Medianatomy
Playboy: Played Out
July 9, 2001

By Andrew Hearst

A couple of years ago, as he was preparing to move to Arizona, my father asked me to stop by his Upper West Side apartment to pick up some large boxes that bore my name. I had packed up the boxes in Bloomington, Indiana, years earlier when my father sold the house I grew up in, and he didn't want to keep lugging the physical remnants of my childhood all around the country. When I got the boxes home and opened them, most of them contained the usual signifiers of childhood--baseball mitts, schoolwork, yearbooks, a stuffed animal or two. One box, however, was filled with something a little less innocent: the Playboys I accumulated when I was a teenager in the '80s.

I looked through an issue a couple of days ago, and what a nostalgia trip it was. Yep, there was the Playboy Advisor, dispensing wisdom about everything from necktie dimples to breast size to threesomes. Yep, there were those all-American young women with big smiles, bigger breasts, and very little clothing. And yep, there was macho man Asa Baber, the Men columnist, who was just as reactionary as I had remembered him being. Baber's column in this issue was a hilarious relic. "I gave one of my friends the nickname RadFem," the column begins, "because she's never heard a radical feminist argument she hasn't liked--which means that on issues of sexual politics, she will always parrot the party line (men are bad, women are good, end of story)." The rest of the column is a fictional conversation between Baber and RadFem, a snarling woman who confronts him with a newspaper article headlined "Women Still Earn Less Than Men: Pay Gap Study Shows 76 Cents vs. $1." RadFem is furious about the pay gap; Baber condescendingly assures her that the study is flawed and has "nothing to do with whether people are receiving equal pay for equal work." The column was an unintentionally amusing reminder of the gender wars of the past.

The weird thing is, I wasn't looking at one of those old issues from my adolescence. I was looking at the August 2001 issue, the cover of which features a wavy-haired Belinda Carlisle ("Go, Go, Girl! Belinda Carlisle Rocks Naked") and teasers like "Sopranos Strippers: Girls of the Bada Bing!" and "Jon Bon Jovi: Back on Top." I don't want to dump on Baber too much; he's written some thoughtful columns over the years, especially about fathers' rights, one of his pet issues. But Baber's silly August column--and the outmoded conception of manhood it reveals--is emblematic of Playboy's problems today, when the cheerfully boorish Maxim rules the men's-magazine roost and online porn is ubiquitous and often free.

Playboy has always been about more than just skin, and it once played a significant role in both the world of magazines and the culture at large. A common joke about Playboy is that everyone says they buy it for the articles, but no one actually reads them. Nevertheless, over the years it has often published noteworthy reportage, as well as fiction by literary giants such as Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jack Kerouac, John Updike, and Nadine Gordimer. The magazine also pioneered the feature-length interview: Since the early '60s, hundreds of politicians, artists, and celebrities--from Jimmy Carter to Ansel Adams--have sat down and talked at length with Playboy. Many of these interviews have significant historical value; the in-depth conversation with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the January 1981 issue, for example, contained Lennon's final musings about his life and music. Long before Nerve came up with the catchy tagline "literate smut," Playboy was combining literary flair and tasteful smut.

Of course, Playboy has never exactly been highbrow; the Vladimir Nabokovs and Nadine Gordimers have always appeared just a few pages away from the Pamela Andersons and LeRoy Neimans. The magazine's combination of tastefulness and tastelessness, of progressive politics and sometimes cartoonish femininity, has always been a bit schizophrenic, and yet this schizophrenia gives the magazine much of its unique charm. Playboy is rarely boorish, and it contains little of the relentless misogyny found in, say, Hustler. But it's no longer as literary as it once was, and its editors don't seem to have thought at all about how to shape the magazine for a new generation of young men. No one would argue that Maxim, that bastard child of Playboy, is a classy magazine, but its creators have clearly thought long and hard about how to create a magazine that today's young men will want to read--or at least look at.

Playboy's U.S. circulation peaked at about seven million in the mid-'70s; after years of declining sales and waning cultural influence, more than three million copies of the American edition are still sold each month. Despite the magazine's impressive circulation numbers, the Playboy empire has struggled financially in recent years. Playboy Enterprises has been losing scads of money on its online operations; last year it scuttled a planned $50 million IPO for Playboy.com. Hugh Hefner's daughter, Christie, the chairman and chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises, has spent years pouring tens of millions of dollars into ventures ranging from Playboy.com to various television and gambling deals. A few days ago, the company announced a major deal to buy three television channels that air hardcore porn.

As Christie Hefner and her fellow executives spend their time trying to reinvent Playboy Enterprises, they seem to have forgotten something along the way: reinventing Playboy itself. Rarely has a major magazine been so ripe for an editorial overhaul and a redesign. The magazine has changed remarkably little since 1981, when as a twelve-year-old I saw my first copy. The design is mostly the same, the fonts are mostly the same, the editorial sections are mostly the same, the cartoonists are mostly the same. A few changes have been made here and there--some new columns have been added and some of the section headers have been tweaked, for example--but the magazine's look, editorial tone, and worldview were frozen in time several decades ago. Playboy's inelegant design, with its stew of influences from the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s, seems to have been arrived at through sheer inertia, not through any direct attempt to style a cohesive retro look.

According to a recent news story, the median age of Playboy's readers is thirty-two. To most of the magazine's target readership, Hef has more in common with Dr. Ruth Westheimer than with Brad Pitt. These days, Hef exists in the public eye primarily as a likable and friendly senior citizen whose continued interest in sex reassures younger people that a vibrant erotic life is still possible during the twilight years--though it may require the help of Viagra, as in Hefner's case.

So here's what Playboy should do: Hire a hotshot editor in his thirties or forties--a David Granger or James Truman type--and give him some room to reinvent the magazine without destroying its core identity. In other words, hire someone to do what Tina Brown and then David Remnick have done with The New Yorker: Throw out the things that don't work; bring in some new things that do work, or might work; yet ensure that the magazine's unique history and editorial voice are still evident within its pages.

Otherwise, it's just tits and ass.

Andrew Hearst is a writer and editor who lives in New York. He has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Newsday, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications.

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