playboy of the western world

Slate's article, "Don't Mind the Gap" tries to excuse the involuntary and instinctual weirdness that most people feel when hearing that Hugh Hefner is engaged yet again to a twenty-something girl. The article lists a handful of celebrity May-December romances as evidence that this proposal is not that strange. Interestingly no older lady/younger dude examples were given. The article may be more sexist than Hef. Good try, but a few examples don't exactly sell the lame point that is trying to be made. Most of the reader comments focused on the ick factor of young gal/old man sex, or that fact that she will have to be his caregiver in just a few years. Not to worry, sweet young thing, not with his bankroll. If the marriage even goes beyond the engagement stage, there will be household help.

What I can't help thinking, scrolling through the list of High's endless nubile blondes of the past few decades (like a new car enthusiast, he tends to trade in fairly regularly), is that Hugh (still) only hangs out with girls. I know he's Hugh Hefner and Playboy was founded on the appreciation and pursuit of tail, but has this guy ever met and liked a woman? Someone who has lived, had experiences (other than the kind to be had at the Playboy mansion), had thoughts?

I'm not trying to say that the bride-to-be or any of her predecessors are stupid. They had to be pretty darn smart to fight their way through the swelling ranks of ready and willing babes in the land of Hef and come out on top, so to speak. They are street-smart, certainly. But I doubt that they have been touched too much by the world of ideas. That's probably all Hugh and many want in a girl anyway. At first. Which is why these relationships all seem to have an expiration date. As these girls grow up into women and start to have ideas of their own on how they want to live their lives they are simultaneously writing their mansion exit visas.

For someone who has lived so long on this planet, has based his life and career on the lives of women, it puzzles me that it is still just one kind of woman—girls. Variety isn't solely based on hair color, Hugh.

Still shallow, but happy, after all these years ...

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