What Playboy taught us about porn that online couldn't
This must be cyber world’s tastiest victory over print media yet. Internet porn has rendered Playboy nudity useless. Who wants to flip pages anymore, the magazine reckoned earlier this week, when help is just a click away.
The revelation dawned on Hugh Hefner apparently when he studied the sales curve of his magazine last month. Circulation had dropped from 5.6 million in the 1970s to 8,00,000 lately. Selling pictures of ladies in the buff is no longer gainful business for a magazine, so Playboy had to be redesigned.
When Marilyn Monroe flaunted her birthday suit for the magazine’s first centrefold in 1953, porn films were normally guilty pleasures screened in rundown theatres. The frank purpose of both media was always to satiate basic instinct, but there was a difference.
Playboy’s prescription for male fantasy, by and large, always exuded an amount of class. If there is a difference between nudity and nakedness while projecting the female form, Playboy usually maintained it. An amount of creative flair always showed in the wanton sexuality staring out of the magazine’s pages.
It is the reason why, beyond super sex symbols, Monroe, Ursula Andress or Pamela Anderson, even the very sophisticated Barbra Streisand surprised all by agreeing to strike a cover pose in 1977. A Playboy appearance never hurt an actress or a model’s career. Nor did a presence in its pages lower a celebrity’s dignity. Interviews of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Jimmy Carter and Frank Zappa that appeared in the magazine prove it was far more than a sex pamphlet. It was a socio-political dossier, too.
Internet porn is different. It is really a progression of big screen smut that ran in decrypted cinemas in days of yore. If cyber porn as a source of entertainment is indeed taking over from Playboy’s published explicitness, there is a danger. Very little of porn available on the net is monitored. With a magazine, there is an automatic system of control in place besides the fact that it appears once in a stipulated period of time. How do you put a check on the incessant content flooding the net?
Hefner, of course, has put in place his plan of action to ensure brand Playboy does not become entirely extinct. There will still be girls striking sexy poses in the pages of his magazine. Only, the pretty ladies will not feature wholly in the nude. In that sense it could be any other premium class magazine, with some provocative pics thrown in.
Hefner’s other masterstroke has been his treatment of the magazine’s website. Although online onslaught has forced Playboy to change tack only now, its official website had banned total skin show a while back. This, to gain entry into social media. In turn, the web traffic for Playboy, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, is nearly four times the print edition’s circulation.
Then there is the talismanic rabbit logo, which leads in making money for 89-year-old Hefner. Franchised as everything from jewellery to toiletries and perfumes, the Playboy bunny hardly looks set to lose its popularity any time soon.
Who needs a magazine of naked girls to make money when you can do so selling its legacy?