I don’t think it is particularly harmful, nor do I think it is a big deal. I mean you can ( and many have ) make a cogent argument that it perpetuates harmful stereotypes about the perfect woman’s body. But at the end of the day I truly don’t think a Playboy is worth getting up in arms about.
But that is a separate question from whether or not it is pornography. Like I said in my first post my first impulse was to say, no, it wasn’t. No penetration, no porn ( not quite, but you get what I mean ). But on second thought I changed my mind. Because Playboy has always been explicitly about selling sex. Many other things as well, including a certain idealized, intellectual, well-heeled gentleman’s lifestyle. But at the end of the day it was still at base about sexual titillation. Whether you call it erotica or pornography ( and I don’t really draw that distinction myself ), it is less about the purity of beauty than it is about getting the juices flowing. It is about as bland and uncontroversial as porn gets, but I still would categorize it as cheesecake/softcore porn.
It isn’t the nudity, it is the intent of the nudity. A lot of actual nude art photography play with notions of the erotic as well, but it is usually trying to engage multiple levels of interest at once. Playboy shoots are mostly after just one ;).
But that doesn’t mean I think Playboy is bad, anymore than I think porn is bad. It isn’t ( to me ) - it just is what it is.
Nobody here said that it was bad, or that kids would be permanently warped by looking at a Playboy. They simply said yes, it’s soft-core porn. That’s it. It’s meant to be arrousing.
Pornography =! bad. It just means it’s meant to be sexual. Tame, but sexual. Like those lame movies they used to show on Cinemax late at night. (Or maybe they still do, I don’t know)
(My uncle used to subscribe to either Playboy or Penthouse when I was a kid. My cousins and I found them and started giggling. “Heheheh – check it out – naked people!!!” We thought it was funny. Of course, when you’re seven, anything relating to nudity is funny)
Back in Texas, I knew someone who kept not one, but two (2) different volumes of a, um, literary journal titled Girls Who Like to Suck Big Cocks on his coffee table. Now, that was porn.
I’m a man, and no it’s not porn…why you ask, the ‘pornographic’ pictures in the magazine are so mild and the girls so airbrushed and fake, it’s not stimulating on any level, whatsoever. Plus, there’s plenty of free (and virus free) porn on the internet, if you know where to look (like I do :D), and it’s much more intense, dirty, nasty, and gritty. Guys that read the Playboy are really wanting to read a magazine, that just so happens to have nude women in it, or at least nowdays they are, 20-25 years ago, yeah, it was still porn back then.
I’m in the camp of “it’s the softest, most bland and non-offensive pablum porn possible”.
In fact, Playboy is usually a good dividing line. It is, perpetually, exactly one nanometer on the ‘porn’ side of the divider between ‘porn’ and ‘not porn’.
People,nobody seems to have mentioned the Supreme Court ruling (decades ago) that specifically said, “Playboy is NOT pornography”.
That’s why that publication can legally be sent through snailmail.
And I tend to think the same thing about the Internet (especially since other sex sites tend to usually contain “viruses”. PLAYBOY corporation would never allow that…PLAYBOY is “socially redeeming”.)
If that’s the definition you’re gonna use, then most advertising, the SI swimsuit issue and countless other things that most of society considers fairly mundane and -par-for-the-course are also porn.
No, it’s not really porn. I had a subscription for about a year – in fact this woman-thing-wife-type entity got it for me. Great fucking interview every month. Basketball-sized tits and no penetration can either make it or break it. Yeah, sure, I’ve been strokin’ to some of them (cue Dr. Lonnie Smith’s tune), but not that big a deal.
All that stupid crap about prosumer audio and shit is retarded, but what do you expect? It’s a mass-market magazine.
I don’t get the hate – the interviews and ocasionally articles are OK. And, it’s a bonus if there’s some fur and early morning dew. Nothing wrong with that,
It’s been a while since I saw a Playboy magazine. Doesn’t it have, uh, gynaecological detail? All those magazines kind of blur into one for me, as I don’t think my cousin segregated his stash by title!
No, we don’t. The purpose of most advertisements is, guess what? To sell a product. The purpose of Playboy, as they flat out admit, is to titillate.
And of course the SI swimsuit issue is porn. That’s specifically why it was made. And that’s specifically why people look askance at you looking at it in public.
Look, I have a foot fetish. You want to know one of the biggest rules on any foot fetish website? No underage girls. It’s just feet, not anything remotely involving having sex with them, but it’s banned. And if you ask the owners why, they will report that they could get in trouble for child pornography, since they promote their pictures as wank material.
If porn were just about showing sex, then nudity wouldn’t constantly be assumed to be child porn.
Didn’t think to mention it earlier, but at my undergrad university in Texas, I worked as a student assistant in the library. We had every Playboy back to the beginning, full years bound in hardcover like we regularly did with periodicals. But they were all stored in the Rare Book Room, to prevent theft. You had to leave an ID to check anything out of that room, and only a staff member was allowed in. We’d go in and get whatever a patron ordered. But it seems all the naughty pictures had been scissored out of the earlier issues by an old-prude Texas librarian.
And very well done at that, mostly because it’s part of an overall compendium of arts, sports, leisure, politics, and humor, with the sexy pictures, jokes, and cartoons occupying less than 50% of the total, and with the rest of the stuff of high quality. That, and the hidden bunny on the cover.
There actually was a philosophy buried at the bottom of all that verbiage, and they’ve stuck to it. All of this is why, despite all the free internet porn, the magazine is still around. It’s got a loyal core of readers and an identifiable brand. Its competitors (those still around_) have much more hardcore without pretensions of style
