This was my father's take on it when I e-mailed him the news-
Gas Bandit's Dad, the Khaki Kukri, said:
Indeed. This is a measure of how much American culture has changed just in my lifetime, that you can't make money selling pix of nekkid broads -- T&A can be the teaser for other content, but the other content has to be good (ask HBO).
It is hard to remember now, but when I was a kid it was pretty difficult for a peripubescent boy to actually see his first set of naked tits; in fact, many a young guy in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years was initially aghast at his first glimpse of the conformation of a real woman sans Playtex girdle and conical bra (most of us recovered quickly ;0). Young soldiers and twentysomethings had more options, but they nearly all involved illegal commerce with gangsters, travel to a bad neighborhood, and the risk of being beaten and robbed, not to mention acquiring a loathsome disease or two.
Playboy in those days was one of the first venues publicly selling extramarital sex not as sleazy but as the centerpiece of the sophisticated, urbane lifestyle of upper-middle class affluence that Baby Boomer guys already aspired to -- 'Without the girls,' Hugh Hefner once said, 'I'd be publishing Esquire.' It was the first girlie mag you could buy at the corner newsstand (albeit behind the counter) rather than at that windowless First Amendment Store with sticky floors down by the tracks. And it was the classiest of its ilk. Playboy featured in-depth interviews with the movers and shakers of the day, real investigative journalism, and fiction by literary heavyweight authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer. 'I buy it for the articles!' wailed a generation of young guys, but when the comparison was to Hustler and Stag that was actually true.
Hef's message resonated in the repressed 50's and if-it-feels-good-do-it 60's, but he never quite made the transition to complete respectability and found himself in a crossfire between turbo-Christians from the right and feminazis from the left. After peaking in the early 70's, the Mad Men / Ring-a-ding-ding sensibility of the Playboy message became less and less relevant to how young men saw themselves and who they wanted to be. And with free porn becoming ubiquitous on the internet, these young men found less and less reason to shell out relatively big bucks for the glossy magazine that changed their fathers' lives.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Khaki Kukri
"Quid, me anxius sum?"
