The End Of Playboy

”Mothers of River City!

Heed that warning before it's too late!

Watch for the tell-tale signs of corruption!

The moment your son leaves the house

Does he re-buckle his knickerbockers below the knee?

Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger?

A dime novel hidden in the corn crib?

Is he starting to memorize jokes from Cap'n Billy's Whiz Bang?”

-- “Ya Got Trouble”, The Music Man

While I mourn its passing because at its height Playboy proved a powerful instrument of cultural change as well as a top flight gathering of artistic and literary talent (oh, who am I kidding?  We all bought it for the nekkid ladies, but gosh darn, sometimes those articles were just sooo interesting…), I think the magazine, the brand, and Hugh Hefner himself all stayed at the party far too long.  

They should have folded up their tent in the late 60s as the counterculture moved into high gear.  

Playboy belonged to the previous generation, the lost mini-generation that almost flowered in the late 50s / early 60s.

(I use “generation” here not to refer to an actual birth cohort but rather a mindset.)

You see them on old TV shows on the nostalgia networks:  
Nice, fresh, clean cut kids, sometimes in white slacks and sweaters, most of the time wearing trim tailored suits, narrow ties, shiny pointed shoes.

Clean shaven.

Short haired.

And you’ll note I’m referring to the guys -- they had some variety in how they could present themselves.

The gals hung around as arm & eye candy.

Oh, there were the occasional nods to “the modern woman” and a few of them found employment as secretaries, but we all knew what they really wanted was to find Mr. Right and settle down.

That was Hefner’s milieu.  All serious and high minded, but with an appreciation of the finer things in life.  Not eager to repeat the same mistakes as their forefathers, but not that terribly different from them, either.  Still a bunch of jazz lovers, though the more rebellious, the hipper portions of the crowd had a thing for folk music.

Of course, the monkey wrench in all this, the thing that forever barred that particular generation from entering the promised land, was the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Regardless of one’s party, Kennedy was the emblem of that generation, and when he died, it died with him.

Three months later despondent United States teens turned on their TV sets to see what Ed Sullivan had for them that night, and what they saw were four mop tops from Liverpool, and suddenly there was joy and happiness again and when our parents decried them for being long haired bums, American’s youth roared “SIGN ME UP!!!”

…and that, as a now disgraced TV actor once observed, was the name of that tune.

From that point on, Hefner and Playboy lost the cutting edge.

They still had several years of cultural relevance ahead of them, and even after their high water mark they contributed some good articles and insights, but they were of the previous generation, not the one rising to ascendency.

You can see in in their cartoons.  Playboy paid top dollar for top flight cartoonists, and the skill of Erich Sokol and Rowland Wilson and Doug Sneyd and others can’t be denied, but compare their work with the underground cartoonists of the same era and you see one group is looking down with smug superiority while the other is looking up from the bottom of the toilet. 

Playboy was about as perfect a match of creator and creation as one could hope to find.  

You know all the basics:
Midwestern Methodist kid, mother wanted him to be a missionary, a flair for editorial work, frustrated when his dream job at Esquire (the prototype of what Hefner said he wanted his magazine to be) turned out to be a dead end, put Playboy together on his kitchen table, lucked out when he found early nude photos of then superstar Marilyn Monroe were available, and bingo!  American cultural icon.

It’s really important to know about Hefner’s background, especially the Midwestern and the Methodist and the Esquire parts, because those reflect the myriad contradictory aspects of his nature, and the nature of the magazine and brand he created.

You also have to understand Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, and further back than that, Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang.

”Few periodicals reflect the post-WW I cultural change in American life as well as Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. To some people [it] represented the decline of morality and the flaunting of sexual immodesty; to others it signified an increase in openness. For much of the 1920s, Captain Billy’s was the most prominent comic magazine in America with its mix of racy poetry and naughty jokes and puns, aimed at a small-town audience with pretensions of ‘sophistication’.”
-- from Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals

What Hefner embodied was not so much a new force or movement in American culture but a rather old one.

For all the ridicule poked at moralistic Midwesterners, they remain as human as anyone else, and what Sinclair Lewis and the editors of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang and Esquire and eventually Hefner himself recognized was the hypocrisy of Middle American attitudes.

We wanted our sex and drugs (including tobacco and alcohol) and rock & roll (or jazz, or ragtime, whatever the era called for), but we were ashamed of these wants, and while we clung to a pious moralistic exterior of church on Sundays Christianity, in truth that proved as far removed from the actual teachings of Christ as imaginable.

The double handed hypocrisy fed off itself:
The public morality created the guilt and shame of our desires, and to hide the guilt and shame of our desires, we reinforced the public morality.

Hefner, Lewis, Captain Billy, et all called shenanigans on that hypocrisy.

And that is where we can say Playboy did its greatest and most good:  Pulling back the curtain and exposing that hypocrisy.

Of course, they were all hated for it.

Hypocrites never like it when you show that not only are their crowns of gold really brass and their feet are not merely clay but sunk thigh deep in a cesspool.

Mind you, Hefner was neither the first nor the only person to publish racy men’s magazines in that era.  There were a host of competitors, some closer to his style than not, but what they lacked was the genuine passion and commitment Hefner brought to his own publication.

Many words can be applied to Hugh Hefner, but dilettante is not one of them.

While publishing spank magazines was simply a job for other publishers and editors, it proved to be a lifestyle for Hefner, and one he eagerly shared with his readers.

Just as he created the magazine, the magazine (and its subsequent media and entertainment empire) created Hef, the pajama wearing, pipe smoking, suave single middle aged guy whom all (well, many…) of the fellas looked up to.

Hefner promoted his ideas and sensibilities through Playboy, and those ideas sunk into millions of people -- male and female -- around the world.

Hefner’s own religious background came through in his editorials and his famous “Playboy Philosophy”.

The core of Christianity is the Golden Rule, and Hefner’s elaborate philosophy, while fully embracing hedonism as a lifestyle, also embraced a live & let live / treat others as you would be treated POV.

“Playboy philosophy is very, very connected to the American dream, it the political philosophy that I've always, that I grew up with and that I espoused in the editorial series, was really personal freedom, political freedom, economic freedom. With the emphasis on the personal. The notion that we indeed did and do own our own minds and bodies, and that anything from church or state that limits that is inappropriate and inconsistent with the ... society that America is supposed to be.”
-- Hugh Hefner

That Hefner did not spiral down in self-destructive flames but rose in public esteem and personal wealth enraged the moralists more and more.  They knew this would undermine their leverage and privilege, and boy howdy, were they ever right.

(Mind you, they deserved to lose that leverage and privilege because they were promulgating the very hypocrisy Hefner exposed, but if they possessed enough self-awareness to recognize this, they either lacked the shame or possessed the sense of self-preservation not to acknowledge it.)

But all the suaveness and sophistication Hefner turn out to be an act, a role he either consciously or subconsciously chose to assume.

He remained, in his heart of hearts, basically an adolescent.

And for all its slickness and high quality art and editorial contents, it remained little more than a glossy version of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang (Esquire, Hefner’s dream job, also started as a slicker version of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, but it actually grew and expanded over its existence, and even as Hefner was establishing the Playboy brand, Esquire moved into a more genuinely adult point of view).

Hefner’s high brow tastes in art and literature and music were counterbalanced by the fact he viewed sex with a thirteen year old’s point of view.

There can be no denying the heterosexual cis male is far more likely than not to be enticed by suggestive visual images of women, but whether this should be a primary focus of males is a different matter.

Hefner, for all the good he did in exposing hypocrisy, fell prey to his own.  To him the sexual revolution meant men no longer felt any responsibility for their relationships with their partners, that contrarywise women were expected to be more willing to engage in intimate relations with men while not expecting anything in return other then momentary pleasure.

It certainly did not afford them any positions of genuine influence and responsibility in the Playboy™ lifestyle other than secretary and / or model (early in the magazine’s history some were called on to perform double duty).

For all his high ideals, Hefner never embraced female empowerment as anything other than a greater willingness to be arm & eye candy.

But like many adolescents, he did possess an inate sense of fairness, and while he failed to apply this in a truly mature fashion to the topic of male / female relationships, he certainly pushed it when it came to civil rights, gay rights, animal rights, and a host of other causes that championed protecting those who needed protection from the hypocrisy of the powers that be.

That’s why he should have thrown in the towel no later than 1969 and either handed the magazine over to new owners who, like Esquire, would have changed it into something else, or else shut it down at the height of its popularity and prestige.

Instead, Hefner and Playboy started to become increasingly irrelevant, especially as once enthusiastic readers matured and saw the shallowness in much of the magazine.

There were always also-rans circling around Playboy, some modestly successful for a number of years as they found their own niche markets, but in the early and mid-70s Bob Guccione’s Penthouse proved to be a genuine competitor (full disclosure:  I was briefly an editor at Penthouse Comix).

For once, Hefner felt forced to respond to something another publisher was doing (not to get graphic about it, Penthouse’s willingness to show full frontal nudity that Playboy shied away from) and once Hefner took his magazine down that path there was no recovery.

He lost ground to Penthouse among their target demographic even though he maintained market dominance,  then Hustler came along and really exposed the whole skin mag field as incredibly tacky (not that there weren't incredibly tacky men's mags before them, but they were always perceived as bottom feeders; Hustler was a great white whale).

Once people recognized that, there was no recovery for the field as a whole.  People prefer their porn free and online, so the entire skin magazine trade has virtually vanished.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, neither Hefner nor his lifestyle aged well.  For a man so worldly and debonair, he never recognized when it was time for him to retire from the scene.  After a while his hanging on became an embarrassment, like the old geezer trying to teach the young kids all the hot new dances such as the foxtrot and the twist.

I'll separate several overlapping items here:
Playboy as a haven for great illustration and great writing and occasional brilliant insights into contemporary issues, and what the Playboy Philosophy and brand actually represented.

In the former aspect it might represent the last hurrah of traditional illustrative art and high grade short fiction and articles. 

In turn, the Playboy Philosophy itself offers a mixed bag, because while it deserves kudos for confronting complacent middle American hypocrisy, it often only substituted a complacency of its own. 

That's why I say it stayed too long at the party (ditto National Lampoon, which rivaled Playboy in the illustration and fiction departments but also eventually became the very thing it originally strived against).

Knowing when to make a graceful exit is a crucial skill.

© Buzz Dixon