by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While as I understand it, Playboy Magazine has begun publishing again, the fact remains that the magazine has zero social significance these days. It’s all very curious to me because as it stands there really isn’t anywhere for some young starlet to try to change her image in the eyes of Hollywood producers other than being in an arty movie like Poor Things or Kinds of Kindness.
It used to be if someone like Emma Stone wanted to raise eyebrows in Hollywood, she would pose in Playboy and she might get a whole variety of different type of roles. Now, she has to just get nekkid in arthouse movies.
But it really makes you wonder about the impact of the Internet when it comes to human expression of sexuality. It used to be, “Back in my day…”, that Playboy had pictures of really hot women and really thought provoking interviews to go with them.
And it would seem to me that such a combination should be timeless and universal in the publishing world but….nope. It seems as though people just want straight porn and don’t really care about the interviews. And it’s even more interesting that the magazine that is closest to Playboy these days, Treats!, has no editorial copy and the pictures are far more…clinical than anything Playboy ever featured
I would pick up a few copies of Treats! but for the fact that they would inevitable be discovered by my family and they would be aghast.
So, I don’t know. I just don’t know the answer to the question of why Playboy can’t exist in the modern media world. One option might be to sell it to a bunch of feminists and have them still have nude pictures but the copy be really, really ardently feminist. Maybe?
But, alas, I think it’s over for Playboy. It might be back in print, but it will never be what it once was.
