Sometime last week, it made the news that Playboy magazine was no longer going to feature nude models. A thousand smart alec remarks would have been launched to such news. Instead, the women will be scantily clad, unprovocative poses, but not nude. In a day and age where Australia's leading lad mag 'Zoo' was forced to close shop, it seems rather retrograde that Playboy retreats to a position of further modesty, but perhaps on another level, subtlety is the new 'adult' thing.
At a time when every teenage boy has an internet connected phone and the web is rife with pornography, the magazine has opted to continue featuring women in provocative poses, just not completely nude, the Times said.
"You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free," Flanders was quoted as saying in the Times. "And so it's just passe at this juncture."
The magazine that featured Marilyn Monroe on its debut cover in 1953 is making the changes after circulation dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 now, the Times said.
That is a relatively slow decline compared to some other magazines. Playboy always elicited strange responses from guys I knew. They would dismiss it as too tame (and therefore lame) next to the more explicit Penthouse magazine, and in the next breath denounce it as all sexist bullshit. Playboy's awkwardness probably lay in its decidedly middle-brow posture which gave it away as somewhat an illegitimate contributor to the public sphere of ideas. It's a quality it shares with Rolling Stone, but of course Rolling Stone magazine gets extra credit from people for dealing with popular music and not naked women. One can't help but think it's a kind prudery because Playboy was no less progressive than Rolling Stone ever was when it came to social mores.
If you think about 1950s America before Alfred Kinsey threw open his Kinsey Report, there probably wasn't any forum or framework for the discussion of sex and the pleasures of carnality. It might seem quaint today but Playboy probably lifted the blinds on the collective bedrooms of the mind. As a society we've come a long way since those days to the point where any teenager can click on the internet and find the most explicit porn to their choosing. It sure didn't turn out this without Playboy magazine along the way.
Try this article for the impact of Playboy on the public consciousness:
The November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine is the magazine’s best selling issue of all time. This is not because of the articles, but due to the proliferation of one iconic image from the magazine: that of centrefold model Lena Söderberg.
The original image was digitised by researches at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) in 1973. Alexander Sawchuk, the assistant professor of electrical engineering, his graduate student and the SIPI lab manager were frantically looking for a new image for a research paper.
They had already exhausted the stock of usual test images. It was at this moment — according to legend — that a colleague walked in with the November 1972 issue of Playboy. Seeing the predicament that the researches were in, he tore a 5.12-inch strip from the top of the centrefold and fed it to their scanner. As it had a resolution of 100 lines per inch, the resulting image was the perfectly cropped head and shoulders image 512 x 512 pixels in size.
This image has since been used widely in imaging processing circles. That’s because the nature of the image makes it amenable for testing a wide range of image processing algorithms.
Here's an article that gives you a better digest of Playboy than I can.
Playboy was always exceptionally decent. Hugh Hefner was helped by a start-up loan from his mother, not Satan. And Playboy had an impeccable record of literary publishing. Ray Bradbury's epochal Fahrenheit 451 was serialised in 1954 and the magazine hosted Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing, John Le Carre and John Updike - not at all a shabby list. Presumably, they did not think of themselves as slumming it.
Photographers at work on Playboy included Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts and Annie Leibovitz. The magazine interviewed major political figures, including Martin Luther King and President Carter. It was the latter who mournfully explained in 1976 that he had "committed adultery in my heart many times". I think he must have meant "head", because the big truth about erotica is that the real action takes place above the collar, not below the belt. Hence, Playboy's late decision to cover up its nudes does very little to defuse eroticism. In the contest between concealment and display, concealment is almost always more sexy: this is why classic Playboy nudes are actually so deliciously chaste.
That is an amazing list of names to have written and taken photos for Playboy. There is a Japanese edition of Playboy. It is remarkably similar in philosophy to its American source. They too hired some of the great writers and photographers to contribute and in most part it was more edifying than not. Nudes are nice, but the articles were the thing. Not that I've looked at any edition of Playboy since the 1980s so it's hard to say if the standard has been maintained.
Sometime in the mid 1980s, Andy Summers and Robert Fripp teamed up to give us the album 'Bewitched'. On it is an epic instrumental track 'What Kind of Man Reads Playboy'. I always took it to be an ironic, subtle admission of their prurient interest in pictures of naked ladies. Today, I'm thinking they meant it was a very different kind of man to look past the naked ladies to actually read the amazing articles contained within.
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