DONE & GONE
HOW THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF PLAYBOY EVAPORATED WITH ITS CONCEPTION OF SOPHISTICATION
Everyone who lays down the sword says they’re doing it out of victory, but in at least some respects Playboy chief executive Scott Flanders is right when he explains the decision to remove nudes from the magazine. He claims it’s being done because one of the organization’s founding goals has been achieved.
Though there’s some bluster in Flanders’ pronouncement that “you’re now just one click away from every sex act imaginable for free." That’s been true for at least a decade, although Playboy hasn’t been what you’d call an early adopter.
Nonetheless, no one would argue that sex is profoundly more ubiquitous now than it was at the magazine’s founding in 1953. We are not just more interested in looking but, more crucially, far more willing to talk about these things than likely ever seemed possible back then.
Nothing about Playboy — as close to the smiling public face of mainstream heterosexual masculinity as the latter half of the 20th century produced — and its legacy is ever really quite that simple, though. Partly that’s because, for all our openness, very little about sex ever is, and partly because the company itself has had what you might charitably call a conflicted — or, less charitably, blinkered, or hypocritical, or, fairly, just gloriously messy — relationship towards openness from its founding.
In his first editor’s letter, Hugh Hefner described the magazine as one meant for men “18 and 80” — I’d wager a guess the now 89-year-old would now revise that upwards — going on to describe the Playboy man as one who enjoys “mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex … .”
Much as that now sounds like the intro to an online dating profile that spends the next 34 paragraphs complaining about how women never go for nice guys, there was something legitimately revolutionary about it at the time, tying as it did the preoccupations of the sophisticated, moneyed male to the idea that sex is as central to that life as a well-stocked bar and bookshelf.
No less an aspirational pitch than any other lifestyle magazine, Playboy did make good on its more urbane promises for a good long while, both inside and outside the magazine: that hoary old cliché about only picking it up for the articles — which essentially means nothing in an era when Playboy is more cliché brand than actually read — made a degree of sense when they were running serialized novels from people like Ray Bradbury and Ian Fleming and short stories by Nabokov and Bellow, doing conversant interviews with philosophers, economists and historians and running glossy ads for the latest in hifi stereos, the ’60s equivalent of iPhones.
Its worldliness didn’t end at literature and consumer goods, either: it was a reliable and relatively unselfcongratulatory promoter of civil rights, giving magazine space to things like Alex Haley interviewing Martin Luther King Jr. and freely integrating its clubs while other institutions waited until the national guard had to be called. There’s a case to be made that Playboy in its early heyday was PBS with tits.
At the same time, though, its conception of the sophisticated world never really made it out of the ’50s. It has essentially always dismissed anyone who had a problem with it as joyless prudes, which made eminent sense during the initial buttoned-up, religious-driven backlash, but got a lot fuzzier as the realm of who actually got to be urbane and educated has grown. The harsh criticisms of someone like Andrea Dworkin likely seem antiquated to a generation of feminists that have largely reclaimed porn, but the more straight-ahead blast of a Gloria Steinem are basically dead-on: women were not (arguably still aren’t) given much more agency than the hifi phonographs that also existed purely for an urbane man’s enjoyment, and the latter were treated more carefully.
For an organization that flew the flag of proud sexuality as high as anyone, it sure shut right up on anything to do with gay rights for a good long while. And its response to competition, first from magazines who were less high-minded about showing naked ladies and then from the parade of videos, DVDs and streaming videos, has essentially been to bleed away its pretensions and embrace the commodification of both its brand and its, ahem, brand ambassadors. Your mileage on the idea of even early Playboy as “tasteful” may vary, but it’s certainly a much harder case to make post-’70s than pre.
This week’s announcement may change a degree of that, although leaving people to click away to vastly more hardcore videos feels like a certain kind of loss for the magazine’s original conception. Even allowing for Playboy’s more troglodytic tendencies — and even if you think all this talk of art and jazz and cocktails was flimsy cover — it certainly tried for a long while to intertwine frank consideration of sex with the idea of the good life, something you’d be hard-pressed to say about many of the similarly mainstream pornographic options that have followed in its footsteps.
Perhaps it’s just that, once sex got in the door, it wasn’t ever going to stay in the corner — and maybe it’s naive to think anyone ever was reading much of Playboy’s articles — but there does seem something almost romantic in the idea that a mass market publication thought people, however narrowly it defined that term, could handle interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre and sexy images all at the same time.