If the opening ’spread’ for your magazine is not a woman at all, but an ad for a game for a Sony PlayStation Portable (the handheld game favored by twitchy teenagers), what does that say about Playboy?
As usual, what Playboy says about men (or perhaps about its own irrelevance) is far more interesting than how it shows women, overloaded on top and shaved for action, or with tiny, non-threatening ‘landing strips’ down there that perfectly match the ‘coffee tea or me’ ambiance of the Brazilian stewardess spread.
Month after month, Hugh Hefner is surrounded with the usual ‘bevy’ of beauties.
The girls remain 20 and pneumatic, but the hair of three of the writers featured, like that of Robert Stone and Pat Jordan, has gone from gray to white. The third isn’t even alive (Kurt Vonnegut.) In the schizophrenic world of Playboy, 2008, those ‘real writers’ bookend a scolding lecture by Susan Jacoby about how America doesn’t read anymore–plopped dead center in the midst of a stroke book.
And I swear I saw the punch lines for the cartoons and the laugh-a-century Playboy Party Jokes 30 years ago.
In the current issue, she’s supposed to be a MILF [Mothers I'd Love to Fuck], but the thought of winning a date with siliconed, dyed and war-painted 42-year old Cindy Margolis is downright scary:
OK, I know that Kevin Bacon and I aren’t the right demographic for Playboy anymore–but who is? Videogames, MILFs, bewhiskered authors and an 81-year old figurehead; the Playboy lifestyle is looking pretty incoherent these days.
Tags: Cindy-Margolis, Hugh-Hefner, Kevin-Bacon, Kurt-Vonnegut, MILF, Playboy, Secrets of Men's Magazines
December 16, 2008 at 10:50 pm |
[...] But there’s a fine line between selling advertising, and selling out to your advertisers, especially one selling so morally questionable a product. Is Playboy so desperate that it doesn’t know who it is anymore? [...]
April 1, 2009 at 5:22 am |
[...] current issue (not the classic ’60’s cover above) continues the weird dichotomy of 19-ish models and elderly authors who could be their leering grandfathers–or [...]
April 23, 2009 at 8:30 pm |
[...] Playboy the magazine doesn’t know who it is either, at least their Bettie Page fixation is harmless, if [...]
May 13, 2009 at 4:31 am |
[...] Blog readers know I have an ambivalent relationship with Playboy, the magazine that no longer knows who it is. It reported today it lost moeny, which in the real world means losing readers and advertisers. [...]
November 25, 2009 at 10:10 pm |
[...] copies per month, have deteriorated to a pathetic 150,000 today. I’ve written before about Playboy’s incoherent content (and cookie-cutter plastic girls) which hardly makes it a compelling impulse [...]
December 18, 2009 at 11:19 pm |
[...] but even incoherent and out-of-date as it is, this great American brand can still be saved. I’d love to consult on it or edit [...]