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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
All sorts of people read Playboy then. A gay friend of mine who grew up in Louisiana in the '60s was a subscriber. For him, as a teenager, the magazine "represented what all magazines represented to me, which was the city." It opened avenues of sophistication to him and, he says, since it was pro-sex, it offered a gay teen a sense that there was nothing to be ashamed of. My wife attended journalism school in the early '80s where her professors regularly advised their students to read the magazine for its editorial excellence.
The December 1968 issue of Playboy is coveted by collectors largely because of Miss December, Cynthia Myers, soon to find cult status for her role in Russ Meyer's (no relation) "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." But to those of us old enough to remember the golden age of American magazines, the sexiest thing in that Playboy are those lovely pages and pages of unbroken, three-column type. No call-outs, no charts, no graphics. The people in charge assumed that if you were buying a magazine, you wanted to actually read it.
Reading is the last thing that the people who put together most mainstream magazines seem to expect their readers to do. Look at Maxim or FHM, the "lads" magazines that have been such a success with the male 18-34 audience, or even the "lifestyle" glossy InStyle. Now try to find an article. You'll have an easier time finding a Tarkovsky movie at Blockbuster. Charts, all of them with pictures crowding out words, have replaced writing. There is nowhere for your eyes to rest on a page. Often it takes a minute to figure out the flow of type that's there -- where it begins, where one column continues.
The overwhelming message these magazines give their readers is that they don't believe the readers have either the interest or the mental ability to read articles. Ed Needham, the new editor of Rolling Stone and a former editor at FHM, put it a little more diplomatically in the New York Times recently, saying that he didn't think that people had time to read anymore. The logical response to that statement would be that magazines shouldn't be catering to the audience that doesn't have time to read.
Unfortunately, they are. Not only are venues for serious writing shrinking, the editorial space inside the magazines is too. Falling advertising revenues, the impact of celebrity journalism (not just journalism about celebrities but profiles that are arranged and preapproved by the stars' publicity agents), and the mad scramble to duplicate success formulas have had a devastating effect on journalism. There is still plenty of good writing to be found out there, and sometimes in unexpected places (Elle's book section is often good, for instance). What doesn't exist is a print magazine that's a must-read -- as opposed to a must-skim -- every month. Individual articles can still make an impact. But magazines of all stripes have become like TV shows that drag on from season to season long after the things that made them new and exciting and fun have become rote.
Sadly, Playboy is one of them. Apart from an interview with Willie Nelson and the always fun feature "The Playboy Forum" (devoted, as ever, to the encroachment on civil liberties), the November 2002 issue features barely one interesting article. And what is there doesn't reflect the sophistication the magazine once had; 20Q, a feature that could be described as the Playboy Interview Lite, features Rams running back Marshall Faulk who voices his support for gays in the NFL by saying, "I'd have nothing against anybody if they were gay, but really, I don't want to know ... I don't want to know what so-and-so did with his wife last night, so why would I want to know if he's smoking the pole?"
According to a recent article in Newsday, Playboy's current circulation is 3.2 million, the highest of any men's magazine, but that's still less than half of the 7 million highwater mark of the '70s. It's not hard to guess why. If few people are reading Playboy for the articles anymore, probably fewer are reading it for the girls. In the '60s and early '70s, Playboy was a socially acceptable way of looking at softcore porn. But with the early '70s era of porno chic, and with the appearance of Penthouse, Hustler and dozens of other skin mags, Playboy -- which has never been raunchy -- began to lose readers. Now with hardcore porn as close to being socially acceptable as it ever will be, when it can be accessed via the Internet and pay cable and by renting or buying videos and DVDs, when even Playboy's longtime competitor Penthouse features hardcore (complete with insertion and cum shots) and is teetering on the brink of extinction, Playboy's demure approach seems quaint.
Into this wasteland steps James Kaminsky, the 41-year-old executive editor of Maxim who became the editorial director of Playboy on Oct. 7. In the Newsday profile Kaminsky talked about how he grew up reading Playboy, calling it "the magazine that got me into magazines in the first place." He says he intends to keep the magazine's journalism and profiles, and you get the feeling that he has enough affection for what the magazine used to be that he really means to restore some of its glory. Hugh Hefner seems to share that desire. In a piece in the New York Observer, Hefner says that he wants the magazine to be better: "What I'm looking for is a contemporary version of what Playboy meant in the '60s and '70s."
God only knows how much Kaminsky will be able to accomplish. It will depend on whether he has a free hand against the advertising department and if he has the will, skill and stamina to really remake the magazine. And let's face it, you can't reheat a soufflé. But giving Kaminsky the benefit of the doubt, and as a disappointed admirer of Playboy, I'd like to offer him some suggestions of things he could do.
