SHOWTIME RAN ONE of those Playboy self-congratulatory videos this month.
The magazine's video division has put out at least three or four of these tapes in recent years. All of them gush on and on about how the magazine singlehandedly started the Sexual Revolution, conquered the bad ol' American Puritan double standards, allowed people to feel good about their bodies, and taught folk to view the mating act as fun and even wholesome.
And its founder Hugh M. Hefner is always depicted by his hired video documentarians as the ultimate cool dude, a great party host and a tireless supporter of all righteous causes. By the time one of these videos is over, a viewer might feel a cult-O-personality trip going on, despite the claims to the publisher's self-effacing humility.
None of these hype jobs or related PR efforts have daunted the magazine's longtime critics, who've leveled the same charges against it all these years--charges that imagine the magazine to be as singularly influential as it claims to be, but in the wrong direction.
Not only is this single monthly rag blamed for the objectivication of women among males and unhealthy body-image obsessions among young females, but some accusers have even blamed it for rape and domestic violence.
In my opinion, that's a crock. Neither Playboy nor, I presume, anyone working for it wants anybody to get hurt. Nor, at least in their own minds, do they mean to demean womanhood. They think they're honoring, even celebrating female humanity by offering what they claim to be "The World's Most Beautiful Women" and asking readers to worship these women as perfect, unattainable fantasy topics.
That's what I think they think they're doing. What I think they're really doing is different, both from that explanation and the critics' diatribes.
Playboy is really a relic of the grey-flannel-suit era of marketing and advertising it claims to have originally been a rebellious statement against. It's corporate and bland. It treats sex as just another consumer-leisure activity, no more or less involving than shopping or tourism.
And the girlie pictures are like ads for an unavailable "product," utilizing every graphic advance in lighting and digital retouching to portray their subjects as "flatteringly" as ad photographers try to "humanize" the newest cars and detergents.
Today's Playmate characterizations (and, remember, the models themselves might not really be anything like the roles they're playing) are neither alluring temptresses nor friendly girls-next-door. They're L.A. starlets, model/actress/whatevers all done up with bleach and silicone. They exist only in a Hollywood make-believe realm (and in the cut-rate versions of that realm that are North America's lap-dance clubs). Their purpose is to sell--to sell magazines and videos, to sell their own star-images.
And a lot of the time, they're not even all that sexy.
It's an aesthetic that has everything to do with turning young men into good consumers and nothing to do with turning them into good lovers.
Its deficiencies wouldn't seem to matter, since Playboy has had the softcore-hetero market pretty much to itself. Its only non-sleazy rivals are the new Perfect 10 and the newer print version of the website Nerve. All the other girlie magazines have gone to hardcore porn.
But while neither Hefner nor anybody else Stateside was looking, the British "bloke magazines" such as Maxim started U.S. editions with leering-attitude text pieces, non-nude pictures of supermodels (themselves sales professionals in the business of selling women's clothes), and advice (albeit often wrong advice) on how young men might get beyond just looking at pictures of women and start dating and mating with genuine females.
Maxim and its ilk are simultanously treating sex more like a part of its readers' lives and making it seem naughty again. They're rapidly gaining on Playboy in both circulation and in the cultural consciousness; while Hefner continues to schmooze at his palace with his invited Hollywood celebrities, ignoring (or trying to ignore) the social/sexual changes challenging both his and Hollywood's grip on America's minds and crotches.
NEXT: Sex magazines may be dumb, but sex is still great!
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RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:
- What we know so far about the new administration.
- A glimpse of our forthcoming coffee-table photo book.
- Still more new cable channels.
- Just when you thought the '70s revival was dead, here comes a new energy crisis.
- Should we pity poor Belltown yet?
- How to improve Ken Burns's Jazz.
- I know what IT is, and if you're nice I just might tell you.
- Yes, Virginia, there's race discrimination in "nice" Seattle.
- A Hollywood insider acknowledges the death of the mass audience.
- Lynda Barry's Cruddy is anything but.
- My dream of a permanent alternative daily paper.
- People you're not better than.
- Parts one, and two of a remembrance at some people, buildings, and institutions that are gone or going at this time.
- Parts one, two, and three of a look at the possible next-big-thing in pop-cult genre repositionings, Christian smut.
- A new arts magazine just for wealthy patrons.
- No, the WTO protests shouldn't just be remembered as a self-promotion exercise.
- What you might expect on this site during the new year.
- What's Insville and Outski for 2001.
- Parts one, two, three, and four of 'A Dot-Com Christmas Carol.'
- Some of the biggest local spectacles of 2000.
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