Dear Tell All: I have bittersweet feelings about the fact that Playboy is dropping nudity. When I was an adolescent, my friends and I used to figure out stratagems for getting hold of the magazine, usually by finding someone to buy it for us in a downtown bookstore. Those bookstores have since disappeared in Madison, and now the nude Playboy Playmate is disappearing, too.
I have vivid memories of how beautiful and sexy the centerfolds looked. They had an innocent charm that today’s porn stars lack. They made for a sweet transition into pubescence for us boys — not shocking or scary, but gently alluring.
As melancholy as I feel about Playboy’s change, I see it as a sign of progress. The magazine always had aspirations to be more than just softcore porn, with substantial fiction and reporting. It makes sense that it would eventually move beyond nude models to maintain its unique position in the culture — in other words, to grow up, just like the rest of us once-adolescent males. I’ll miss the old Playboy Bunnies, but to be honest I might start buying the magazine for the first time in decades now that the stigma of pornography is gone.
Former Seventh-Grader
Dear Seventh-Grader: I don’t share your nostalgic view of Playboy. To me, it’s ground zero for American misogyny. How demeaning is it that the models are called “Centerfolds,” “Playmates” and “Bunnies”? That’s about as reductive as it gets for women. They’re bluntly labeled as objects for men’s use.
Believe me, I’m no hater of sexual fantasies. But being anti-Playboy is not being anti-sex; it’s being anti-sexism. I don’t see what’s alluring about Hugh Hefner’s vision of women: as eye candy for spicing up the “substantial fiction and reporting” you admire so much. Unlike you, Seventh-Grader, I can’t enjoy a John Updike story when it’s placed next to a fatuously smiling mannequin with inhuman breast implants. The pretension is part of what gives Hefner’s brand of pornography a bad name.
And do you seriously think the new anti-nudity policy is a sign a growing up? It’s simply a financial calculation. Playboy was losing porn-lovers to the Internet, so it’s going PG-13 to reach a wider mainstream audience. The fatuously smiling mannequins aren’t going anywhere, though; they’re merely hiking up their negligees a couple inches to cover the inhuman breast implants.
That’s progress?
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