankers via Reddit who I know got banned. That was a good day for Reddit on the anti RMT front!

Now there is the whole unassailable wealth thing.. This made my literally laugh out loud. For a start I know more people in Eve who are station traders and combined have more isk than IWISK bankers / IWISK in general. They could have funded the war against Mittens all by themselves as a small group. Station traders in major hubs selling and buying firesales or hunting forums for cheap BPO deals and reselling them etc also have unassailable wealth. The hypocrisy that it is unfair because you cannot target these people and casino’s are generally untouchable… Well if you know station trading or have half a fucking clue about this game and enough capital, you can literally steer the market in your favour. And I do believe a trader recently and a few other have been banned and they are still banned. Guess who is investigating them… CCP Peligro

@ CCP – I am disappointed with you that you even listened to the dear complaints of the overlord Mittani, But I do expect you to Nerf Market trading so you can be killed and have your stuff taken from you, or would it be better Mittens to write a letter of complaint to Ned?
Sigh…

Lastly
I was debating and have been for the last 15 minutes whether to put this in or not but I will add these last few bits as conjecture and you make up your own mind. But all of the above is my story and I have no reason to BS. You can see it is open and honest. I have tried not to misty any part of the above except the bit with my email trades with Falcon as it contained some personal parts of my life when I was in the forces / Hospital. But I hope at the very least you can see that not everything is as it seems.

If you control the evidence that is received and you want a group or x people out of the game, you can make any evidence tell the story you want. Forget what you think about me or IWISK etc, just think about it for a while.

[Tinfoil-zone]

· Mittani is RL friends with Peligro and he is / was a Goonswarm Member… · Head of internal affairs left after this all happened. · Head of CCP Security left after this all happened.

[/Tinfoil-zone-end]

The pro-sex feminist, cultural critic and author tells THR why Hef's art of seduction is needed today and how Gloria Steinem is not a role model for young women.
With the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner on Sept. 27, cultural historian and contrarian feminist Camille Paglia spoke to The Hollywood Reporter in an exclusive interview on topics ranging from what Hef's choice of the bunny costume revealed about him to the current "dreary" state of relationships between the sexes.
Have you ever been to a party at the Playboy Mansion?
No, I'm not a partygoer! [laughs]
So let me just ask: Was Hugh Hefner a misogynist?
Absolutely not! The central theme of my wing of pro-sex feminism is that all celebrations of the sexual human body are positive. Second-wave feminism went off the rails when it was totally unable to deal with erotic imagery, which has been a central feature of the entire history of Western art ever since Greek nudes.
So let’s dig in a little — what would you say was Playboy’s cultural impact?
Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.
Hefner re-imagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and with the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.
Hefner’s new vision of American masculinity was part of his desperate revision of his own Puritan heritage. On his father's side, he descended directly from William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was governor of Plymouth Colony, the major settlement of New England Puritans.
But Hefner’s worldview was already dated by the explosion of the psychedelic 1960s. The anything-goes, free-love atmosphere — illustrated by all that hedonistic rolling around in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 — made the suave Hefner style seem old-fashioned and buttoned up. Nevertheless, I have always taken the position that the men's magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality. Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.
What could today's media learn from what Hef did at Playboy?
It must be remembered that Hefner was a gifted editor who knew how to produce a magazine that had great visual style and that was a riveting combination of pictorial with print design. Everything about Playboy as a visual object, whether you liked the magazine or not, was lively and often ravishing.
In the early 1990s, you said that Hugh Hefner "ushered in a revolution in American sexual consciousness. Some say that the women in Playboy come across as commodities, like a stereo, but I think Playboy is more an appreciation of pleasure of all kinds." What would you add to his legacy today, if anything?
I would hope that people could see the positives in the Playboy sexual landscape — the foregrounding of pleasure and fun and humor. Sex is not a tragedy, it's a comedy! [laughs]
What do you think about the fact that Trump's childhood hero and model of sophisticated American masculinity was Hefner?
Before the election, I kept pointing out that the mainstream media based in Manhattan, particularly The New York Times, was hopelessly off in the way it was simplistically viewing Trump as a classic troglodyte misogynist. I certainly saw in Trump the entire Playboy aesthetic, including the glitzy world of casinos and beauty pageants. It's a long passé world of confident male privilege that preceded the birth of second-wave feminism. There is no doubt that Trump strongly identified with it as he was growing up. It seems to be truly his worldview.
But it is categorically not a world of unwilling women. Nor is it driven by masculine abuse. It's a world of show girls, of flamboyant femaleness, a certain kind of strutting style that has its own intoxicating sexual allure — which most young people attending elite colleges today have had no contact with whatever.
I instantly recognized and understood it in Trump because I had always been an admirer of Hefner's sexual cosmos. I can certainly see how retrograde and nostalgic it is, but at the same time I maintain that even in the photos that The New York Times posted in trying to convict Trump of sexism, you can feel leaping from these pictures the intense sizzle of sexual polarization — in that long-ago time when men were men and women were women!
My 1960s generation was the gender-bending generation — we were all about blending the genders in fashion and attitude. But it has to be said that in terms of world history, the taste for and interest in androgyny is usually relatively brief. And it comes at late and decadent phases of culture! [laughs] World civilizations predictably return again and again to sexual polarization, where there is a tremendous electric charge between men and women.
The unhappy truth is that the more the sexes have blended, the less each sex is interested in the other. So we’re now in a period of sexual boredom and inertia, complaint and dissatisfaction, which is one of the main reasons young men have gone over to pornography. Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives, where the sexes are now routinely mixed in the workplace.
With the sexes so bored with each other, all that's left are these feminist witch-hunts. That's where the energy is! And meanwhile, men are shrinking. I see men turning away from women and simply being content with the world of fantasy because women have become too thin-skinned, resentful and high maintenance.
And American women don't know what they want any longer. In general, French women — the educated, middle-class French women, I mean — seem to have a feminine composure, a distinct sense of themselves as women, which I think women in America have gradually lost as they have won job equality in our high-pressure career system.
Trump has certainly steadily hired and promoted women in his businesses, but it has to be said that his vision of women as erotic beings remains rather retrograde. Part of his nationwide support seems to be coming from his bold defense of his own maleness. Many mainstream voters are gratified by his reassertion of male pride and confidence. Trump supporters may be quite right that, in this period of confusion and uncertainty, male identity needs to be reaffirmed and reconsolidated. (And I’m speaking here as a Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein!)
Ultimately every culture seems to return to sexual polarization because it may be in the best interest of human beings, whether we like it or not. Nature drives every species to procreate, although not necessarily when there's overpopulation!
Gloria Steinem has said that what Playboy doesn't know about women could fill a book. What do you think about that?
What Playboy doesn't know about well-educated, upper-middle-class women with bitter grievances against men could fill a book! I don't regard Gloria Steinem as an expert on any of the human appetites, sexuality being only one of them. Interviews with Steinem were documenting from the start how her refrigerator contained nothing but two bottles of carbonated water. Steinem's philosophy of life is extremely limited by her own childhood experiences. She came out of an admittedly unstable family background. I’m so tired of that animus of hers against men, which she’s been cranking out now for decade after decade. I come from a completely different Italian-American background — very food-centric and appetite-centric. Steinem, with that fulsomely genteel WASP persona of hers, represents an attitude of malice and vindictiveness toward men that has not proved to be in the best interest of young women today.
So would you say that her other comment — that women reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual — is just an expression of her animus toward men?
Oh Lord, how many times is Gloria Steinem going to play the Nazi card? What she said about me in the 1990s was: "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying he’s not anti-Semitic.” That’s the simplistic level of Steinem's thinking!
Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, all of those relentlessly ideological feminists are people who have wandered away from traditional religion and made a certain rabid type of feminist rhetoric their religion. And their fanaticism has poisoned the public image of feminism and driven ordinary, mainstream citizens away from feminism. It’s outrageous.
I hugely admired the early role that Steinem played in second-wave feminism because she was very good as a spokesperson in the 1970s. She had a very soothing manner that made it seem perfectly reasonable for people to adopt feminist principles. She normalized the image of feminism when there were a lot of crazy feminists running around (like Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol). That was Steinem’s great contribution, as far as I'm concerned. Also, I credit her for co-founding Ms. magazine and thereby contributing that very useful word, Ms., to the English language, which allows us to refer to a woman without signaling her marital status. I think that's a tremendous accomplishment.
But aside from that, Steinem is basically a socialite who always hid her early dependence on men in the social scene in New York. And as a Democrat, I also blame her for having turned feminism into a covert adjunct of the Democratic party. I have always felt that feminism should transcend party politics and be a big tent welcoming women of faith and of all views into it. Also, I hold against Steinem her utter, shameless hypocrisy during the Bill Clinton scandal. After promoting sexual harassment guidelines, which I had also supported since the 1980s, Steinem waved away one of the worst cases of sexual harassment violation that can ever be imagined — the gigantic gap of power between the President of the United States and an intern! All of a sudden, oh, no, it was all fine, it was “private.” What rubbish! That hypocrisy by partisan feminist leaders really destroyed feminism for a long time. So now feminism has rebounded, but unfortunately it's a particularly virulent brand of feminism that’s way too reminiscent of the MacKinnon-Dworkin sex hysteria of the 1980s.
Is there anything of lasting value in Hugh Hefner’s legacy?
We can see that what has completely vanished is what Hefner espoused and represented — the art of seduction, where a man, behaving in a courtly, polite and respectful manner, pursues a woman and gives her the time and the grace and the space to make a decision of consent or not. Hefner’s passing makes one remember an era when a man would ask a woman on a real date — inviting her to his apartment for some great music on a cutting-edge stereo system (Playboy was always talking about the best new electronics!) — and treating her to fine cocktails and a wonderful, relaxing time. Sex would emerge out of conversation and flirtation as a pleasurable mutual experience. So now when we look back at Hefner, we see a moment when there was a fleeting vision of a sophisticated sexuality that was integrated with all of our other aesthetic and sensory responses.
Instead, what we have today, after Playboy declined and finally disappeared off the cultural map, is the coarse, juvenile anarchy of college binge drinking, fraternity keg parties where undeveloped adolescent boys clumsily lunge toward naive girls who are barely dressed in tiny mini skirts and don't know what the hell they want from life. What possible romance or intrigue or sexual mystique could survive such a vulgar and debased environment as today's residential campus social life?
Do men need a kind of Hefner for today to give an example of how to interact with women in a sophisticated manner?
Yes. Women's sexual responses are notoriously slower than men's. Truly sophisticated seducers knew that women have to be courted and that women love an ambiance, setting a stage. Today, alas, too many young women feel they have to provide quick sex or they’ll lose social status. If a guy can't get sex from them, he'll get it from someone else. There’s a general bleak atmosphere of grudging compliance.
Today’s hook-up culture, which is the ultimate product of my generation’s sexual revolution, seems markedly disillusioning in how it has reduced sex to male needs, to the general male desire for wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am efficiency, with no commitment afterwards. We're in a period of great sexual confusion and rancor right now. The sexes are very wary of each other. There’s no pressure on men to marry because they can get sex very easily in other ways.
The sizzle of sex seems gone. What Hefner's death forces us to recognize is that there is very little glamour and certainly no mystery or intrigue left to sex for most young people. Which means young women do not know how to become women. And sex has become just another physical urge that can be satisfied like putting coins into a Coke machine.
This may be one reason for the ferocious pressure by so many current feminists to reinforce the Stalinist mechanisms, the pernicious PC rules that have invaded colleges everywhere. Feminists want supervision and surveillance of dating life on campus to punish men if something goes wrong and the girl doesn't like what happened. I am very concerned that what young women are saying through this strident feminist rhetoric is that they feel incapable of conducting independent sex lives. They require adult intrusion and supervision and penalizing of men who go astray. But if feminism means anything, it should be encouraging young women to take control of every aspect of their sex lives, including their own impulses, conflicts and disappointments. That's what's tragic about all this. Young women don't seem to realize that in demanding adult inquiry into and adjudication of their sex lives, they are forfeiting their own freedom and agency.
Young women are being taught that men have all the power and have used it throughout history to oppress women. Women don't seem to realize how much power they have to crush men! Strong women have always known how to control men. Oscar Wilde said women are complex and men are simple. Is it society or is it nature that is unjust? This was the big question that I proposed in Sexual Personae, where I argued that our biggest oppressor is actually nature, not society. I continue to feel that my pro-sex wing of feminism, which does not see sexual imagery or men in general as the enemy, has the best and healthiest message for young women.
There is a big push/pull happening in the entertainment industry about female voices and representation around directors in Hollywood. Surely there's nothing wrong with that, right, in your opinion?
All this constant complaining by women in Hollywood, I really don't understand it. I’m disturbed by women acting as if the world owes them opportunities, when there are so many hugely rich women stars in movies and music who should be using their millions to fund the creation of production companies precisely for the kind of hiring that they want. All those wealthy performers with their multiple houses — how about selling one of them? And let them do whatever feminist projects they want and see if they can sell it to the general public.
Look at the way you had George Lucas and Steven Spielberg coming together when they had nothing — they were just young men with a dream, with a vision, and they made an enormously successful series of films with global impact. Look at how many young male billionaires dropped out of college, and you got the Apple computer and Facebook.
I blame women for their own lack of imagination. There was a period when there were so many really unique and memorable films by women. Lisa Cholodenko's High Art is an example. That’s an amazing film. And what about Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts? A knock-out film with vivid characters and a wonderful sense of place. But I know how difficult it is to get the funding for films. It can be like a five-year process, and it saps people’s creative energies. And it's kind of a double whammy — when women are able to produce movies that bring in big bucks on the international stage, that’s when woman directors will get more chances. But women can certainly cut their teeth by making really important, low-budget films. I want to see them! Show us. Show us the quality of your mind and your work, okay? At a certain point, it’s counterproductive when you're claiming that someone else always has to open doors for you.
You have discussed the issue of imagery — what are your thoughts about the Playboy bunny costume?
Feminists of that period were irate about it — they felt that it reduced women to animals. It is true it’s animal imagery, but a bunny is a child's toy, for heaven's sake! I think you could criticize the bunny image that Hefner created by saying it makes a woman juvenile and infantilizes her. But the type of animal here is a kind of key to Hefner's sensibility because a bunny is utterly harmless. Multiplying like bunnies: Hefner was making a strange kind of joke about the entire procreative process. It seems to me like a defense formation — Hefner turning his Puritan guilts into humor. It suggests that, despite his bland smile, he may always have suffered from a deep anxiety about sex.
There are all kinds of complex currents in men’s relationship to women that feminism refuses to acknowledge. The main one is men’s often very unstable or ambivalent relationship with their mothers. That's what I see in Hefner's notorious lifestyle in the Playboy Mansion, where he stayed and worked in his bedroom all day long, dressed in pajamas and a robe. It's a blatant regression to the womb world exactly as Elvis Presley evidently desired. Elvis’s wife Priscilla complained that all he wanted to do was stay in his bedroom all day long in the dark, watching TV and having hamburgers brought in. There was a strange kind of craving there for maternal nurturance. I think feminism is wildly wrong when it portrays men as the oppressor, when in fact men, as I have argued in my books, are always struggling for identity against the enormous power of women.
Hefner created his own universe of sexuality, where there was nothing threatening. It’s a kind of childlike vision, sanitizing all the complexities and potential darkness of the sexual impulse. Everybody knows that Hefner’s sexual type was the girl next door, in other words, the corn-fed, bubbly American girl who stays at the borderline of womanhood but never crosses it.
The limitations in Hefner's erotic system can be seen when one compares Playboy to the other great magazine that it inspired, Penthouse: Its U.S. editor, Bob Guccione, was then married to a very stylish British woman, Kathy Keeton, who gave her particular cosmopolitan perspective to Penthouse. It projected an adult vision of sexuality in a highly sophisticated urban environment — people flirting in limousines, glamorous women who were as free and dominant as a man about town.
When we look back at Hefner's girl next door, we see that she's kind of like a high-school cheerleader or the ingenue in a postwar musical comedy like Oklahoma. Hefner was a Midwesterner who took a very long time to change his residence from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he was suddenly moving in the fastest currents of American culture.
Hefner’s women may have been uncomplex as personalities, but they were always warm and genuine. I never found them particularly erotic. I much preferred the Penthouse style of women, who were more femme fatales. Hefner’s bunnies were a major departure from female mythology, where women were often portrayed as animals of prey — tigresses and leopards. Woman as cozy, cuddly bunny is a perfectly legitimate modality of eroticism. Hefner was good-natured but rather abashed, diffident, and shy. So he recreated the image of women in palatable and manageable form. I don’t see anything misogynist in that. What I see is a frank acknowledgment of Hefner’s fear of women’s actual power.
For ideological feminists to go on and on about how we cannot have women treated as sex objects is so naive, so uncultured. It shows a total incomprehension of the history of art, which flows into the great Hollywood movies and sex symbols of the 20th century. The whole history of art is about objectification. That's what an art work is: it's an artifact, an object. Because of our advanced brains, it is the nature of human beings to make sex objects — objects of worship. Turning a person into a beautiful thing does not automatically dehumanize her.
All you have to do is look at the long history of the gay male world, beginning in classical Athens. No gay man has ever said when gazing at a beautiful young man with a perfect body, “I am making him passive beneath my gaze.” That would be stupid beyond belief. Every gay man knows that youth and beauty are supreme principles that deserve our admiration and veneration. When we worship beauty, we are worshipping life itself.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/camille-paglia-hugh-hefners-legacy-trumps-masculinity-feminisms-sex-phobia-1044769

The pro-sex feminist, cultural critic and author tells THR why Hef's art of seduction is needed today and how Gloria Steinem is not a role model for young women.
With the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner on Sept. 27, cultural historian and contrarian feminist Camille Paglia spoke to The Hollywood Reporter in an exclusive interview on topics ranging from what Hef's choice of the bunny costume revealed about him to the current "dreary" state of relationships between the sexes.
Have you ever been to a party at the Playboy Mansion?
No, I'm not a partygoer! [laughs]
So let me just ask: Was Hugh Hefner a misogynist?
Absolutely not! The central theme of my wing of pro-sex feminism is that all celebrations of the sexual human body are positive. Second-wave feminism went off the rails when it was totally unable to deal with erotic imagery, which has been a central feature of the entire history of Western art ever since Greek nudes.
So let’s dig in a little — what would you say was Playboy’s cultural impact?
Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.
Hefner re-imagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and with the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.
Hefner’s new vision of American masculinity was part of his desperate revision of his own Puritan heritage. On his father's side, he descended directly from William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was governor of Plymouth Colony, the major settlement of New England Puritans.
But Hefner’s worldview was already dated by the explosion of the psychedelic 1960s. The anything-goes, free-love atmosphere — illustrated by all that hedonistic rolling around in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 — made the suave Hefner style seem old-fashioned and buttoned up. Nevertheless, I have always taken the position that the men's magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality. Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.
What could today's media learn from what Hef did at Playboy?
It must be remembered that Hefner was a gifted editor who knew how to produce a magazine that had great visual style and that was a riveting combination of pictorial with print design. Everything about Playboy as a visual object, whether you liked the magazine or not, was lively and often ravishing.
In the early 1990s, you said that Hugh Hefner "ushered in a revolution in American sexual consciousness. Some say that the women in Playboy come across as commodities, like a stereo, but I think Playboy is more an appreciation of pleasure of all kinds." What would you add to his legacy today, if anything?
I would hope that people could see the positives in the Playboy sexual landscape — the foregrounding of pleasure and fun and humor. Sex is not a tragedy, it's a comedy! [laughs]
What do you think about the fact that Trump's childhood hero and model of sophisticated American masculinity was Hefner?
Before the election, I kept pointing out that the mainstream media based in Manhattan, particularly The New York Times, was hopelessly off in the way it was simplistically viewing Trump as a classic troglodyte misogynist. I certainly saw in Trump the entire Playboy aesthetic, including the glitzy world of casinos and beauty pageants. It's a long passé world of confident male privilege that preceded the birth of second-wave feminism. There is no doubt that Trump strongly identified with it as he was growing up. It seems to be truly his worldview.
But it is categorically not a world of unwilling women. Nor is it driven by masculine abuse. It's a world of show girls, of flamboyant femaleness, a certain kind of strutting style that has its own intoxicating sexual allure — which most young people attending elite colleges today have had no contact with whatever.
I instantly recognized and understood it in Trump because I had always been an admirer of Hefner's sexual cosmos. I can certainly see how retrograde and nostalgic it is, but at the same time I maintain that even in the photos that The New York Times posted in trying to convict Trump of sexism, you can feel leaping from these pictures the intense sizzle of sexual polarization — in that long-ago time when men were men and women were women!
My 1960s generation was the gender-bending generation — we were all about blending the genders in fashion and attitude. But it has to be said that in terms of world history, the taste for and interest in androgyny is usually relatively brief. And it comes at late and decadent phases of culture! [laughs] World civilizations predictably return again and again to sexual polarization, where there is a tremendous electric charge between men and women.
The unhappy truth is that the more the sexes have blended, the less each sex is interested in the other. So we’re now in a period of sexual boredom and inertia, complaint and dissatisfaction, which is one of the main reasons young men have gone over to pornography. Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives, where the sexes are now routinely mixed in the workplace.
With the sexes so bored with each other, all that's left are these feminist witch-hunts. That's where the energy is! And meanwhile, men are shrinking. I see men turning away from women and simply being content with the world of fantasy because women have become too thin-skinned, resentful and high maintenance.
And American women don't know what they want any longer. In general, French women — the educated, middle-class French women, I mean — seem to have a feminine composure, a distinct sense of themselves as women, which I think women in America have gradually lost as they have won job equality in our high-pressure career system.
Trump has certainly steadily hired and promoted women in his businesses, but it has to be said that his vision of women as erotic beings remains rather retrograde. Part of his nationwide support seems to be coming from his bold defense of his own maleness. Many mainstream voters are gratified by his reassertion of male pride and confidence. Trump supporters may be quite right that, in this period of confusion and uncertainty, male identity needs to be reaffirmed and reconsolidated. (And I’m speaking here as a Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein!)
Ultimately every culture seems to return to sexual polarization because it may be in the best interest of human beings, whether we like it or not. Nature drives every species to procreate, although not necessarily when there's overpopulation!
Gloria Steinem has said that what Playboy doesn't know about women could fill a book. What do you think about that?
What Playboy doesn't know about well-educated, upper-middle-class women with bitter grievances against men could fill a book! I don't regard Gloria Steinem as an expert on any of the human appetites, sexuality being only one of them. Interviews with Steinem were documenting from the start how her refrigerator contained nothing but two bottles of carbonated water. Steinem's philosophy of life is extremely limited by her own childhood experiences. She came out of an admittedly unstable family background. I’m so tired of that animus of hers against men, which she’s been cranking out now for decade after decade. I come from a completely different Italian-American background — very food-centric and appetite-centric. Steinem, with that fulsomely genteel WASP persona of hers, represents an attitude of malice and vindictiveness toward men that has not proved to be in the best interest of young women today.
So would you say that her other comment — that women reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual — is just an expression of her animus toward men?
Oh Lord, how many times is Gloria Steinem going to play the Nazi card? What she said about me in the 1990s was: "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying he’s not anti-Semitic.” That’s the simplistic level of Steinem's thinking!
Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, all of those relentlessly ideological feminists are people who have wandered away from traditional religion and made a certain rabid type of feminist rhetoric their religion. And their fanaticism has poisoned the public image of feminism and driven ordinary, mainstream citizens away from feminism. It’s outrageous.
I hugely admired the early role that Steinem played in second-wave feminism because she was very good as a spokesperson in the 1970s. She had a very soothing manner that made it seem perfectly reasonable for people to adopt feminist principles. She normalized the image of feminism when there were a lot of crazy feminists running around (like Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol). That was Steinem’s great contribution, as far as I'm concerned. Also, I credit her for co-founding Ms. magazine and thereby contributing that very useful word, Ms., to the English language, which allows us to refer to a woman without signaling her marital status. I think that's a tremendous accomplishment.
But aside from that, Steinem is basically a socialite who always hid her early dependence on men in the social scene in New York. And as a Democrat, I also blame her for having turned feminism into a covert adjunct of the Democratic party. I have always felt that feminism should transcend party politics and be a big tent welcoming women of faith and of all views into it. Also, I hold against Steinem her utter, shameless hypocrisy during the Bill Clinton scandal. After promoting sexual harassment guidelines, which I had also supported since the 1980s, Steinem waved away one of the worst cases of sexual harassment violation that can ever be imagined — the gigantic gap of power between the President of the United States and an intern! All of a sudden, oh, no, it was all fine, it was “private.” What rubbish! That hypocrisy by partisan feminist leaders really destroyed feminism for a long time. So now feminism has rebounded, but unfortunately it's a particularly virulent brand of feminism that’s way too reminiscent of the MacKinnon-Dworkin sex hysteria of the 1980s.
Is there anything of lasting value in Hugh Hefner’s legacy?
We can see that what has completely vanished is what Hefner espoused and represented — the art of seduction, where a man, behaving in a courtly, polite and respectful manner, pursues a woman and gives her the time and the grace and the space to make a decision of consent or not. Hefner’s passing makes one remember an era when a man would ask a woman on a real date — inviting her to his apartment for some great music on a cutting-edge stereo system (Playboy was always talking about the best new electronics!) — and treating her to fine cocktails and a wonderful, relaxing time. Sex would emerge out of conversation and flirtation as a pleasurable mutual experience. So now when we look back at Hefner, we see a moment when there was a fleeting vision of a sophisticated sexuality that was integrated with all of our other aesthetic and sensory responses.
Instead, what we have today, after Playboy declined and finally disappeared off the cultural map, is the coarse, juvenile anarchy of college binge drinking, fraternity keg parties where undeveloped adolescent boys clumsily lunge toward naive girls who are barely dressed in tiny mini skirts and don't know what the hell they want from life. What possible romance or intrigue or sexual mystique could survive such a vulgar and debased environment as today's residential campus social life?
Do men need a kind of Hefner for today to give an example of how to interact with women in a sophisticated manner?
Yes. Women's sexual responses are notoriously slower than men's. Truly sophisticated seducers knew that women have to be courted and that women love an ambiance, setting a stage. Today, alas, too many young women feel they have to provide quick sex or they’ll lose social status. If a guy can't get sex from them, he'll get it from someone else. There’s a general bleak atmosphere of grudging compliance.
Today’s hook-up culture, which is the ultimate product of my generation’s sexual revolution, seems markedly disillusioning in how it has reduced sex to male needs, to the general male desire for wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am efficiency, with no commitment afterwards. We're in a period of great sexual confusion and rancor right now. The sexes are very wary of each other. There’s no pressure on men to marry because they can get sex very easily in other ways.
The sizzle of sex seems gone. What Hefner's death forces us to recognize is that there is very little glamour and certainly no mystery or intrigue left to sex for most young people. Which means young women do not know how to become women. And sex has become just another physical urge that can be satisfied like putting coins into a Coke machine.
This may be one reason for the ferocious pressure by so many current feminists to reinforce the Stalinist mechanisms, the pernicious PC rules that have invaded colleges everywhere. Feminists want supervision and surveillance of dating life on campus to punish men if something goes wrong and the girl doesn't like what happened. I am very concerned that what young women are saying through this strident feminist rhetoric is that they feel incapable of conducting independent sex lives. They require adult intrusion and supervision and penalizing of men who go astray. But if feminism means anything, it should be encouraging young women to take control of every aspect of their sex lives, including their own impulses, conflicts and disappointments. That's what's tragic about all this. Young women don't seem to realize that in demanding adult inquiry into and adjudication of their sex lives, they are forfeiting their own freedom and agency.
Young women are being taught that men have all the power and have used it throughout history to oppress women. Women don't seem to realize how much power they have to crush men! Strong women have always known how to control men. Oscar Wilde said women are complex and men are simple. Is it society or is it nature that is unjust? This was the big question that I proposed in Sexual Personae, where I argued that our biggest oppressor is actually nature, not society. I continue to feel that my pro-sex wing of feminism, which does not see sexual imagery or men in general as the enemy, has the best and healthiest message for young women.
There is a big push/pull happening in the entertainment industry about female voices and representation around directors in Hollywood. Surely there's nothing wrong with that, right, in your opinion?
All this constant complaining by women in Hollywood, I really don't understand it. I’m disturbed by women acting as if the world owes them opportunities, when there are so many hugely rich women stars in movies and music who should be using their millions to fund the creation of production companies precisely for the kind of hiring that they want. All those wealthy performers with their multiple houses — how about selling one of them? And let them do whatever feminist projects they want and see if they can sell it to the general public.
Look at the way you had George Lucas and Steven Spielberg coming together when they had nothing — they were just young men with a dream, with a vision, and they made an enormously successful series of films with global impact. Look at how many young male billionaires dropped out of college, and you got the Apple computer and Facebook.
I blame women for their own lack of imagination. There was a period when there were so many really unique and memorable films by women. Lisa Cholodenko's High Art is an example. That’s an amazing film. And what about Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts? A knock-out film with vivid characters and a wonderful sense of place. But I know how difficult it is to get the funding for films. It can be like a five-year process, and it saps people’s creative energies. And it's kind of a double whammy — when women are able to produce movies that bring in big bucks on the international stage, that’s when woman directors will get more chances. But women can certainly cut their teeth by making really important, low-budget films. I want to see them! Show us. Show us the quality of your mind and your work, okay? At a certain point, it’s counterproductive when you're claiming that someone else always has to open doors for you.
You have discussed the issue of imagery — what are your thoughts about the Playboy bunny costume?
Feminists of that period were irate about it — they felt that it reduced women to animals. It is true it’s animal imagery, but a bunny is a child's toy, for heaven's sake! I think you could criticize the bunny image that Hefner created by saying it makes a woman juvenile and infantilizes her. But the type of animal here is a kind of key to Hefner's sensibility because a bunny is utterly harmless. Multiplying like bunnies: Hefner was making a strange kind of joke about the entire procreative process. It seems to me like a defense formation — Hefner turning his Puritan guilts into humor. It suggests that, despite his bland smile, he may always have suffered from a deep anxiety about sex.
There are all kinds of complex currents in men’s relationship to women that feminism refuses to acknowledge. The main one is men’s often very unstable or ambivalent relationship with their mothers. That's what I see in Hefner's notorious lifestyle in the Playboy Mansion, where he stayed and worked in his bedroom all day long, dressed in pajamas and a robe. It's a blatant regression to the womb world exactly as Elvis Presley evidently desired. Elvis’s wife Priscilla complained that all he wanted to do was stay in his bedroom all day long in the dark, watching TV and having hamburgers brought in. There was a strange kind of craving there for maternal nurturance. I think feminism is wildly wrong when it portrays men as the oppressor, when in fact men, as I have argued in my books, are always struggling for identity against the enormous power of women.
Hefner created his own universe of sexuality, where there was nothing threatening. It’s a kind of childlike vision, sanitizing all the complexities and potential darkness of the sexual impulse. Everybody knows that Hefner’s sexual type was the girl next door, in other words, the corn-fed, bubbly American girl who stays at the borderline of womanhood but never crosses it.
The limitations in Hefner's erotic system can be seen when one compares Playboy to the other great magazine that it inspired, Penthouse: Its U.S. editor, Bob Guccione, was then married to a very stylish British woman, Kathy Keeton, who gave her particular cosmopolitan perspective to Penthouse. It projected an adult vision of sexuality in a highly sophisticated urban environment — people flirting in limousines, glamorous women who were as free and dominant as a man about town.
When we look back at Hefner's girl next door, we see that she's kind of like a high-school cheerleader or the ingenue in a postwar musical comedy like Oklahoma. Hefner was a Midwesterner who took a very long time to change his residence from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he was suddenly moving in the fastest currents of American culture.
Hefner’s women may have been uncomplex as personalities, but they were always warm and genuine. I never found them particularly erotic. I much preferred the Penthouse style of women, who were more femme fatales. Hefner’s bunnies were a major departure from female mythology, where women were often portrayed as animals of prey — tigresses and leopards. Woman as cozy, cuddly bunny is a perfectly legitimate modality of eroticism. Hefner was good-natured but rather abashed, diffident, and shy. So he recreated the image of women in palatable and manageable form. I don’t see anything misogynist in that. What I see is a frank acknowledgment of Hefner’s fear of women’s actual power.
For ideological feminists to go on and on about how we cannot have women treated as sex objects is so naive, so uncultured. It shows a total incomprehension of the history of art, which flows into the great Hollywood movies and sex symbols of the 20th century. The whole history of art is about objectification. That's what an art work is: it's an artifact, an object. Because of our advanced brains, it is the nature of human beings to make sex objects — objects of worship. Turning a person into a beautiful thing does not automatically dehumanize her.
All you have to do is look at the long history of the gay male world, beginning in classical Athens. No gay man has ever said when gazing at a beautiful young man with a perfect body, “I am making him passive beneath my gaze.” That would be stupid beyond belief. Every gay man knows that youth and beauty are supreme principles that deserve our admiration and veneration. When we worship beauty, we are worshipping life itself.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/camille-paglia-hugh-hefners-legacy-trumps-masculinity-feminisms-sex-phobia-1044769

The pro-sex feminist, cultural critic and author tells THR why Hef's art of seduction is needed today and how Gloria Steinem is not a role model for young women.
With the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner on Sept. 27, cultural historian and contrarian feminist Camille Paglia spoke to The Hollywood Reporter in an exclusive interview on topics ranging from what Hef's choice of the bunny costume revealed about him to the current "dreary" state of relationships between the sexes.
Have you ever been to a party at the Playboy Mansion?
No, I'm not a partygoer! [laughs]
So let me just ask: Was Hugh Hefner a misogynist?
Absolutely not! The central theme of my wing of pro-sex feminism is that all celebrations of the sexual human body are positive. Second-wave feminism went off the rails when it was totally unable to deal with erotic imagery, which has been a central feature of the entire history of Western art ever since Greek nudes.
So let’s dig in a little — what would you say was Playboy’s cultural impact?
Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.
Hefner re-imagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and with the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.
Hefner’s new vision of American masculinity was part of his desperate revision of his own Puritan heritage. On his father's side, he descended directly from William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was governor of Plymouth Colony, the major settlement of New England Puritans.
But Hefner’s worldview was already dated by the explosion of the psychedelic 1960s. The anything-goes, free-love atmosphere — illustrated by all that hedonistic rolling around in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 — made the suave Hefner style seem old-fashioned and buttoned up. Nevertheless, I have always taken the position that the men's magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality. Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.
What could today's media learn from what Hef did at Playboy?
It must be remembered that Hefner was a gifted editor who knew how to produce a magazine that had great visual style and that was a riveting combination of pictorial with print design. Everything about Playboy as a visual object, whether you liked the magazine or not, was lively and often ravishing.
In the early 1990s, you said that Hugh Hefner "ushered in a revolution in American sexual consciousness. Some say that the women in Playboy come across as commodities, like a stereo, but I think Playboy is more an appreciation of pleasure of all kinds." What would you add to his legacy today, if anything?
I would hope that people could see the positives in the Playboy sexual landscape — the foregrounding of pleasure and fun and humor. Sex is not a tragedy, it's a comedy! [laughs]
What do you think about the fact that Trump's childhood hero and model of sophisticated American masculinity was Hefner?
Before the election, I kept pointing out that the mainstream media based in Manhattan, particularly The New York Times, was hopelessly off in the way it was simplistically viewing Trump as a classic troglodyte misogynist. I certainly saw in Trump the entire Playboy aesthetic, including the glitzy world of casinos and beauty pageants. It's a long passé world of confident male privilege that preceded the birth of second-wave feminism. There is no doubt that Trump strongly identified with it as he was growing up. It seems to be truly his worldview.
But it is categorically not a world of unwilling women. Nor is it driven by masculine abuse. It's a world of show girls, of flamboyant femaleness, a certain kind of strutting style that has its own intoxicating sexual allure — which most young people attending elite colleges today have had no contact with whatever.
I instantly recognized and understood it in Trump because I had always been an admirer of Hefner's sexual cosmos. I can certainly see how retrograde and nostalgic it is, but at the same time I maintain that even in the photos that The New York Times posted in trying to convict Trump of sexism, you can feel leaping from these pictures the intense sizzle of sexual polarization — in that long-ago time when men were men and women were women!
My 1960s generation was the gender-bending generation — we were all about blending the genders in fashion and attitude. But it has to be said that in terms of world history, the taste for and interest in androgyny is usually relatively brief. And it comes at late and decadent phases of culture! [laughs] World civilizations predictably return again and again to sexual polarization, where there is a tremendous electric charge between men and women.
The unhappy truth is that the more the sexes have blended, the less each sex is interested in the other. So we’re now in a period of sexual boredom and inertia, complaint and dissatisfaction, which is one of the main reasons young men have gone over to pornography. Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives, where the sexes are now routinely mixed in the workplace.
With the sexes so bored with each other, all that's left are these feminist witch-hunts. That's where the energy is! And meanwhile, men are shrinking. I see men turning away from women and simply being content with the world of fantasy because women have become too thin-skinned, resentful and high maintenance.
And American women don't know what they want any longer. In general, French women — the educated, middle-class French women, I mean — seem to have a feminine composure, a distinct sense of themselves as women, which I think women in America have gradually lost as they have won job equality in our high-pressure career system.
Trump has certainly steadily hired and promoted women in his businesses, but it has to be said that his vision of women as erotic beings remains rather retrograde. Part of his nationwide support seems to be coming from his bold defense of his own maleness. Many mainstream voters are gratified by his reassertion of male pride and confidence. Trump supporters may be quite right that, in this period of confusion and uncertainty, male identity needs to be reaffirmed and reconsolidated. (And I’m speaking here as a Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein!)
Ultimately every culture seems to return to sexual polarization because it may be in the best interest of human beings, whether we like it or not. Nature drives every species to procreate, although not necessarily when there's overpopulation!
Gloria Steinem has said that what Playboy doesn't know about women could fill a book. What do you think about that?
What Playboy doesn't know about well-educated, upper-middle-class women with bitter grievances against men could fill a book! I don't regard Gloria Steinem as an expert on any of the human appetites, sexuality being only one of them. Interviews with Steinem were documenting from the start how her refrigerator contained nothing but two bottles of carbonated water. Steinem's philosophy of life is extremely limited by her own childhood experiences. She came out of an admittedly unstable family background. I’m so tired of that animus of hers against men, which she’s been cranking out now for decade after decade. I come from a completely different Italian-American background — very food-centric and appetite-centric. Steinem, with that fulsomely genteel WASP persona of hers, represents an attitude of malice and vindictiveness toward men that has not proved to be in the best interest of young women today.
So would you say that her other comment — that women reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual — is just an expression of her animus toward men?
Oh Lord, how many times is Gloria Steinem going to play the Nazi card? What she said about me in the 1990s was: "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying he’s not anti-Semitic.” That’s the simplistic level of Steinem's thinking!
Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, all of those relentlessly ideological feminists are people who have wandered away from traditional religion and made a certain rabid type of feminist rhetoric their religion. And their fanaticism has poisoned the public image of feminism and driven ordinary, mainstream citizens away from feminism. It’s outrageous.
I hugely admired the early role that Steinem played in second-wave feminism because she was very good as a spokesperson in the 1970s. She had a very soothing manner that made it seem perfectly reasonable for people to adopt feminist principles. She normalized the image of feminism when there were a lot of crazy feminists running around (like Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol). That was Steinem’s great contribution, as far as I'm concerned. Also, I credit her for co-founding Ms. magazine and thereby contributing that very useful word, Ms., to the English language, which allows us to refer to a woman without signaling her marital status. I think that's a tremendous accomplishment.
But aside from that, Steinem is basically a socialite who always hid her early dependence on men in the social scene in New York. And as a Democrat, I also blame her for having turned feminism into a covert adjunct of the Democratic party. I have always felt that feminism should transcend party politics and be a big tent welcoming women of faith and of all views into it. Also, I hold against Steinem her utter, shameless hypocrisy during the Bill Clinton scandal. After promoting sexual harassment guidelines, which I had also supported since the 1980s, Steinem waved away one of the worst cases of sexual harassment violation that can ever be imagined — the gigantic gap of power between the President of the United States and an intern! All of a sudden, oh, no, it was all fine, it was “private.” What rubbish! That hypocrisy by partisan feminist leaders really destroyed feminism for a long time. So now feminism has rebounded, but unfortunately it's a particularly virulent brand of feminism that’s way too reminiscent of the MacKinnon-Dworkin sex hysteria of the 1980s.
Is there anything of lasting value in Hugh Hefner’s legacy?
We can see that what has completely vanished is what Hefner espoused and represented — the art of seduction, where a man, behaving in a courtly, polite and respectful manner, pursues a woman and gives her the time and the grace and the space to make a decision of consent or not. Hefner’s passing makes one remember an era when a man would ask a woman on a real date — inviting her to his apartment for some great music on a cutting-edge stereo system (Playboy was always talking about the best new electronics!) — and treating her to fine cocktails and a wonderful, relaxing time. Sex would emerge out of conversation and flirtation as a pleasurable mutual experience. So now when we look back at Hefner, we see a moment when there was a fleeting vision of a sophisticated sexuality that was integrated with all of our other aesthetic and sensory responses.
Instead, what we have today, after Playboy declined and finally disappeared off the cultural map, is the coarse, juvenile anarchy of college binge drinking, fraternity keg parties where undeveloped adolescent boys clumsily lunge toward naive girls who are barely dressed in tiny mini skirts and don't know what the hell they want from life. What possible romance or intrigue or sexual mystique could survive such a vulgar and debased environment as today's residential campus social life?
Do men need a kind of Hefner for today to give an example of how to interact with women in a sophisticated manner?
Yes. Women's sexual responses are notoriously slower than men's. Truly sophisticated seducers knew that women have to be courted and that women love an ambiance, setting a stage. Today, alas, too many young women feel they have to provide quick sex or they’ll lose social status. If a guy can't get sex from them, he'll get it from someone else. There’s a general bleak atmosphere of grudging compliance.
Today’s hook-up culture, which is the ultimate product of my generation’s sexual revolution, seems markedly disillusioning in how it has reduced sex to male needs, to the general male desire for wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am efficiency, with no commitment afterwards. We're in a period of great sexual confusion and rancor right now. The sexes are very wary of each other. There’s no pressure on men to marry because they can get sex very easily in other ways.
The sizzle of sex seems gone. What Hefner's death forces us to recognize is that there is very little glamour and certainly no mystery or intrigue left to sex for most young people. Which means young women do not know how to become women. And sex has become just another physical urge that can be satisfied like putting coins into a Coke machine.
This may be one reason for the ferocious pressure by so many current feminists to reinforce the Stalinist mechanisms, the pernicious PC rules that have invaded colleges everywhere. Feminists want supervision and surveillance of dating life on campus to punish men if something goes wrong and the girl doesn't like what happened. I am very concerned that what young women are saying through this strident feminist rhetoric is that they feel incapable of conducting independent sex lives. They require adult intrusion and supervision and penalizing of men who go astray. But if feminism means anything, it should be encouraging young women to take control of every aspect of their sex lives, including their own impulses, conflicts and disappointments. That's what's tragic about all this. Young women don't seem to realize that in demanding adult inquiry into and adjudication of their sex lives, they are forfeiting their own freedom and agency.
Young women are being taught that men have all the power and have used it throughout history to oppress women. Women don't seem to realize how much power they have to crush men! Strong women have always known how to control men. Oscar Wilde said women are complex and men are simple. Is it society or is it nature that is unjust? This was the big question that I proposed in Sexual Personae, where I argued that our biggest oppressor is actually nature, not society. I continue to feel that my pro-sex wing of feminism, which does not see sexual imagery or men in general as the enemy, has the best and healthiest message for young women.
There is a big push/pull happening in the entertainment industry about female voices and representation around directors in Hollywood. Surely there's nothing wrong with that, right, in your opinion?
All this constant complaining by women in Hollywood, I really don't understand it. I’m disturbed by women acting as if the world owes them opportunities, when there are so many hugely rich women stars in movies and music who should be using their millions to fund the creation of production companies precisely for the kind of hiring that they want. All those wealthy performers with their multiple houses — how about selling one of them? And let them do whatever feminist projects they want and see if they can sell it to the general public.
Look at the way you had George Lucas and Steven Spielberg coming together when they had nothing — they were just young men with a dream, with a vision, and they made an enormously successful series of films with global impact. Look at how many young male billionaires dropped out of college, and you got the Apple computer and Facebook.
I blame women for their own lack of imagination. There was a period when there were so many really unique and memorable films by women. Lisa Cholodenko's High Art is an example. That’s an amazing film. And what about Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts? A knock-out film with vivid characters and a wonderful sense of place. But I know how difficult it is to get the funding for films. It can be like a five-year process, and it saps people’s creative energies. And it's kind of a double whammy — when women are able to produce movies that bring in big bucks on the international stage, that’s when woman directors will get more chances. But women can certainly cut their teeth by making really important, low-budget films. I want to see them! Show us. Show us the quality of your mind and your work, okay? At a certain point, it’s counterproductive when you're claiming that someone else always has to open doors for you.
You have discussed the issue of imagery — what are your thoughts about the Playboy bunny costume?
Feminists of that period were irate about it — they felt that it reduced women to animals. It is true it’s animal imagery, but a bunny is a child's toy, for heaven's sake! I think you could criticize the bunny image that Hefner created by saying it makes a woman juvenile and infantilizes her. But the type of animal here is a kind of key to Hefner's sensibility because a bunny is utterly harmless. Multiplying like bunnies: Hefner was making a strange kind of joke about the entire procreative process. It seems to me like a defense formation — Hefner turning his Puritan guilts into humor. It suggests that, despite his bland smile, he may always have suffered from a deep anxiety about sex.
There are all kinds of complex currents in men’s relationship to women that feminism refuses to acknowledge. The main one is men’s often very unstable or ambivalent relationship with their mothers. That's what I see in Hefner's notorious lifestyle in the Playboy Mansion, where he stayed and worked in his bedroom all day long, dressed in pajamas and a robe. It's a blatant regression to the womb world exactly as Elvis Presley evidently desired. Elvis’s wife Priscilla complained that all he wanted to do was stay in his bedroom all day long in the dark, watching TV and having hamburgers brought in. There was a strange kind of craving there for maternal nurturance. I think feminism is wildly wrong when it portrays men as the oppressor, when in fact men, as I have argued in my books, are always struggling for identity against the enormous power of women.
Hefner created his own universe of sexuality, where there was nothing threatening. It’s a kind of childlike vision, sanitizing all the complexities and potential darkness of the sexual impulse. Everybody knows that Hefner’s sexual type was the girl next door, in other words, the corn-fed, bubbly American girl who stays at the borderline of womanhood but never crosses it.
The limitations in Hefner's erotic system can be seen when one compares Playboy to the other great magazine that it inspired, Penthouse: Its U.S. editor, Bob Guccione, was then married to a very stylish British woman, Kathy Keeton, who gave her particular cosmopolitan perspective to Penthouse. It projected an adult vision of sexuality in a highly sophisticated urban environment — people flirting in limousines, glamorous women who were as free and dominant as a man about town.
When we look back at Hefner's girl next door, we see that she's kind of like a high-school cheerleader or the ingenue in a postwar musical comedy like Oklahoma. Hefner was a Midwesterner who took a very long time to change his residence from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he was suddenly moving in the fastest currents of American culture.
Hefner’s women may have been uncomplex as personalities, but they were always warm and genuine. I never found them particularly erotic. I much preferred the Penthouse style of women, who were more femme fatales. Hefner’s bunnies were a major departure from female mythology, where women were often portrayed as animals of prey — tigresses and leopards. Woman as cozy, cuddly bunny is a perfectly legitimate modality of eroticism. Hefner was good-natured but rather abashed, diffident, and shy. So he recreated the image of women in palatable and manageable form. I don’t see anything misogynist in that. What I see is a frank acknowledgment of Hefner’s fear of women’s actual power.
For ideological feminists to go on and on about how we cannot have women treated as sex objects is so naive, so uncultured. It shows a total incomprehension of the history of art, which flows into the great Hollywood movies and sex symbols of the 20th century. The whole history of art is about objectification. That's what an art work is: it's an artifact, an object. Because of our advanced brains, it is the nature of human beings to make sex objects — objects of worship. Turning a person into a beautiful thing does not automatically dehumanize her.
All you have to do is look at the long history of the gay male world, beginning in classical Athens. No gay man has ever said when gazing at a beautiful young man with a perfect body, “I am making him passive beneath my gaze.” That would be stupid beyond belief. Every gay man knows that youth and beauty are supreme principles that deserve our admiration and veneration. When we worship beauty, we are worshipping life itself.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/camille-paglia-hugh-hefners-legacy-trumps-masculinity-feminisms-sex-phobia-1044769