The Right’s Playboy Problem

O ne of the surprising things I have learned while writing about the pornography business is that it is not easy to make money in porn, which is one of the many things that industry has in common with political journalism.

That wasn’t always the case. Magazine publishers such as Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione grew vastly wealthy on the skin trade, and less glamorous film producers and videotape distributors made splendid fortunes in the heyday of the industry, which modern pornography entrepreneurs still wistfully describe as the “golden age.” The sweet spot was the years between the widespread availability of VCRs and the widespread availability of streaming video: Pornographers peddling VHS tapes might have lost some revenue to video piracy and the secondary market, but that was more than made up for by the spike in porn consumption the VCR made possible — it was no longer necessary to visit a seedy theater or bookstore, and porn boomed.

The Internet changed that. And it did so in almost exactly the way it changed political journalism: Content became largely free, and people who had been consumers exclusively became content producers as well. Selling subscriptions and advertising became difficult or impossible. And so revenue crashed. The quality of the product may have declined, but that did not turn out to matter very much to the vast majority of consumers: It might have had inferior production values, but, being liberated from major media properties and their liabilities, it was more outlandish and outrageous, which is what matters most.

There was a change that came before this technological change — a cultural change.

The allure of pornography resides in part in its transgressiveness, in the attention it lavishes on the forbidden. Playboy was the first to grapple with that challenge, as its relatively restrained nudes were made to compete in a pornography market that took an inevitable turn toward the hardcore. Playboy’s old centerfolds were about as transgressive as Renoirs compared to what soon came to be available. And so Playboy ended up being the thing people joked about its being: a magazine one read for the articles, which included the work of such heavyweight writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and William F. Buckley Jr.

Playboy’s ethos was perhaps most perfectly expressed in the public career of Bill Clinton, a politically progressive, Yale- and Oxford-educated gentleman-hedonist, one who would have been perplexed by the suggestion that his professed feminism was at odds with his treatment of women. When Clinton was impeached (just the one time) as a result of the Monica Lewinsky affair, his apologists lectured his critics in distinctly Hefnerian terms: Americans were prudish victims of their Puritan patrimony, unsophisticated when compared to their Continental cousins who, with a resigned Gallic shrug, judged the private lives of public men irrelevant to public affairs. Roman Polanski was generally excused, and sometimes lionized, in Hollywood on the same grounds. Variations on the theme accompanied the careers of such figures as Warren Beatty and Steven Tyler, who at one point became the legal custodian of his 14-year-old girlfriend. Harvey Weinstein seems to have believed that he was operating in an era in which the Playboy ethos stood regnant and impregnable, only coming to understand the tenets of its successor faith when he became the Great Satan in its divine cosmology.

Playboy weathered the new hardcore competition and, to some extent, the decline in the Playboy ethos in the same way: by becoming an interesting literary magazine. (Today’s new, woke Playboy is a different kind of cultural creature, thoroughly Millennial, purging from its archives my own name and work, no doubt among others, as too controversial.) But many other companies in the smut business were unable to adapt: They had neither the taste nor the inclination to become the sort of media company Playboy was at its height, nor the ability to compete with the pornographic Library of Alexandria available to everybody with a computer. Penthouse went from a circulation of more than 5 million to bankruptcy.

What political journalism failed to learn from the example of pornography is that it sells — to a limited but significant extent — a version of the same product: titillation. The titillation is not (usually) sexual in political journalism, but people get an emotional charge out of seeing the people they consider their enemies and rivals criticized or insulted — “owned!” or “destroyed!” in the Internet language of five minutes ago. And, as with pornography, a non-trivial share of journalism consumers will seek out more extreme, more outrageous, and more exotic material in pursuit of the thrill that comes from the same source as it does in pornography: transgression.

We have seen this play out on the right during the Trump years. Fox News cannot afford to be as outrageous or irresponsible as Newsmax or ONAN (I know, I know, but that’s how I’m going to write it), but Newsmax and ONAN cannot as a practical business matter (or, in some cases, as a legal matter) offer up the kind of content transgression-seeking partisans can get online from QAnon cultists, anonymous social-media accounts, message boards, and the like. A figure such as Sean Hannity can’t do a show like Firing Line, because he doesn’t have that kind of talent or wit, but he also can’t compete with whatever has replaced Alex Jones in his feverish media ecosystem.

And so the squeeze is on.

Already, conservative talk-radio networks are trying to reinvent themselves and their content to compete in the new QAnon-dominated post-Trump market, and the race to the bottom among right-wing “news” channels — no, they are nowhere close to hitting it yet — will be very amusing to watch. The same dynamic is complicating not only journalism but politics proper as well, as the Republican Party tries to figure out how to be capacious enough to include both QAnon kooks such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) and conservatives such as Senator Mitt Romney and Senator Ben Sasse. Which way will the balance tilt?

In his famous “House Divided” speech, Abraham Lincoln argued that the Union could not continue to endure half-slave and half-free, and said that he did not expect the Union to collapse but did expect it to become all one thing or all the other. The conservative movement, its journalistic organs, and the political apparatus with which it is associated have a similar choice before them, and these will at some point be all one thing or all the other. This house cannot long endure half-kook and half-conservative.