In the early days when Playboy was new, the magazine published serious literature, articles, & interviews, along with pictures of naked ladies. Young men caught with a Playboy would say. “I just read it for the articles”! A laugh and, “Yeah, Sure”, would follow. It was a standard joke.
Naked ladies always outsell literature. Combining naked ladies with worthwhile reading was good strategy. Beyond strategy, the writing in Playboy was always excellent. I know this because I not only looked at the naked ladies, I really did read the articles.
Playboy provided good cover for boyish gawking at
naked ladies, it also provided a rare market for serious writing. Publisher, Hugh Hefner, published the best writers of the era.
He could have used lesser writers if the only point was excuse for looking at naked ladies.
Hugh Hefner had more in mind.
He saw himself as a Renaissance Man of the modern age. The naked ladies were there to promote his vision of a more sexually open society. The literature was there to promote his hope for literary refinement in young men otherwise driven only by hormones
The magazine also published reviews of music, movies, books, stereo equipment, cars clothing, lifestyles, and anything else hip young urban males should know about.
Later, his Playboy Club promoted the same. I think he envisioned the Playboy Club as a twentieth-century version of the seventeenth-century Hell-Fire club, only this time the sexual extravagances (in the sexually liberated society he would help
to create) would be socially tolerable.
Naughty lusts would blend seamlessly with the finer concerns of music, art, and literature.
The Renaissance Hefner hoped for never quite materialized.
The magazine limps on, a shadow of its former self.
I don’t know if the Playboy clubs are still in business.
The sexual revolution ended in nouveau sexual diseases and ongoing moral dissolution. Young urban males remain no more refined than before, arguably less hip.
Hefner’s Playboy didn’t do all that much damage, but
It did set the ball rolling.
Playboy, for better or worse, will long be remembered
in the cultural history of twentieth-century America. It caused
a stir, and It made Hugh Hefner a very rich man.
The writers published in Playboy don’t need defending: Jack Kerouac, Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury, Norman Mailer, Alice Denham, Arthur C. Clarke, Roald Dahl, Ursula Le Guin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and so many more.
Hefner once joked, surrounded by a bevy of Centerfolds, “Ladies, without you I would have had nothing but a literary magazine”.
“I selected a rabbit as the symbol for the magazine
because of the humorous sexual connotation, and because
he offered an image that was frisky and playful.
----- Hugh Hefner -----
“I selected a rabbit as the symbol for the magazine
because of the humorous sexual connotation, and because
he offered an image that was frisky and playful.
----- Hugh Hefner -----