Playboy's pictorial captions: too crude now?

[Brian Sorgatz]

Maybe I'm a prude, but I see an unfortunate trend towards vulgarity in the 
captions to Playboy's pictorials. Yes, this magazine has always contained a 
lot of good-natured raunch, but the pictorials are supposed to have a more 
gallant sensibility. They're supposed to sound like James Bond or Cary 
Grant, not like dialogue from The Man Show. And don't tell me that the 
captions need to get dirty to compete with the lads' mags. Illiterate slobs 
won't care one way or the other, so why not satisfy us discriminating men?

For me, examples of this fairly sudden loss of class include the following:

Girls of the Big 12, October 2002: "UT's Rachel Balbert gives us a 
Longhorn."

Cyber Girls, February 2003: "Control your joystick. . . . These girls may 
make you want to download."

Of course, any healthy heterosexual male will make these kinds of statements 
in his inner monologue. But I like the way that Playboy's earlier, more 
discreet style of caption writing made me feel like a gentleman. It's 
flattering to be implicitly presented as a nice boy, just as the models are 
presented as nice girls. (Unlike the utopian sexual revolutionaries, I 
suspect that human beings will always have at least a mild inclination to 
see sex as dirty. The girl-next-door and boy-next-door messages of Playboy 
will always be gloriously counterintuitive in some way.)

I believe Playboy's writers should follow the example set by Jeff Cohen in 
his introductions to the special editions. Many of these are delightfully 
poetic tributes to female beauty and sex appeal. By infusing male lust with 
a feminine sense of romance and pageantry, they remind us of the somewhat 
androgynous quality that makes Playboy so special.

Brian Sorgatz

_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online  
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963