ABSTRACT

Playboy was therefore very self-consciously a lifestyle magazine that did not address an audience of mass consumers, but consumers who yearned for distinction. The Playboy consumer sought to make lifestyle a life projection and display their individuality and sense of style of the assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions that they mobilized, and he was fully conscious that he speaks not only with his clothes, but with his home, furnishings, decoration, car and other activities. Playboy's belief in the liberating powers of lifestyle consumption is probably best summed up by Hefner himself that he think it was the right idea in the right place at the right time. Life service politics would be wrong to dismiss Playboy as simply an anti-Communist cold war publication. Playboy was not anti-women but anti-wives, a position that prefigured many of the central tenets of Friedan's feminist classic, The Feminine Mystique.