Hilarious and chillingly apposite ‘lost in showbiz’ article up on the Guardian today, read the whole thing and weep/laugh:

At the Playboy annual ball he just looked morose and detached. Reports say he didn’t interact much with the playmates, but perhaps Hef’s willingness to suspend disbelief that these women give a crap about what he’s saying and aren’t just thinking, “Please make me more famous and not homeless with the minimum amount of touching” is fading with age.

Personally, I have always wondered how Hef appeases himself inwardly with the unspoken deal women make when they become part of his retinue. Now, I’m assuming here that Hef has sex or intimate contact with these young playmates as this is the exact assumption that Hef’s whole persona – sat there, aged 85, in his pyjamas at a party – wants me to buy into. But for the past 25 years there must have been, on the playmates’ side, a weapons-grade amount of putting up, shutting up and thinking of the dollars. Surely Hef has sensed young women blanching and seeming bilious as he sidles up. Surely he knows this is all a bit icky. When I’m 85, I hope I’m not idiotic enough to take a flurry of 20-year-old male companions, let them live on my bank balance and then fool myself that these boys don’t joke behind my back that my nipples face east and west and my pubic hair, or what’s left of it, has a mallen-streak.

Or perhaps I’m wrong and Hugh Hefner truly is delusional. Let’s face it, Playboy’s business plan relies heavily on men and women’s capacity for glorious denial. Last year, Hef opened a Playboy club in London and people flocked there to pay homage, keen to tell each other it’s ever-so-classy, and the women if anything are emancipating themselves. And Cee Lo Green and Snoop Dogg and Tim Lovejoy and Simon Rimmer and Nick Knowles showed up and Playboy was all normalised and lovely and if anything, some people said, this was feminism.