Playboy & Sons

Dr. Johnson remarks that a man might lie as happily in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess, were it not for imagination. The insight that sex appeal is much more than just physical appeal is the basis, oddly enough, of Playboy’s success. Hugh Hefner describes himself as a man of romantic temperament, and in a sense he is surely right: the Playmates are famous for their wholesome, girl-next-door quality, which has to do partly with their fresh looks, but also with the magazine’s courtly format that supplies, however leeringly, their social credentials. It shows them in elegant dress, in ritzy surroundings, at civilized activities, as well as in the buff. They may not be duchesses but, by golly, they aren’t chambermaids, let alone your common tramps. They are just the sort of girls to appeal to a shallow, upwardly mobile young fellow of the sort whose aspirations and self-delusions are so savvily played on by the rest of the magazine. It’s respectable middle-class porn, whose decent drapery surrounds the consumer’s appetite rather than the Playmate’s flesh—vice, even solitary vice, losing half its evil by losing all its grossness.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Playboy & Sons

Dr. Johnson remarks that a man might lie as happily in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess, were it not for imagination. The insight that sex appeal is much more than just physical appeal is the basis, oddly enough, of Playboy’s success. Hugh Hefner describes himself as a man of romantic temperament, and in a sense he is surely right: the Playmates are famous for their wholesome, girl-next-door quality, which has to do partly with their fresh looks, but also with the magazine’s courtly format that supplies, however leeringly, their social credentials. It shows them in elegant dress, in ritzy surroundings, at civilized activities, as well as in the buff. They may not be duchesses but, by golly, they aren’t chambermaids, let alone your common tramps. They are just the sort of girls to appeal to a shallow, upwardly mobile young fellow of the sort whose aspirations and self-delusions are so savvily played on by the rest of the magazine. It’s respectable middle-class porn, whose decent drapery surrounds the consumer’s appetite rather than the Playmate’s flesh—vice, even solitary vice, losing half its evil by losing all its grossness.