Playboy's in trouble -- but it's not good news
January 3, 2009
The economy is apparently hitting the Playboy pornographic empire, at least according to an article in December in Business Week. The magazine which was famously described as being good for women, providing that women knew what they were good for, is struggling, but before you crack open the champagne, it is no cause for rejoicing those who deplore what it represent: the problem Playboy faces is twofold -- the `softcore' content on which it made its reputation is now so mainstream that equivalent material can be found in many magazines that would never be considered pornographic; and it cannot compete with the harder, more explicit stuff that is now easily available to any ten year old child with a computer and a modem. As one pundit on Tina Brown's politics and culture webpage, The Daily Beast, asked, `Who buys a skin mag these days?'
Many will see some poetic justice in this: Hefner helped to mainstream porn; and, in so doing, he pushed the envelope and laid the groundwork for more extreme material to gain a foothold; now his empire must face the earthly consequences of the markets it helped to foster. Christians, however, will take little satisfaction in knowing that Playboy's problems arise from the fact that it is just too ordinary these days.
There is another aspect to this, however, which is perhaps just as disturbing as what it says about the market for porn in modern society: the slow but steady abolition of the distinction between the public and the private. Now notions of privacy, even sexual privacy, have changed over the years: in medieval and early modern Europe, the wedding night of a public figure, (Luther is a good example) would be witnessed by a thrid party, to ensure that everything was done decently and in order, so to speak. Similar practices of public copulation at the start of married life often took place in peasant societies; and, even subsequent to marriage, a poor family, living in a house of one or two rooms, could scarcely expect the kind of sexual privacy which many of us would now see as the norm. Nevertheless, the public nature of sexual activity in contemporary society is different, driven it seems not so much by social necessity as by moral iconoclasm, hedonism, voyeurism, and exhibitionism.
For all of the public nature of some sexual acts in the past, it is still arguable that sexual intercourse was, at least in terms of social ideals and aspirations, a relatively private matter even in premodern societies. Sex as common third-party entertainment was not, as far as I know, mainstreamed and respectable even in the kind of societies to which I alluded above. Thus, Augustine once observed that it was strange how pregnant women in his day delighted to show off their swelling tummies and talk about the baby to come, but would have died of embarrassment if they had actually been caught in the act of sexual intercourse which started the whole process. For the Bishop of Hippo, this formed part of a (none too convincing) argument that post-Fall sexual pleasure was bad. Nevertheless, while his conclusion made be unwarranted, the argument is interesting because it depends upon notions of what is public and what is private, and upon ideas of decency and decorum which undergird such notions. The mainstreaming of pornography, and the rise of amateur web pornography, witnesses not simply to the insatiability of the fallen human appetite for sexual pleasure; it is also an (albeit extreme) piece of evidence that the whole idea of what is public and what is private is being radically reconfigured in our society; indeed, the distinction may, just possibly, be about to be abolished in its entirety. When `reality TV shows' top the viewing polls, when the internet allows anyone to observe my town, my street, my house, by satellite cam, when anybody can post video of themselves doing anything -- from the mundane to the obscene -- online, then the distinction of the public and the private -- and the concomitant notions of decency and decorum upon which the distinction depends-- is rendered meaningless. What is left is little more than a hedonistic wasteland inhabited by exhibitionists and voyeurs, where the tawdry and the trivial must inevitably triumph.
I'd always assumed that learning that a magazine like Playboy was in financial difficulties would be an answer to prayer and a source of rejoicing. Given what it says about society, however, I am perhaps more inclined to mourning and lamentation at this point.
Many will see some poetic justice in this: Hefner helped to mainstream porn; and, in so doing, he pushed the envelope and laid the groundwork for more extreme material to gain a foothold; now his empire must face the earthly consequences of the markets it helped to foster. Christians, however, will take little satisfaction in knowing that Playboy's problems arise from the fact that it is just too ordinary these days.
There is another aspect to this, however, which is perhaps just as disturbing as what it says about the market for porn in modern society: the slow but steady abolition of the distinction between the public and the private. Now notions of privacy, even sexual privacy, have changed over the years: in medieval and early modern Europe, the wedding night of a public figure, (Luther is a good example) would be witnessed by a thrid party, to ensure that everything was done decently and in order, so to speak. Similar practices of public copulation at the start of married life often took place in peasant societies; and, even subsequent to marriage, a poor family, living in a house of one or two rooms, could scarcely expect the kind of sexual privacy which many of us would now see as the norm. Nevertheless, the public nature of sexual activity in contemporary society is different, driven it seems not so much by social necessity as by moral iconoclasm, hedonism, voyeurism, and exhibitionism.
For all of the public nature of some sexual acts in the past, it is still arguable that sexual intercourse was, at least in terms of social ideals and aspirations, a relatively private matter even in premodern societies. Sex as common third-party entertainment was not, as far as I know, mainstreamed and respectable even in the kind of societies to which I alluded above. Thus, Augustine once observed that it was strange how pregnant women in his day delighted to show off their swelling tummies and talk about the baby to come, but would have died of embarrassment if they had actually been caught in the act of sexual intercourse which started the whole process. For the Bishop of Hippo, this formed part of a (none too convincing) argument that post-Fall sexual pleasure was bad. Nevertheless, while his conclusion made be unwarranted, the argument is interesting because it depends upon notions of what is public and what is private, and upon ideas of decency and decorum which undergird such notions. The mainstreaming of pornography, and the rise of amateur web pornography, witnesses not simply to the insatiability of the fallen human appetite for sexual pleasure; it is also an (albeit extreme) piece of evidence that the whole idea of what is public and what is private is being radically reconfigured in our society; indeed, the distinction may, just possibly, be about to be abolished in its entirety. When `reality TV shows' top the viewing polls, when the internet allows anyone to observe my town, my street, my house, by satellite cam, when anybody can post video of themselves doing anything -- from the mundane to the obscene -- online, then the distinction of the public and the private -- and the concomitant notions of decency and decorum upon which the distinction depends-- is rendered meaningless. What is left is little more than a hedonistic wasteland inhabited by exhibitionists and voyeurs, where the tawdry and the trivial must inevitably triumph.
I'd always assumed that learning that a magazine like Playboy was in financial difficulties would be an answer to prayer and a source of rejoicing. Given what it says about society, however, I am perhaps more inclined to mourning and lamentation at this point.
