Farewell to the pajama man

Hugh Hefner is dead. For years he—well, someone at his magazine—sent Playboy to my office. I’ve never officially subscribed, though from time to time I’d seek out a copy to read a specific story—an interview with Billy Bob Thornton, a jeremiad by Norman Mailer. Usually I left it on the corner of my desk, where it generally disappeared fairly quickly. That always struck me as both funny and sad.

It was funny because of the joke implicit in Playboy—it’s only limited-purpose naughty. It’s felt anachronistic for decades. It’s an image-conscious brand with more in common with Walt Disney Corp. than authentic smut peddlers.

And it was sad because the paradox of Playboy is that the magazine itself would never be an accouterment of the style of living it purports to celebrate. That is to say, the Playboy ideal—the man the Playboy reader aspires to be—would never read Playboy. Hefner didn’t need photographs, he could avail himself of the actual.

Gawking at Playboy is something the sophisticated gentlemen to whom Playboy pretends would never do. They wouldn’t have need of visual Viagra. And while you can make a case for the magazine as a showcase for quality writing—the articles often were excellent—it’s safe to assume most Playboy users didn’t buy it for that. With Hefner’s blessing, the editor went a year without any naked ladies in their book. Eventually they determined nudity was essential to the brand.

But if the naked pictures are essential, they aren’t really the reason Playboy exists. If all you wanted was naked pictures— if all you wanted was pornography—there are always more efficient delivery systems. Even 60 years ago there were less indirect ways to furnish a fantasy.

Like most magazines, Hugh Hefner’s rag is a wish book, a catalog of covetable images. In this sense it is no different than Town & Country or Architectural Digest; Playboy flatters its readers as it insinuates that they are the sort who take things like beautiful women and good Scotch for granted.

Ah ha—you’ve caught me—I just wrote the word sequence “things like beautiful women.” That’s the insidious evil of Playboy, isn’t it? While it might not traffic in the sadomasochistic or overtly championed neanderthal machismo—in fact, it implied a kind of bemused, enlightened masculinity that anticipated the rise of the metrosexual—it still reduces living, breathing, thinking human beings into so many lumps of comely, utilitarian meat.

And that’s not nice, though one might argue that the individual bodies being commodified are fairly well compensated adults with the capacity to enter into contracts. Playboy may reinforce the obnoxious male attitude that women are primarily vehicles for male gratification, but it’s difficult to argue that the individual who agrees to pose for money in its pages is being victimized.

Posing nude in the magazine may or may not be a good career move, but even in this censorious, puritanical society it doesn’t register as genuinely stigmatizing. Some people may think less of you, but some people will think less of you if you vote Democratic or attend the wrong flavor of church; no doubt many former Playmates list the “achievement” on their resumes. They worked hard to make their bodies look the way they look. Why shouldn’t they capitalize on their industry, why shouldn’t they profit from the fruit of their labor?

If one wanted to condemn Playboy, it might be better to posit the magazine as a kind of gateway drug that might lead to the harder, uglier stuff. Say it loud and long: Some Playboy perusers might eventually become enamored of more explicit, less pretty images available in other venues. (I have no idea if this is true, but it would make a good scare tactic.)

Or you might argue that Playboy is actually anti-sex in that it encourages unrealistic expectations. Few women look like airbrushed models, and “good sex” is rarely available without the expenditure of energy and the investment of emotion. While most adults know this, while it might be that this knowledge is crucial to the development of an adult worldview, Playboy seems to operate on the assumption that the majority of its readers do not.

I always enjoyed Hefner more than his magazine, though there was always some pathos in the character he portrayed. Watching him in old TV clips, he sometimes seems stiff and square—a pre-rock ’50s libertine. But he was an amiable caricature who often was on the right side of issues. His lifestyle, as he sold it, bore no animus toward gays or lesbians. His was an equal opportunity pleasure dome.

About the worst to be said about Hefner’s magazine is that like network sitcoms and the patent homilies of smug and certain social commentators it tends to contribute to the general lack of seriousness in American life. We’re at the point where it’s almost impossible to talk about important things, about first principles or the duty the individual owes society without being shouted down by the snarky and the facile. Playboy fills a market niche, and it doesn’t hurt anyone that badly, but it contributes to our national mania for the cheap and sensational.

And while we need the cheap and sensational, while the cheap and sensational can be a whole lot of fun, Playboy masquerades as a magazine that champions a viable perspective. It holds itself out as a bible of masculine, heterosexual deportment. It affects to convey a patina of status to its readers—those hanging automotive air fresheners cut in the shape of the trademarked rabbit head are supposed to mark the bearer as a man of wealth and taste.

Which makes it a remarkable piece of Americana. There’s no question Hefner was a great capitalist. So, by extension, some would argue that he was a great American.