Why are these women with no sex organs posing for photographs so clearly meant to make us think about sex? One image of a woman with an artfully placed leaf or credenza blocking our view of her crotch is fine once you flip through an entire magazine’s worth, you start to wonder not just who the magazine is for but who the magazine is showing us. What constitutes “nude” in publishing terms is a matter of opinion, but to show women so clearly nude and yet not show their genital area - or worse, to blot it out - is at best comical and at worst borderline disturbing. My gripe with this new, “bold” era of Playboy is that one is constantly straining to see something so conspicuously absent. The gaze of Playboy was always male, but it was almost never terrifying. Where more hardcore magazines offered too much information for me, Playboy, which had drawn some probably arbitrary but fairly rational lines about what nudity it offered, blurred the hard edges off of things a little and offered a picture of the female form that seemed, well, recognizable. Not too challenging, but an educational, titillating representation of what any girl could expect from womanhood. Penthouse was a little horrifying, a little too medically accurate and graphic: Playboy or better yet, Playgirl (gasp) was the goods. If you found yourself, as I often did as a kid, rifling through your friends’ fathers’ nightstands, Playboy was what you wanted to find. Playboy was always the “best” of the mainstream skin mags. Unlike most men, I didn’t read Playboy for the articles: I was there for the breasts, the butts, and the vaginas. It’s not a literal fig leaf, I don’t think, but the joke isn’t lost on me, if there’s a joke. The centerfold shot is of a woman holding a giant leaf over her crotch. One shot of a woman’s crotch in sheer black underwear bears the remarkable mouseprint of Photoshop: Where there should be lines or creases, there is simply blank space. Flipping through the issue, I see breasts and butts, but no vaginas no pubes no labia. Naked is normal, if norms exist! What’s interesting about the new “normal” nudity of Playboy is that it doesn’t resemble the nakedness of Playboy of yore. ‘Naked is normal,’ it reads,” reported The New York Times. “In a nod to the end of its experimentation, Playboy’s new issue features a blaring headline on the cover, with a letter artfully placed over part of a topless model. The cover of the first “back to nudity” Playboy, for March / April 2017, featuring “Miss March” Elizabeth Elam, proclaims that “Naked is normal,” and most of the articles written about it swallow that bold statement whole. Today we’re taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are,” he said. “Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s son Cooper, who came to the business as chief creative officer last year, was publicly critical of the decision, saying, at the time, “What the hell is the company doing?” and referring to the nudity as part of the magazine’s “DNA.” Two weeks ago, amid reports that the magazine was shedding subscribers, the younger Hefner issued a statement on Twitter saying that Playboy was bringing nudity back after less than a year. But Forbes, who hailed the change for… changing, suggested that the business no longer favored so much skin. The reasoning at the time, as founder Hugh Hefner wrote, was that our world “bears almost no resemblance” to the one in which the magazine was born in 1953. Last October, Playboy announced that it was going to rid itself of its most prevalent, and seemingly valuable, feature: the nudes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |