I don’t think I paid Robert Evans very much mind until a ~*lover*~ of mine dropped his name with . Not long after, I ended up coming across a stack of old Playboys from the 70′s at a garage sale. I struck honey gold. was delivered to me like I was Mohamed on the Mount—it read, Women’s Lib and Me—Carroll O’Connor, Johnny Bench, Peter Frampton, Howard Cosell, Evel Kinevil, and Others.
It was a survey of famous men in the mainstream media, and their thoughts on “women’s lib.” It was written in 1978, and it was, frankly, shocking; the undercurrent seething below nearly every quote was glib and dehumanizing in a way that other less candid publications and media had never afforded me a look at. I had never before in my entire life been so grateful to all the women who came before me, not fully having realized that the kitchen was not just a hyperbolic metaphore, but a literal prison. “A woman’s place,” I had yet to appreciate, wasn’t just implied and subtly codified, but explicitly endorsed. And not even delivered with the cushion of a laugh, rather just this sort of biblical absolution that made you feel like feminism was being condemned like some . Which it was.
That incredible article is for another time, but fascinatingly enough, Robert Evans was one of the very, very few (of very many) who did not devalue and dismiss “women’s lib,” or any women seeking to understand or exercise their own power. In fact, he said, he desired it. That struck me as funny; his legacy painted him to be, as my friend put it, a master “cocksmyth,” or to put it less kindly, a womanizer. But what was clear, reading his words against those from the panicked, crumbling masculine egos in opposition, was that his sense of manhood and self had nothing to do with the subjugation of the feminine. What he wanted was a partner to compliment his presence, not cower in fear of it. Or at least that’s what he claimed, which is about as far as I ever care to go reading celebrity brains. Besides, man, when you can make a girl blush thirty years later, universes apart, with just a single paragraph hidden inside a musty skin rag from some creep’s garage…well, that’s .
I could go on (and on), but instead, I will leave you with an obsessive photographic slideshow dedicated to the man, the myth, the celebrated cocksmyth, Robert Evans:
