Playboy was one of those institutions that was a huge deal when it served a need that few or no other outlets did, but then way overstayed its welcome. I’ve grumbled about how the fricking jokes never, never, never, ever change (to the point where simply discussing the contents of the magazine has become absolutely impossible), and now I believe that this, in a sense, encapsulates why this venerable company could never adapt to the times…it wasn’t meant to. Seriously, go rewatch some of the videos or movies sometime and pay attention to the imagery, the style. Manual typewriters. Vintage muscle cars. Country houses. Gothic style mansions. Picket fences. Handwritten letters. Analog everything. Maybe it was a rigidly enforced policy, maybe it was a tradition that nobody dared defy, but there was a big push to keep things old-fashioned, classic, “timeless”, and that’s never going to be a formula for success in the age of smartphones and woke feminism and YouTube.
I’ll probably miss the videos more than anything else. Yeah, yeah, the 90’s and early 00’s had tons of porn, but if you wanted skin…not gangbangs, not anal, not “cherry popping”, and, most importantly, no disgusting semen spraying all over the goddam place, just beautiful women with no clothes on…Playboy was the way to go. There were other “softcore” companies (man, does the Internet ever use that word?) at the time, but none with the scope or variety of Playboy. If you were to ask me where the best places on the internet were for female casual nudity, I wouldn’t have any idea how to answer.
Remember when Playboy got a network TV show trying to cash-on the success of Mad Men but their period 60s drama only got headlines due to some local TV stations also having 60s values and refusing to air “pornographic content” despite being tamer than an episode of Survivor?
That’s a really good question. I think the difference is, someone needs to poke the religious restrictions from time to time to see if they still serve a valid purpose. Does God seriously want us to eat fish on Friday? Or lock the liquor section of the store on Sunday? Or keep our daughters virgins until their wedding night? I don’t want to make Playboy out to be more important than it was, but it sure did facilitate some awkward conversations that needed to be made.
Playboy served as a consultant (in a fairly minor role) but it was really a 20th Century Fox show trying to cash in on Mad Men. Much like the short lived Pam-Am show.
Thank-you. I’m perplexed as to how that’s not so incredibly off-putting - more so than any basic hardcore. (shrug)
I’ll wager that you were whooshed. At least I’ll pray JAQ was sarcastic. Playboy, on the other hand, didn’t fare too badly with contributors like, oh - Updike, Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, Mailer, Shirely Jackson…
Ah, slipped my radar. (and just found out - a fellow Canuck!)
::Go, memory banks, go!!!::
Recalling an unabridged dictionary definition mentioning the opposite of a ‘quickie’ as being a ‘slow poke’.
:o
Some few people are ‘back in a big way’ to the trappings of the past in an IRONIC way. Like playing dressup. Like when young boys (in the past of course). played Cowboys and Indians…There are young girls like to wear bonnets and play store like they do in Little House On The Prairie. Plenty of young women like to play ‘50’s dressup’ with red lipstick, 50’s girdles and full skirts, wearing aprons and cooking with vintage pyrex. Untold numbers of all kinds of people are enamored of Star Wars and Harry Potter stuff. It’s fun, a little hobby, an escape from modern life… Playing Mr. Suave, with an ascot, a martini, and lounge music is fun. But real life takes over, who are these Playboy wanna-bes who are buying finely crafted goods and collecting vintage technology? A few filthy rich snobbish frat boys living off their parents. Posers.
The New Yorker, AFAIK, is doing OK or at least holding its own. I think this is a combination of consistent high quality writing and reporting and the lack of very much serious competition, other than the Atlantic and perhaps some of the New York Times offshoot magazines. They have, however, toughened their soft paywall, which means they either want more money or need more money to stay afloat.
But Playboy was mired in a bygone era whose time has come and gone. The best I can say for it is that Heffner really did make a largely successful effort to attract some really good writers and interviewees, in part I think by paying very generously.
Circa five decades ago in San Francisco the first MrsRico and I (long story) attended gatherings of youngish adults in a nearby Methodist church where books, music, films, and the latest issue of PLAYBOY were discussed. PB was that vanilla even then. It was quite irrelevant not much later. Ian Shoales (I GOTTA GO) dismissed PB in 1983.
But the nekkid wimmens! Airbrushed, shooped, denatured into innocence. Sure, there was all that great literature, the fine interviews, the music polls, the… nekkid wimmens! All that remains is a stack of old centerfolds stuffed in a manila folder. Time marches on.
NO, I mean Penthouse Forum was all made up. Just like pro rasslin’.
Even though every one started with “I never used to believe forum letters, until ONE DAY…” they still aren’t true.
Like the guy, who is probably a best selling novelist now, who wrote a gem of a tale about having immoral congress with the chicken he was preparing for a get together, and how everyone complemented him on the unique flavor of his stuffing. Well written, but somehow I don’t believe it was true.