‘Playboy’ learns sex sells; let’s hope sanity does, too
If you’re like me, the hours since Election Day have felt like America has taken one long break from reality. Watching Democrats transmogrify into red-baiting cold warriors while the Grand Old Party relaunches as a boy band dedicated to KGB-inspired love ballads leaves me wondering what happened to my country.
Now there’s a big sign that sanity is on the upswing. And it is not the resignation of retired Army lieutenant general Michael Flynn as national security adviser. Think bigger. “‘Playboy’ brings nudity back to magazine,” USA TODAY reported Monday.
You might reasonably ask what March Playmate Elizabeth Elam and plus-size breasts could possibly have to do with Donald Trump and his fact-free presidency. The answer is simple: Culture is far more powerful than mere politics.
Four months before New Hampshire primary voters handed Trump his first primary victory a year go, signaling that something was afoot in American politics, Playboy Enterprises announced that boob-ogling would play a much smaller role in its “lifestyle” brand. The move was so big that it took Playboy from its October 2015 announcement to its March 2016 issue to go from an erudite Penthouse to Vogue for
Boys. That’s about the same amount of time it took Trump to rack up all his primary wins.
Playboy’s cultural psychotic break was the real sign that Trump would become president. For Playboy, it was a disaster. Or as Cooper Hefner charitably put it, ditching naked girls “was a bad idea, the whole thing.”
Anyway, in America, some things are just true. As long as a single drop of testosterone remains, “sex sells” is one of them. Eventually, even in Playboy’s fantasy world, facts matter.
If there is a political corollary to “sex sells,” it is “sanity sells.” Look back at the 44 presidents before Trump and you can find some mistakes, but voters always go back to picking the sane one.
In the long run, it is obvious that nobody wants to buy a Play
boy without the artful soft-focus crotch shots. It is equally true that nobody wants to go to bed every night worried the president might simultaneously declare war on Mexico, China and France in a 2 a.m. tweet.
If our reality TV president is smart, he’ll see Flynn’s resignation as a chance for a mid-season plot correction. If not, there’s plenty of reason for hope that both The Donald and Trumpism will go the way of the excessively clothed Playboy. In the long run, facts matter. Sex and sanity sell.
I can read President Pence’s tweet now: “Trump was a bad idea, the whole thing. Sad!”