Playboy: out of sync with the modern world?

Pity poor Hugh Hefner. The 83-year-old founder of the Playboy empire and incarnation of the American Dream at its most grandiose faces a distressing double whammy: the loss of his carefully structured love life, and the potential collapse of his business empire. So says today’s Independent in this piece, where we find that two of Hef’s trio of live-in girlfriends have deserted him for younger models while Playboy Enterprises, in the three months to June, has lost $2.1m, with revenues declining by 14 per cent to $73.4m from $85.7m. As the Indy has it: “As a result, the firm has outsourced various parts of its operation and is looking to cut down on its 789 employees – imperiling the future of many of the maids and gardeners (but not, so far, the bunnies) at the mansion.”

Aside from noting that Playboy Enterprises is not a firm, but a company (the two, as m’learned friends will confirm, are different legal entities), Blade would also observe that Playboy is not, perhaps like its owner, the force it once was. In the 1950s and on into the 60s, the magazine was possessed of a certain pre-feminist zeitgeist, carrying interviews, as the Indy notes, “with the likes of Bob Dylan, Fidel Castro, Woody Allen, Johnny Carson, Norman Mailer, Stanley Kubrick and Ray Charles,” while contributors included “Ian Fleming, J Paul Getty, W Somerset Maugham, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.”

But times have changed. The Hef schtick as benevolent patriarch at the head of an apparently endless personal harem is difficult to square with contemporary America’s manifest destiny. Playboy has been hit by rivals such as Hustler and Penthouse – magazines which are somewhat less afraid of their primary purpose – and looks more tired than demure. The credit crunch can hardly have helped, but ultimately the question is this: is there a place for the Hefner world-view in modern Western society?

There are many who would say that Hef is a dinosaur – an amiable one, perhaps, but a dinosaur nevertheless. Perhaps, when he is gone, he will be revered, studied even, and maybe – indeed, almost certainly – a Hollywood director will make a film of his life, a kind of Jurassic Park with cleavage. Meanwhile, for another take on what’s at the heart of all this – depictions of women, sans much, if any, clothing – click this link to read Libby Purves’ views on the great Page Three Girl debate.

The image is of Holly Madison, until recently a girlfriend of Hugh Hefner. Her appearance on behalf of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) poses another question: is erotica featuring nude women OK, if co-opted for a worthy cause? Yet another question might be: did the PETA campaign featuring Madison also feature a male equivalent? 

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