The new London Playboy Club opens today and Hugh Hefner has actually got dressed and flown to the UK for the event. On Thursday he recreated a famous picture from the past as he posed with some of the new London Bunnies on the tarmac of Stanstead airport.
The press over here reported that the picture was a re-creation of a famous one for when he flew to London for the opening of the original club in 1966. In fact this shot was taken in Jamaica for the opening of the Ocho Rios club on January 1st 1965 but the effect is still striking. Agent Triple P is not sure about the new opaque black tights the new Bunnies are wearing but I am sure the young ladies themselves find them more flattering.
Membership of the new club costs £1200 a year plus a £1000 joining fee and nearly a thousand members have signed up, a third of whom are women. Today, however, feminists plan to demonstrate outside the club in a rather sixties style protest. These women don't seem to have realised that many women today, from a generation that takes its freedoms and equalities for granted because of, admittedly, the work of protestors in the past, feel that one of those freedoms is to be able to openly flaunt their sexuality in a way that was previously only acceptable to men. Playboy had a lot to do with this (although not quite as much as they tend to claim) in that it promoted the fact that women weren't just unwilling particpants in sex but did actually enjoy it themselves. Agent Triple P can, himself, remember discovering with delight that, much to his surprise, the women he met at university at the end of the seventies had not been programmed, as he had been led to believe, to resist men because they only wanted one thing. In fact for many of them that "one thing" was exactly what they were after.
Today's protestors seem to have missed the fact that whilst women, rightly, want equal treatment at work and by society generally they also want to be able to wear sexy lingerie, strip off on beaches and wear very revealing clothes (it's 24 degrees today and some of the outfits we have just seen on Walton on Thames high street beggar belief); in short be women but with the same rights as men. The feminist groups objecting to the Playboy club today are arguing that Playboy as an institution legitimises pornography. Do they not realise that most of the young women Agent Triple P knows enjoy pornography and do not think it is a bad thing at all as they are comfortable about their sexuality. That is the real sexual revolution of the last decade or so, one these women seem to have missed.