Listen, you can look down on me all you want. But I say, if you were in the same situation, YOU would have grabbed that Playboy out of the Burger King garbage can, same as I did.

Not this one…but that’s the general idea.

Maybe it was the long buried reflex all bad children cultivate, that when they see something they’re not allowed to have they snatch it like squirrels. I am allowed Playboys now, but that reflex runs deep. I grab extra Oreos when people aren’t looking, too.

But mostly it was the chance to enter a world I am cut off from, to figure out the minds and read about the values that I don’t respect. To know more about people I don’t understand. The people who want to put Playboy in their hearts and homes.

And, it was just lying there, in the mouth of the (reasonable clean) Burger King drive-thru garbage can. Free Playboy! In perfect condition, from 1999. Yoink! Free stuff!

Artist Jason Salavon overlaid every Playboy centerfold for each decade, all at once. Left to right, 60’s-90’s

I had forgotten that the fake round tits and peroxide hair and obvious plastic surgery to look as generic as possible didn’t really hit till the 2000’s. That 1999 Playboy’s models had a vague sense of the human form still clinging to their heavily  airbrushed bodies. And, since the only porn I’ve seen in the last ten years has been the occasional mis-step into the squalid quagmire of online porn sites…(the depressing, shot on a handheld camera in a rented penthouse staring bored sad women enduring closeups that allow you to see mons pubis pimpled with razor burn) it was quite debonair by comparison. The pictures, anyway. The text was macho shite.

It  confirms it. I still goddamn hate Playboy. I hate Hugh Hefner’s smug lechery. I hate the (pardon the cliche) objectification. Fueling the dream that a woman will be your sex torso (I also stumbled on one of THOSE the other day…online. Not literally. Though I would have taken that home, too. After getting some gloves.) with no accompanying personality to irritate you. I hate the stupid jokes, the asshole machismo.

Real Doll makes sex dolls with a devotion to science and design that used to be reserved for medical innovations.

And I hate that I forgot to take it out of the car before I strapped my kids in for the carpool commute to day camp. I got in the car just to see my six year old daughter admiring the cover of the magazine.

“GIVE THAT TO ME! GIVE THAT TO ME! NOW! RIGHT NOW! NOW NOW NOW!!!!”

She was surprised that I’d be so passionate that she not look at a picture of a lady in a bikini. But I got it out of her hands before she opened it and was confronted by the innocence stealing, sticky skankdom within. I don’t care HOW many real naked ladies she sees in the changing room at swim class or on my Pinterest art boards. More the better, in fact. Behold child,  the jiggled disproportion that is your legacy and the true beauty of womanhood!

I’m even ok with her slight obsession with the underwear models in my Lane Bryant fliers, which she alternately forbids her father to look at or presents to him as a gift. “Dad likes sexy too much!”

Your probably not gonna look like this, either, hon. But still a better role model than I ever had.

But that world, the Playboy man’s fantasy world is too uneven. Uneven enough to make you motion sick. It does not balance sex with heart, with brain, with reality or gentleness, or even with “women are people.” It’s sex torsos, all the way down. That I will try and shield her from, or at least mitigate, until she’s old enough to raise a skeptical eyebrow to it all by herself.