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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
The guilty smiles were everywhere, again. It was all right – practically a civic obligation, really – to buy the March Playboy because the sitting governor of an actual state had once again held forth on weighty subjects. And if, in searching for The Body’s further reflections on organized religion and oversized undergarments, the careless page-turner were to accidentally encounter other bodies, surely he could be excused. Those glossy pages have static cling. The defiant feet Jesse Ventura is wont to plant in his mouth are personal salutes to the Hef, bestowing upon a nation of horny male puritans the permission to indulge. Playboy is unique, and uniquely American. In its nearly half-century of existence, no rival has seriously challenged its market niche. One reason for that is the oddity of the niche – an incongruous jumble of celebrity, haute monde style, respected interviews, tits and ass. But this is, let’s face it, an ingenious jumble. The serious legitimizes the frivolous; haute serves as foil for the flesh. As long as the articles are not completely laughable, the self-conscious American male can always portray himself, however implausibly, as a seeker of edification. Certainly Playboy has thrived on the efforts of good edifiers and the gaffes of the famous. Less well appreciated, however, and certainly less visible are the finely calibrated editorial judgments behind the photographs. Somewhere, some editorial savant is frantically seeking clues to our evolving instincts. You can find his (or her) fingerprints on every decade. The faces change, but the pictorial idiom – the rules that govern the look, the poses, what’s shown, what’s hidden – invariably mirrors an era’s collective id. Who we are is what we look at, and particularly so when the appeal is to our deepest, most irreducible desires. So if you want to know what’s wrong with America, the diagnosis lies in the pages of Playboy. And I don’t mean in the text. Forget about the excuses of horny male puritans. Seekers of social mores or leading cultural indicators should skip the articles and look at the pictures. Janet Pilgrim’s stately visage peers at us from the centerfold of not one but three issues from the 1950s. Plucked from Playboy’s subscription department, she’s enjoyed a certain cult status among the magazine’s devotees – still signing autographs at 65. In her centerfolds she has short, almost silvery blond hair and a regal bearing. One image finds her next to a Christmas tree, swathed and bejeweled in her just-opened gifts: a white fur stole, a glittering choker, two topaz and silver bracelets, star-shaped diamond earrings. Her smile is pearly and formal. Though there’s cleavage aplenty, everything less demure has been lightened into near-invisibility. In the '50s, those centerfolds were not about nudity; their message was luxury. These days, with the roads owned by towering SUVs and a souped-up PC in every family room, it may be difficult to recall an era when material rewards were an aspiration rather than an entitlement. The distortions of nostalgia have refracted the '50s into a time of rampant prosperity, whitebread values, and repressed conformity. That impression is due less to reality than to the persistent residue of pop culture and the mistaken assumption that entertainment then, as now, sought to represent average experience. In fact, the '50s media, by and large, saw their mission in normative terms – to instruct, to portray "what’s best in us," to energize consumers for their advertisers. Jim Anderson always knew best because you are supposed to listen to your father. And Playboy’s readers saw what they were expected to strive for. Naked flesh made the American dream immediate and accessible. Fifties Playboy models also seem strikingly amateurish. There are no flirtatious winks, no pinup come-hithers, no theatrical startles at being caught undressed. In fact, no one seems to have posed them at all. They are dignified and elegant, coifed for a dinner party or a job interview. They just happen to be mostly unclothed. In not knowing who they were supposed to be, they were being entirely themselves. Which is one reason Playboy cannot be considered pornographic. From the beginning, its models have always displayed too much personality. With an internal logic dictated by a single goal – stimulation – the conceits and conventions of pornography demand personality’s absence. Faux ecstasy, the head turned aside and thrown back, the eyes firmly (and unthreateningly) shut, a fetishistic obsession with anonymous body parts – pornography is degrading because it denies the person. Abnegation of self is the ultimate form of submission. But those Playboy centerfold models look you squarely in the eye. Self-possessed and undisguised, they challenge as much as they reveal, their identities as prominent as their bodies. They are women, not toys. By the '70s, censorship codes and obscenity standards had relaxed, and the temperature began to rise. Photographs became much more naturalistic. The '50s images were obviously color-enhanced, with heavily saturated primaries, and delicately soft-focused in the style of turn-of-the-century pictorialist nudes. The effect was always a little bizarre – Alfred Stieglitz meets Andy Warhol. All of that was gone by the '70s, the boudoir forsaken for the bucolic. Ursula Andress gamboling with a goose. Barbi Benton topless in a park, gamely laughing at the parrot with a talon sunk deep into her arm. There are waterfall showers and baptismal dunks in still lagoons, sylphs stretched out on stones. The rules now sanctioned pubic hair. And more. Gone were the strategically placed prop and the infelicitous drape of clothing. Since these were the '70s, a certain degree of bad taste was essential. Barbi on all fours plucking a hanging grape with her mouth. Campy tableaux where uninhibited women met, cuddled, and clowned around, the unstated (and unthreatening) message always the same: Sex is healthy. Sex is mother nature. Take a toke of good sex. Where the '50s models were iconic and unattainable, models in the '70s were all-over genuine. Hairdos were simple, bikini lines unruly, and size didn’t matter. Bridgett Rollins, pictured in the May 1975 centerfold, is not a laboratory-grade specimen. Outdoors somewhere and draped in Spanish moss, she mugs a madwoman for the camera – hands attacking her chestnut hair, mouth open in mock terror at the horticultural assault upon her full-frontal nakedness. She is slender but not buff; her waist is not pinched, her hips do not flare, her chest does not explode from the page. In the '70s, the attractive woman came in many versions. Photographs that urged reality suited a decade when "real" meant desirable. Real experiences were good ones; the plastic was to be shunned (except when woven into sky-blue leisure suits). It is not surprising to find authentic women displacing mannequins just as this country’s gender barriers began to lose anchorage. The madonna-whore dichotomy dictates subservient status for women, who are either too precious to let out of the house or too base to deserve rights. But men of the Me Generation were obviously ready for real women in bare feet. It requires an adult sensibility and a basic level of respect to appreciate women in all their diversity and anatomy. Cowards in search of playthings would find no satisfaction in the Playboys of the '70's. For that, they would have to wait twenty years. Today, naked women have disappeared entirely from the pages of Playboy. Nudes have supplanted them. Today, sleek, hard, archetypal perfection banishes every trace of the familiar. Look at any recent pictorial and you will find all the parts well formed, well tuned and in the right place, spike-heeled and shiny as porcelain. Molded breasts salute stiffly in any direction. There are no blemishes or imperfections. Those unshorn pubic brambles have been tamed into tidy ribbons. Cloned into supermodel sameness, the photos have all the joy of a checklist. The '50s have returned – minus the charm. In an era of increasing productivity and shrinking attention spans, perhaps it should come as no great shock to find the worlds of fashion and celebrity swallowing the world of Playboy. For one thing, the old marketing logic may be starting to rattle. So many other magazines now revel in the skin of celebrity that today’s corner newsstand resembles a Vegas stage revue; it seems nothing will sell without a flash of cheesecake. Eyes today glaze over at text, at least when it exceeds the length of an e-mail message, so magazines have learned to use sex to sell mainstream content. Playboy, of course, has always done just the opposite – relying on mainstream content to make the sale of sex respectable. The growing dependence of the arts, including traditional publishing, on the entertainment industry also ensures an inevitable slide into sameness. This trend is often explained as the inevitable product of in an image-conscious age. But every age treasures its images of itself. We are especially addicted to the visual because the factual bombards us daily. Overwhelmed with revised these and upgraded those, our crania want a rest. Our eyes are open, but they’re short of time. The familiar, the iconic, the unthreatening win us over every time. New experiences ask too much of a punch-drunk mind. By prodding itself into the mainstream so frequently and for so long, Playboy has enshrined a certain edginess for itself – an edginess that won’t disappear even as the content flattens. Serious people still write for the magazine and give interviews. Next time a foot lands in a famous mouth on Playboy’s pages, six-o’clock newscasters will utter the magazine’s name with nary a snicker. Yet, those pages will still be filled with bare bods! It’s a permanent nervous tension: Playboy is the dirty joke you wish you hadn’t told your mother, one of those things you freely talk about other people doing. And there will always be those who see predatory fangs behind the bunny symbol’s mouthless gaze. Asked during his interview about Sable, the pneumatic blond scourge of the wrestling world (and twice a Playboy headliner), Jesse Ventura muses, "T and A will sell." It does. It always has. The vigilant bunny is watching us, returning our vacant stares. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com
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