Nekked ladies

I am an admirer of nekked ladies.  It's a guy thing.  Women do not seem to be interested in admiring nekked guys.  If you pick up a women's magazine you will find lots of pictures of other women and few if any pictures of men.  The women in question are often supermodels.  There are no supermodel guys.  And I think women are looking mostly at the clothes and accessories and not so much at the model inside them.  With guys, well there's a famous joke.  The punch line is "what color is her purse".

Anyhow, this story is actually about Playboy magazine.  Playboy used to be a big thing.  It's still around but nobody pays much attention to it now.  I haven't even glanced at a Playboy in years.  But when I was in college all guys knew about Playboy.  And, like me, they only read it for the articles.

Playboy was started in the '50s by Hugh Hefner.  Before it became popular it's niche was filled by Esquire. Hefner figured that there was room for a magazine that had some editorial heft like Esquire but pushed the boundaries a little harder on the nekked lady front.  He turned out to be right.  By the time I was in college Playboy was "where it's at" and Esquire was a dinosaur.  Now at this time there were also "girlie" magazines.  But they were a back room (or perhaps a barber shop) item that no one admitted to reading in polite company.

Playboy took its editorial content seriously.  Every monthly issue featured an interview with a prominent person.  And they published fiction by big name authors.  And being a good "I only read it for the articles" kind of guy, I read all the interviews.  (I will confess to skipping a lot of the fiction).  Another part of the editorial content was Hefner's "The Playboy Philosophy" contributions.  I quickly cottoned to the fact that I could safely skip these.  It might be useful to look these over now.  Hefner has demonstrated over many decades to have a social conscience, the origins of which can probably be found in these contributions.  He has also turned out to be far less of a hypocrite than many of the social commentators that have clashed with him.

Anyhow, back to the articles, and especially the interviews.  One of these interviews was with Raquel Welch.  Playboy by this point had done photo spreads on many sexy Hollywood actresses, the first and most famous being Marilyn Monroe.  And they originally approached Welch to do a similar spread.  She turned them down but said she would be willing to do an interview.  Playboy was smart enough to go along.  So one month there was the interview, which I carefully read.  Another notable "get" for the interview series was Fidel Castro.  At the time this was a big deal.  We were at the height of the cold war and here was this commie running a country that was just 90 miles from out border and was the home of the "Cuban Missile Crisis".  So I carefully read this interview too.

But then I noticed something.  A few days after I had read the interview I couldn't remember a thing from it.  I was still impressed that Raquel had gotten away with doing an interview rather than a photo spread.  But I couldn't remember a single thing she said.  Similarly with Castro.  He was a big deal and it was important to understand his thinking.  But a few days after the interview I couldn't remember a single thing from it.  This was the beginning of the end of my interest in Playboy.

Once Playboy established that there was money in this sort of thing the imitators started springing up.  The first was Penthouse magazine edited by Bob Guccione, who died recently.  Guccione applied the "take it a little further" formula to Playboy.  The pictures were racier.  But he failed to get Penthouse's editorial content taken seriously.  So Penthouse was seen as a sleazier Playboy imitation.  This did not stop it from making money.  But it made less money than Playboy and started fading sooner.

The other famous imitator was Larry Flint's Hustler.  He applied the "take it a little further" formula to Penthouse.  Almost from the start no one took Hustler seriously.  Most people viewed it as a "skin" magazine pretty much from the start.  Flint decided fairly early on to not buck the image and is now happy to be known as a pornographer.  Flint was shot and paralysed in 1978.  He has been wheelchair bound since.  Flint, like Hefner, has been noted for his support of social causes.  He has actively opposed anti-pornography groups, as one might expect.  But he has also been very active in various free speech efforts.  Finally, he has funded various efforts to "out"  the hypocrisy of various conservatives, most notably Bob Livingston during the Clinton impeachment.

I never regularly read Penthouse or Hustler.  And the whole field has moved on.  The movie "Deep Throat" came out in 1972 and all of a sudden every town of any size had a porno theater.  Hefner went along with the loosening of restraints but decided at some point that things had gone too far.  So Playboy has been relatively sedate for many years now.  I don't know if Penthouse is still in business.  Larry Flint and Hustler definitely still are.  I think that both Hefner and Flint would agree that they are now in different businesses.  In 1982 Hefner put his daughter Christie in charge of the business side of the company.  She continued to run the organization until 2009.  Somehow it's not the same to pick up a "men's" magazine that is put out by a company run by a woman.  But good for her and good for her father.  It certainly damaged his reputation (in some circles) as a woman hater or at least woman denigrater.

Finally, I did most of my Playboy reading during the period before silicone breasts.  Now certainly the women featured in the Playboy photo spreads during this period had unnaturally large breasts.  But they were natural unnaturally large breasts.  Now I am willing to confess to a preference to larger rather than smaller.  This preference is shared widely.  It was the reason that Playboy selected large breasted ladies and it is why the silicone breast implant industry exists today.  But most women do not come by large breasts naturally.  So what's a girl to do?  After years of careful study of this issue, my recommendation is to stick with what you came by naturally.  I prefer small natural breasts to large artificial ones.  And, due to the early education provided by those by gone issues of Playboy, I am very good at spotting the fake ones.