On a scale from one to offensive, Playboy Magazine was Sweden: pretty, airbrushed, earnest, essentially vanilla, ultimately tame, though darkness could lurk underneath. Case in point: Steig Larsson novels.
Of course Playboy was exploitative. Of course it peddled smut, albeit more of the soft-porn variety. It has made impressive strides to attain respectability and class, enlisting for instance, some of the world’s biggest movies stars and models—Cher, Madonna, and Kate Moss among them—to disrobe tastefully, if provocatively, on its pages.
It has also attempted to portray itself as a purveyor of serious substance, commissioning prize-winning authors and literary lions—the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Sam Lipstye, and Joseph Heller, to name a few—to pen articles and short stories, or publishing interviews with controversial political figures, such as former president Jimmy Carter’s conscience-stricken confession to having committed adultery several times in his heart.
Thus, one could say, whether male or female, that they read Playboy “for the articles,” and that pneumatically enhanced women with names like Cherie-Lyn and Amber Jane depicted bare-breasted (alone or together) simulating—tastefully, not explicitly—various sexual acts, their pubic hairline thickening or disappearing altogether depending on the waxing trends du jour were merely incidental to the literary fare waiting to be digested.
The intellectual trumped the carnal, they convinced themselves. Meanwhile, Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s dark force, the very epitome of lizard-like and louche, in all his silk-robed creepy sleaziness, held court over this empire—his seat of power the Playboy Mansion, like a Disney-esque playground with naked women, some bunnies, some Playmates. The fact that his daughter, Christine Hefner, at one point ran the business, was like a huge fuck-you to feminists, as if to say, Playboy couldn’t be THAT offensive to women everywhere even as it completely objectified them and pandered almost exclusively to male sexual fantasies, if a woman was actually the publisher.
Well, it seems that those images will soon be a thing of the past, as Playboy announced recently that as of March 2016, it would stop publishing nudes in its pages.
According to a statement released by the company: “The reimagined Playboy magazine will include a completely modern editorial and design approach, and, for the first time in its history, will no longer feature nudity in its pages. Playboy will continue to publish sexy, seductive pictorials of the world’s most beautiful women, including some of its iconic Playmates, all shot by some of today’s most iconic photographers. The magazine will also remain committed to its award-winning mix of long-form journalism, interviews and fiction.”
Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders conceded, “the political and sexual climate of 1953, the year Hugh Hefner introduced Playboy to the world, bears almost no resemblance to today.”
Online, Playboy.com went suitable for work in 2014, banishing nudes from office screens around the world.
In other words, just as video killed the radio star, the Internet killed Playboy.
In an era in which a click of a mouse could take you to a world rated XXX in seconds and a menu offering every conceivable kink and fetish available for instant viewing and downloading, not to mention live chats with “real life sluts hungry for your cock,” Playboy, despite decades of indulging the fantasies of boys and men everywhere, had all this time been playing it safe by choosing the “artistic” over the explicit route. Other magazines had gone, well, breast-to-breast against Playboy before, choosing to be raunchier and more hardcore than the pioneering men’s publication, but they didn’t last as long (see: Penthouse).
But while Viagra keeps Hugh Hefner’s erection from going soft, it remains to be seen whether any dose of financial or editorial Viagra can keep Playboy from folding. I imagine it makes many men nostalgic for the good old days when sneaking a peek into the pages of Playboy, the copy they or their fathers brought back from trips abroad and kept hidden at the bottom drawer of the bedside table or in a locked cabinet, was the most illicit (yet in a quaint way, innocent) pleasure. How many boys and men have jerked off to the sight of the Playmate of the Month’s creamy breasts or exposed pussy lips, imagining themselves with her, in her? Carnal, yes. Cheesy, sure. But crass? That was debatable.
Yet crassness—the cruder, the rougher, it seems, the more hits—appears to be the defining feature of Internet porn these days. Even the most cursory glance at youporn.com or pornhub.com reveals a disturbing montage of images as teasers for the videos waiting to be watched, each one more degrading than the other. Even the titles are off-putting: “Buy me dinner, I give you sex!” or “Cheerleader takes it in the backdoor” or “Devil’s Gang Bang compilation” or “Burning Angel Wet Goth Chicks Orgy Time!”
As come-ons, they couldn’t be any more crass. Yet porn sites proliferate, and many a man—and no doubt woman—has turned to a diet of non-stop Internet porn to sate their libidos, for better or worse. Usually worse. (See Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Don Jon.)
In the dark days of dial-up, my five-year-old daughter once asked me to load pollypocket.com on the family computer for her. I duly typed in the website name and went back into the kitchen, not realizing that I had missed one, just ONE, crucial letter. A minute later, I heard her wail “Moooooooooooom!” and rushed back into the study in time to see three giant red X’s pulsing on a black screen. Every time we attempted to close the window, another one would pop up. Finally, there was no other recourse but to shut down the computer.
I think the poor child was rather traumatized and dumped Polly Pocket for Bratz.
B. Wiser is the author of Making Love in Spanish, a novel published earlier this year by Anvil Publishing and available in National Book Store and Powerbooks, as well as online. When not assuming her Sasha Fierce alter-ego, she takes on the role of serious journalist and media consultant.
For comments and questions, e-mail b.wiser.ph@gmail.com.
Art by Dorothy Guya