Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
A former Hustler editor celebrates the now-drooping skin mag that taught American lads that a nasty girl with a B cup could be hotter than Hef's mammoth-meloned innocents.
Apr 19, 2002 | Reports that Penthouse boss Bob Guccione may throw in the towel and literally stop the presses at his venerable strokebook are alarming: Can it be that glossy print pornography is headed for oblivion, like "burlesk" and 8-page dirty comics? Are DVDs, the Internet and, of all things, those awful rags featuring tattoos, skateboarder duds and pretty gals in thongs replacing the T&A books that helped millions of chronic masturbators -- myself included -- through our youthful years?
Guccione claims his 37-year-old publication is millions of bucks in the hole and selling only 650,000 copies each month -- down from a high of 5 million back in the good old days of print onanism. He recently told the New York Times that "there is no future for magazines such as Penthouse."
Call me sentimental, but I'm gonna miss Penthouse. Not that I buy it anymore. I don't even pick up Hustler, the magazine where I spent some happy seasons as executive editor nearly a quarter-century ago. Hustler's motto, by the way, used to be "For the rest of the world" -- that is, guys who found Penthouse and Playboy effete. Before Hustler, the choice was between the girls next door with gigantic tits in Playboy or those with smaller breasts in the slightly kinkier Penthouse.
Hustler has always touted its hard-hat-wearing, lunch-pail-carrying blue-collar clientele. And true, we tried to be crude and tasteless in cartoons and other humor sections, and we presented the models as neither sophisticates nor the girls next door. Our Hustler Honeys were more like the hot little number down at the bar who'd likely give you a blow job out in the parking lot if you'd buy her a couple of beers.
Hustler was a breakthrough of sorts in the smut biz. Larry Flynt's genius, as I figured out after some months of his tutelage, was in doing something different each issue, something sexier, something even more outrageous than he'd printed the previous month. And I'll always remember the wise advice he cackled at me in his back-country Kentucky hillbilly drawl: "Lee, always put a pretty girl on the cover of your magazine!" He pronounced "put" "putt."
Although he never admitted it in my presence, I suspect that for all of his bluff and bravado, Larry was for a while a bit jealous of Guccione and of Playboy czar Hugh Hefner. In fact, Guccione was bound and determined to prove that Larry was jealous enough to be out to get him, to discredit him, in the pages of Hustler. You have to miss that kind of competition between skin mag dudes.
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