Oh - reading it for the articles was a joke, but the fact is they were there. If you wanted a magazine solely for smut, it probably shouldn't have been your first choice. I bought my first right around when I turned 19 because it happened that they had a big article on KISS reuniting (speaking of people with bad opinions, nothing better than a Gene Simmons interview). Honestly, even then (1996ish) the pictures were really tame compared to both other magazines and the internet/online bulletin boards so that aspect just wasn't a huge deal to me.
You can definitely get better or similar content in other places, I think what made it sort of a big deal when it was in it's heyday was it was one place where a "gentleman" could get information on everything in one place. You could read about the new Mustang, what the life of an NBA star was like, find out what suits were in style, read some jokes/comics, what movies were coming out and read an interview with a politician about foreign policy. Reading other posts, I'm sure those articles were pushing against feminism and by today's standards the idea of "this is what is manly" is pretty toxic/outdated, but I think the format of the magazine and the ideas behind it were certainly a big deal. In fact, I'd say some of these attempts at one stop nerd sites like IGN probably owe a bit to his idea of creating a lifestyle brand. Obviously I have no idea how much he personally dictated that though.
Playboy in its heyday was basically 1960s GQ but with nipples.
Reading your mum's clothing catalogue for the underwear section is definitely how a lot of people encounter sexy looking ladies for the first time
11 year old bowen was looking for stuff for christmas.
11 year old bowen couldn't remember where they were in the catalog.
11 year old bowen was very fascinated when he turned onto those pages.
It is very difficult to sneak the sears catalog from the living room. They were very large and, honestly, how often does one need to look through it for gift ideas?
Fortunately the Next catalogue could fit up your t-shirt, even as an 11 year old, and therefore be easily stealthed out for perusal elsewhere in more private surroundings.
Reading your mum's clothing catalogue for the underwear section is definitely how a lot of people encounter sexy looking ladies for the first time
11 year old bowen was looking for stuff for christmas.
11 year old bowen couldn't remember where they were in the catalog.
11 year old bowen was very fascinated when he turned onto those pages.
It is very difficult to sneak the sears catalog from the living room. They were very large and, honestly, how often does one need to look through it for gift ideas?
We always kept those catalogs in the bathroom anyway, so it was very convenient for me.
I think the word you're looking for is "accommodating"
Reading your mum's clothing catalogue for the underwear section is definitely how a lot of people encounter sexy looking ladies for the first time
11 year old bowen was looking for stuff for christmas.
11 year old bowen couldn't remember where they were in the catalog.
11 year old bowen was very fascinated when he turned onto those pages.
It is very difficult to sneak the sears catalog from the living room. They were very large and, honestly, how often does one need to look through it for gift ideas?
We always kept those catalogs in the bathroom anyway, so it was very convenient for me.
I think the word you're looking for is "accommodating"
I'd probably spell it slightly differently, so as to imbue it with additional context-relevant meaning.
It did always feel like people used "for the articles" as a way to hide the fact that they were actually just reading a porno mag, in a sort of pseudo-intellectual way.
You can find pretty decent articles of the same variety in a lot of magazines without needing vaginae to be there.
I feel the same way about "for the articles" as I do about Hooters' wings.
There's nothing inherently wrong with pornography. The culture of its production is another matter.
Also, pedantry, but Playboy classicly never showed vagina.
I don't think that was the case I think ten years or so ago. As a teenager the mailman mistakenly left some Playboys in our mailbox several times, and on one occasion my curiosity was enough to spirit it away and see what the big deal was. It was a college girl edition and I'm pretty sure they did show vagina.
Ultimately the magazine was wrapped into a container and tossed in the trash as I further questioned what the big deal was, unknowing what ace even was back then.
That probably wasn't playboy then. i worked in porn distribution for several years about 20 years ago and there were hard and fast rules about what you could or couldn't show. Playboy absolutely did not have vaginas in it or else the issue would have been pulled off the shelves.
Permit me to give my 30 min speech on porn classifications
If you want to see Hefner's finest moment watch The House Bunny.
There's a scene where he's on the phone with Anna Faris' character and she says something shocking to him and delivery of, "WHAT?" is one of the best things I have ever seen.
Son of a fuck, I looked this up (because I can't remember a single thing about it) and it has Emma Stone and Kat Dennings in it. And Colin Hanks!
If you want to see Hefner's finest moment watch The House Bunny.
There's a scene where he's on the phone with Anna Faris' character and she says something shocking to him and delivery of, "WHAT?" is one of the best things I have ever seen.
Son of a fuck, I looked this up (because I can't remember a single thing about it) and it has Emma Stone and Kat Dennings in it. And Colin Hanks!
Emma Stone is my celebrity crush
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
If you want to see Hefner's finest moment watch The House Bunny.
There's a scene where he's on the phone with Anna Faris' character and she says something shocking to him and delivery of, "WHAT?" is one of the best things I have ever seen.
Son of a fuck, I looked this up (because I can't remember a single thing about it) and it has Emma Stone and Kat Dennings in it. And Colin Hanks!
Sometimes I think Emma Stone is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful, but other times I look at her and her face seems to disassociate into its component parts and I can't see a human being any more, just an eye here and a nose there that don't seem to have any relationship to each other. Like the opposite of a late Picasso where the parts are in the wrong places but the mastery of composition means your mind can reconcile it all into a coherent whole - her face parts are in the right places, but I've stared too long and too hard and my mind has lost the capacity to see anything but chaos. It's the visual equivalent of when you say a word too many times and start to doubt that it's a real word, and wonder if you've just been spouting gibberish for several minutes while everyone around you nods indulgently but privately worries that you've lost your mind.
The only other person I can recall experiencing this phenomenon looking at is Rowan Atkinson. And I have to admit, there's some structural similarity there. But he would probably be less upset to find out that his face sometimes slides backwards into the Uncanny Valley for me.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
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Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
If you want to see Hefner's finest moment watch The House Bunny.
There's a scene where he's on the phone with Anna Faris' character and she says something shocking to him and delivery of, "WHAT?" is one of the best things I have ever seen.
Son of a fuck, I looked this up (because I can't remember a single thing about it) and it has Emma Stone and Kat Dennings in it. And Colin Hanks!
Emma Stone is my celebrity crush
Get in line!
Behind me AND my partner...
I have a weakness for freckles and red hair. I know the red hair is fake but still.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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Garlic Breadi'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm aRegistered User, Disagreeableregular
Of course, there's a fair amount of overlap between (classic) Baywatch and Playboy: Pamela Anderson, Erika Eleniak, et al
(also the "real product is hawt women wearing very little, with a thin narrative thread to provide a pretense/veneer of respectability" part...)
Those floating embers are probably what kill it. I can kind of look past the cheesy fire job but the embers take it from "meh" cgi to "haha holy shit am I watching syfy right now?"
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
NPR had a really interesting retrospective on Playboy the other day.
It was pretty much a mix of positives and negatives from the beginning. The negatives have been discussed here already (Monroe, etc). It did other things, though. Fahrenheit 451 was first released in the magazine as a serial, for an example of the quality you could find in the early days. The magazine as a whole had a domestic focus for the bachelor, effectively serving as a counterpoint for the whole "get married as soon as you finish high school as a mechanism to leave your parents' house" tradition (for men only of course, but at least that would theoretically permit women to do the same). Articles focused on stuff like cooking, which wasn't supposed to be a man thing unless you were a chef.
And above all else, it sought to normalize / de-stigmatize sex and sexuality to Americans. Remarkable progress was made in this department during the magazine's first couple decades or so of publication. It's hard to say how responsible it was for it (versus how opportunistic it was of following the trends), but in the end it was still part of the movement.
Of course it was also founded with and within old-school sexism, and it never really attempted to clean up that act. And after its primary battle was won of normalizing bachelorhood and sexuality, it had nowhere to go and struggled to be anything other than a self-parody, finally removed from relevance with the advent of the Internet (as it had devolved into being noted only for softcore photography by this point). This "death" as it were (technically still around so not dead, but you know) probably came a decade and a half too late. Society moved well past the magazine's visionary, who stayed put in a gross place while everyone else worked to keep making things better. And he'd built such a cult of personality of himself in the 70s that there wasn't really any going around him so long as he lived.
It would be nice if there were a single powerful voice (in terms of an organization) for the 2010s version of sex-positive movements. The Internet, by its nature, decentralizes and thus reduces the potential cultural impact of individual voices as well as the breadth of focus of those voices. That's sometimes good, but sometimes bad. Today's porn isn't accompanied with any attempt to move society forward in a sex-positive way. It's isolated, focused, and filled with a lot of really gross, harmful stuff (not gross in a judging your kinks way but rather in a way that's harmful to a lot of the participants and frequently regressive).
There are many smaller voices, and people can find and follow the ones that they find positive, entertaining, and useful. We won't know how effective that is in moving cultures until we're looking back some decades from now.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
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Playboy in its heyday was basically 1960s GQ but with nipples.
Fortunately the Next catalogue could fit up your t-shirt, even as an 11 year old, and therefore be easily stealthed out for perusal elsewhere in more private surroundings.
I think the word you're looking for is "accommodating"
I'd probably spell it slightly differently, so as to imbue it with additional context-relevant meaning.
That probably wasn't playboy then. i worked in porn distribution for several years about 20 years ago and there were hard and fast rules about what you could or couldn't show. Playboy absolutely did not have vaginas in it or else the issue would have been pulled off the shelves.
Permit me to give my 30 min speech on porn classifications
But always from an angle and not spread eagle stuff
Oh yeah I should specify this was US Playboys.
Son of a fuck, I looked this up (because I can't remember a single thing about it) and it has Emma Stone and Kat Dennings in it. And Colin Hanks!
Emma Stone is my celebrity crush
Get in line!
Behind me AND my partner...
The only other person I can recall experiencing this phenomenon looking at is Rowan Atkinson. And I have to admit, there's some structural similarity there. But he would probably be less upset to find out that his face sometimes slides backwards into the Uncanny Valley for me.
My first exposure to her was in that episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia and I was taken aback.
I have a weakness for freckles and red hair. I know the red hair is fake but still.
Nuh uh
I will fight you to the death.
you'll only kill what you love
Why the hell is there cg in baywatch
Fire on a yacht.
hahahaha holy shit that is bad
(also the "real product is hawt women wearing very little, with a thin narrative thread to provide a pretense/veneer of respectability" part...)
There's like a certain level of ripped that just stops being appealing to me and makes me think about how human bodies work instead
BECAUSE
E: you're welcome to whoever screenshots my signature with this image
It was pretty much a mix of positives and negatives from the beginning. The negatives have been discussed here already (Monroe, etc). It did other things, though. Fahrenheit 451 was first released in the magazine as a serial, for an example of the quality you could find in the early days. The magazine as a whole had a domestic focus for the bachelor, effectively serving as a counterpoint for the whole "get married as soon as you finish high school as a mechanism to leave your parents' house" tradition (for men only of course, but at least that would theoretically permit women to do the same). Articles focused on stuff like cooking, which wasn't supposed to be a man thing unless you were a chef.
And above all else, it sought to normalize / de-stigmatize sex and sexuality to Americans. Remarkable progress was made in this department during the magazine's first couple decades or so of publication. It's hard to say how responsible it was for it (versus how opportunistic it was of following the trends), but in the end it was still part of the movement.
Of course it was also founded with and within old-school sexism, and it never really attempted to clean up that act. And after its primary battle was won of normalizing bachelorhood and sexuality, it had nowhere to go and struggled to be anything other than a self-parody, finally removed from relevance with the advent of the Internet (as it had devolved into being noted only for softcore photography by this point). This "death" as it were (technically still around so not dead, but you know) probably came a decade and a half too late. Society moved well past the magazine's visionary, who stayed put in a gross place while everyone else worked to keep making things better. And he'd built such a cult of personality of himself in the 70s that there wasn't really any going around him so long as he lived.
It would be nice if there were a single powerful voice (in terms of an organization) for the 2010s version of sex-positive movements. The Internet, by its nature, decentralizes and thus reduces the potential cultural impact of individual voices as well as the breadth of focus of those voices. That's sometimes good, but sometimes bad. Today's porn isn't accompanied with any attempt to move society forward in a sex-positive way. It's isolated, focused, and filled with a lot of really gross, harmful stuff (not gross in a judging your kinks way but rather in a way that's harmful to a lot of the participants and frequently regressive).
There are many smaller voices, and people can find and follow the ones that they find positive, entertaining, and useful. We won't know how effective that is in moving cultures until we're looking back some decades from now.
descending
Or
Ascending?
point
let's summit this mountain
Ayyyyyyyyyyyscending mirite
This was in an actual Hollywood released movie from the past year, right?
Am I taking crazy pills or should this have never made it past the storyboard?