Is Marc Bell a Playboy: In Defense of American Institutions
I address this letter in general to the American public, more specifically to the stock holders of Playboy, and especially to Marc Bell, CEO of FriendFinder.
In December of 1953, an American icon was born with the first publication of Playboy by Hugh Hefner and co-founder Eldon Sellers. And America would never be the same again. Since that first publication, America has watched the genre go from an upscale gentleman’s magazine, to the leading share of the media world that we live in today. It has decided large changes in the way we share images and information from the internet to VHS, to DVDs and eventually replacing them with Blu-ray. But among the plunging standards in the medium that desensitizing has caused, Playboy has always stood above the rest, never wavering from their softer images and their non-graphic displays of the female form and sexuality that looks more like the work of a Renaissance master when compared to contemporary companies like BangBros., Hustler, and yes, Penthouse.
Comparing Playboy and Penthouse, is a bit like comparing the wit of Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin to the comments found on YouTube and MySpace. While Playboy may have strayed slightly from the path once laid out in its articles with pieces by such as Shel Silverstein, John Updike, Michael Crichton, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladmir Nabokov, and interviews of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X (interviewed by the later co-author of his autobiography, Alex Haley), and a little man from Plains, Georgia named Jimmy Carter! Not to mention countless rock stars and celebrities like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I mean, for God’s sake, Fahrenheit 451 was originally published in the pages of Playboy in the spring of 1954. In the meantime, Penthouse’s one claim to literary fame is convincing millions of lonely lecherous men that the letters they publish are real.
But beyond the simple differences of style, there is something more here. Something that leaves an uneasy feeling in the bottom of your stomach. Playboy isn’t simply another corporate brand, a Global Media Marketing Inc., to be bought and sold like a cheap whore. It is an American institution, and for too long now we have let corporate giants take our cherished institutions and squash them, to rob them of their souls. To be ripped out from under the people who built them, that worked for them, who lived for them, and to trade them away cheaply, to turn them into a mockery of what they once were, not just as products, but as institutions.
This is less a matter of corporate mergers and more a matter of personal honor. You waited until the announcement that Mr. Hefner wanted to take his company private, and then you swoop in to try and claim that brand which he created, loved, and nourished for more than half a century out from under his nose. For God’s sake man, his own mother was one of his original investors, do you mean to steal what the man’s mother helped him create? This has less similarity to a Time-Warner merging, and more in common with Michael Jackson buying the rights to The Beatles’ songs from out from under his one time friend Paul McCartney. Do you really wish to be remembered as the Michael Jackson of the business world? I’m not saying that you have sex with little boys, Mr. Bell, but I have little evidence that you don’t.
To the stock holders, I beg you to consider the repercussions of your actions. We live in a world today that is slowly drifting farther and farther towards a bland, tasteless, faceless future. Hugh Hefner is of a dying breed. Let him die in peace, with the company he created, not a shattered, broken, forgotten old man. At what point do we stop the imperialistic conglomeration of all companies, all people, beneath one giant corporate banner? Must all American business, all successful American business eventually go the way of Anheuser-Bush, a foreign front, feigning Patriotism from far away Corporate headquarters while stripping the American worker of their jobs, their retirement packages, even going so far as to cut their support and sponsorship of the American Olympic Team? Is this the world you plan to leave for your children? For your children’s children? An America where anything you make is stripped out from under you by anyone sufficiently spineless enough too slime their way beneath the moral code that upholds the American Dream that so many men have given their lives to create and defend?
Mr. Bell, I pray that this letter finds you in time to prevent your plans for Playboy. Or, may God have mercy on your soul.
The Editor