what the fuck is playboy?
entertainment for men
The Supreme Court is currently hearing testimony about the Texas law that forces users in Texas to upload IDs in order to verify their age in order to access pornographic sites. In his questioning of Pornhub’s lawyers’ Justice Samuel Alito asked:
Is it like the old Playboy magazine, you have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr?
I had a good laugh about this.
Sometime in my junior year, in a Latin American literature class, I was told that Roberto Bolaño’s last interview was given in Playboy Magazine. We didn’t read it in class (I went to a public school with a very vocal PTA) but at the time I treated it as symptomatic of the author. Bolaño, as prolific and respected (as an author) as he was, was a bit of an eccentric man—he would have an interview in Playboy! Admittedly, my knowledge of Bolaño was shotty, but so was my idea of Playboy. I knew it from Superbad and as a Halloween costume I was told I couldn’t wear: it was a porno mag—rather—The Porno Mag. As a cultural touchstone, there is perhaps nothing more iconographically associated with the unabashed masculinity of a theoretical gentleman than Playboy.
I did not grow up with Playboy. By the time I knew what porn was it was in the form of fully operational, monetized sites. I would watch old 90s movies where teenage boys foamed at the mouthes just to stare at a single still image of a woman’s titties. Given these impressions (along with various Gloria Steinem essays) I assumed that Playboy was strictly a porn magazine.
I found a Reddit comment I’m going to take as gospel about how and why Playboy, a porno mag, also became (was?) a serious magazine. Truthfully, I do not care about this. Regardless of the how and why of it all, Playboy was a serious player in the magazine world, and its dominance as a cultural force exceeded its pornographic capacity. This is not to deny the obvious allure of people to the magazines through pornographic material, but magazines (as a type of journalism) are perhaps the largest offenders of risque images on front covers to sell pages, and Playboy truly cornered this market.
I will say that Playboy does feel different in its unabashed use of scantily clad women to sell copies. There is a specific tinge to the various Playboy Bunnies (Playgirls) who were featured. Unlike many modern sites of pornography (Pornhub, OnlyFans, etc…) where the featured women are often devoid of any personable details (thus the ever-present “name?” comment in many porn comment sections), Playgirls are given a page to write about themselves. The biographies are interesting: some of the Playgirls are equestrians, others are in college to become engineers, some are chess players, waiters, and Van Gogh fans. Under their biographies, there is often also a carousel of baby pictures and childhood photos.
Some might see this as a bleaker outlook on women featured in porn, and, I will admit, it does feel like fucking someone in their childhood bedroom. It’s almost too personal; while I feel that it is likely fruitless to hark on the more problematic parts of modern pornography (the ideology it pushes, the treatment of those who star in it, its lack of protection for all parties, the exploitive thrust of the algorithm, to name a few) its grip on late millennials and almost all of Gen Z is undeniable. Anecdotally, I used to hook up with a man I can only describe as a porn addict. At the time I didn’t really think there was anything wrong with that (i.e. we weren’t exclusive) but it was one of my early sexual experiences. As pillow talk, he would often describe the porn he would watch, and he would insist on filming us having sex (I consistently refused, although, there were times when I often thought it would be easier to give in). Even after my refusals, when he meant to compliment me, he would describe only watching porn featuring women that looked like me. To this day, I am still not sure whether to be flattered or not.
This is not to talk down on masturbation (it’s natural, necessary, etc…), but there is a certain element, especially porn-assisted masturbation, that feels fundamentally wrong. Especially in the digital age, given the many degrees of separation between creator and viewer. In some ways, I do feel that the biographies and childhood photos are good because it forces some reckoning on behalf of the “masturabtor” (lol) to see these women as more than a pair of tits and vacant pussy.
What I do think Playboy represents, however, especially in contrast to modern-day porn, is a shift in masculinity. Playboy’s tagline was “Entertainment for men” and it was serious. Between boobs and booze ads, there were Slavoj Zizek articles about the war in Iraq and Margaret Atwood short stories. “Men,” as Playboy saw, are not strictly a sexual category, but rather, an assembly of many other parts that constitute proper manhood.
What a “gentleman” was used to be a much narrower definition. It wasn’t simply separate from a woman, it was a certain distinction one earned through various “masculine” pursuits: a specific brand of intellectualism, clothes, and speech. This obviously is not to praise this as the correct form of masculinity, but rather to point out an obvious shift from the more “refined” sexuality of Playboy to the more crude fucking that Pornhub specializes in. This shift in masculinity seems symptomatic of the grip and control that patriarchy held. As the clearly dominant system, there was no need to make all men “masculine;” it could exclude effeminate men, uneducated men, and poor men. When Playboy describes themselves as “entertainment for men” they have a specific man in mind. You can see this in Hugh Hefner himself, his mansion is decorated to ooze a traditional White American masculinity: wood, leather, books, pool table, a pool.
Not to sound too Dworkin-pilled and anti-porn, but current adult entertainment appeals to a more base masculinity. A large chunk of pornography focuses on showing women at their weakest, or, at the very least, reducing them down to their most fetishizable parts. Women are demeaned, thrown around, cum on, and punished. This is not accidental. It appeals to the basest male instinct, one that separates itself from women. The capitalist model of porn production can only encourage this type of fetishization of women because it is fundamentally unexculsionary. There are simply the men who consume and the women who are subjected. Obviously, men are not the only gender demographic that consumes pornography, but it is blindingly obvious to anyone who has seen pornography that the largest demographic watchers of it are men and thus appeals to an ideology that they might divulge the most pleasure from (i.e. women beneath them).
This is all to say the decline of Playboy represents a much larger shift in conceptions of masculinity. One from a strict ideal requiring a certain level of intellectual, sexual, and monetary hedonism to masculinity that simply requires separation from feminity. As long as men are not the subject of the fetishizing gaze of the porn camera, they are not emasculated. POV pornography is perhaps the greatest offender in this category as literally allows the (presumably) male viewer to imagine that they themselves are (often) brutally fucking the woman in front of them. The inclusivity of pornography is a double-edged sword here and this shift in masculinity is beneficial towards men—it is inclusive—and thus makes masculinity inclusive. At the same time, however, the gaze Playboy has toward women is the same gaze that contemporary pornography graphs onto women.
It seems redundant to point this out, and I don’t really have a proposed solution, but I will use it as a retort against general “men’s rights” truthers that pop up on my Instagram reels.
In other news, Playboy is back in print. In their announcement, they claim that Playboy is a “world-renowned brand associated with class, wit, and perhaps most of all, pleasure.” In the same announcement, they also refer to themselves as cutting-edge. The joke here is that this new reprint feels synonymous with the creep back to traditional masculinity. No longer does the patriarchy have to appeal to as many men as possible in order to cling to legitimacy; it’s a marked return to “formal” masculinity: boobs, booze, billiards. There is nothing cutting edge to Playboy, their authors perhaps (although there’s no promise that they have as many truly subversive voices as they once had), but the women, the ads, and the ideology they promote are all the same.
In all honesty, however, I do hope that Playboy returns to its former glory. I suppose if nothing about the way they view women changes, the added Zizek essays don’t hurt. Until then, this substack is going to convert to an OnlyFans.
