Roger Ebert
eulogizes a man who isn't dead, Hugh Hefner, writing:
Hefner and Playboy have been around so long that not everyone remembers what America used to be like. It was sexually repressed and socially restrictive. College students were expelled for having sex out of wedlock. Homosexuality and miscegenation were illegal. Freedom of choice was denied. McCarthyism still cast a pall over the freedom of speech. Many people joined in the fight against that unhealthy society. Hefner was one of them, and a case can can be made that Playboy had a greater influence on our society in its first half-century than any other magazine.
No doubt Playboy objectified women and all the rest of it. But it also celebrated them, and freed their bodies from the stigma of shame. It calmly explained that women were sexual beings, and experienced orgasms, and that photographs of their bodies were not by definition "dirty pictures." Not many of today's feminists (of either gender) would be able to endure America's attitudes about women in the 1950s.
And while all of that is true, it does elide over the difference between Playboy and its two major competitors. To that, I would like to eulogize a man who died last week, and who taught us better things about women than Hugh Hefner: Bob Guccione.
Playboy's two major competitors throughout most of its history were Penthouse and Hustler. There were themes to Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler, and those themes affected an entire generation of young men, my teenage self included.
In Hustler, the story was obvious: slutty women will have sex, even wild, freaky sex, for money. Larry Flint, Hustler's editor and publisher, threw dollar signs around as often as he did beaver shots, and Hustler did nothing to discourage the reader from connecting the two. Having respect for women was not something men had to think too much about.
Playboy had a message that could be accused of similarity: achingly beautiful women are attracted to handsome, sophisticated, or wealthy gentlemen. These women deserved respect, even (or especially) if they chose to have sex. Gentlemen did not ask for, and did not particularly seek, wild and freaky sex. Even more importantly, for men typical sex was something of a virtuoso performance, with demanding gradations of demonstrable skill.
Bob Guccione's Penthouse, on the third hand, offered us a vision of women who
liked sex, all kinds, and weren't afraid of it. Even more importantly, guys could be taught to be unfraid of women who liked sex. Penthouse did more to normalize the notion of a woman who knew what she wanted, who asked for it, and who expected nothing more from her partner other than his willingness and his respect up front. Guccione's universe was one of playfulness and raw, pleasurable, spontaneous sexuality, without demanding anything more of either party other than a willingness to show up and get naked. Guccione admitted that women were more than
sex objects, they were
sexual beings.
Oh, have no doubt that Guccione sometimes bought into the commodity model of sexuality (in which one party, usually the woman, "has" something, and the man must "get" it somehow). Yet somehow, far more often than either Flynt or Hefner, Guccione also described well the performance model of sexuality (in which partnered sex is a collaboration) and in which the men and women involved were attempting to achieve something
together.
And part of that was reflected in the names of the publications: A "playboy" or a "hustler" were things you had to be, often after enourmous effort, or a selling of one's soul. On the other hand, a penthouse was just someplace you had to
be to have interesting things happen. (Penthouses are, still, expensive, but you didn't have to own the place, just be lucky enough to be there at the right time.)
Guccione also did the world a huge favor with the earliest versions of Penthouse Forum (the standalone magazine, not the letters section of Penthouse magazine itself), in which he hired a number of investigative reporters throughout the 1970s to uncover what was really happening to sex in America. Forum popularized the work of people like Masters & Johnson, Alex Comfort, Shere Hite, Philip Nobile, and many more who, in some sense, atomized sex into its component parts but who also taught us that each part by itself was comprehensible, understandable, and not scary, and then re-assembled them into an equally comprehensible, and not alltogether frightening, narrative of human sexuality.
Playboy may have philosophized, and Hustler lusted, but Penthouse taught. Penthouse taught us that sex didn't always have to be based on a predator/prey notion of men and women, and even if it was, sometimes the woman was the predator, and that if you played that game knowing it was a game, that could be fun.
It's a shame that Penthouse collapsed under the Internet, while Playboy and Hustler hung on by offering more and more of the same.
Although maybe that
is the remains of Bob Guccione's legacy. Playboy and Hustler continue to sell a sexual lifestyle that is unattainable, commodity-oriented. Penthouse, on the other hand, gave us the idea that sex was fun. Sometimes awkward, sometimes surprising, occasionally dangerous, but usually fun. We've learned that lesson.
I won't miss Larry Flynt when he dies. I'll miss Hefner a little. I already miss Guccione. Of the three, I think we owed him the most, and rewarded him the least.
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