Playboy's pictorial captions: too crude now?

[Peggy Wilkins]

>>>>> "Brian" == Brian Sorgatz <bsorgatz@hotmail.com> writes:

    Brian> Maybe I'm a prude, but I see an unfortunate trend towards
    Brian> vulgarity in the captions to Playboy's pictorials...
    Brian> For me, examples of this fairly sudden loss of class
    Brian> include the following:

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

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

I didn't notice the 10/02 caption (maybe i never read them all), but I
have to admit that the 2/03 Cyber Girls pictorial subheading did make
me do a double take.  It does have a bit of the crude in it; so for me
the question was, did its "cuteness" make up for that.  I still am not
that happy with it, so I guess that for me, the answer is no.

PLAYBOY has a long history of printing tongue-in-cheek word plays; in
fact, they took this almost too far on a regular basis in the
mid-'60s.  I remember coming across many a sentence that just about
made me cringe.

(I would love to give an example of this, because one of them stands
out in my mind, but I don't have my collection at hand and can't look
it up.  I am thinking in particular about the January 1966 article
about the Playboy Mansion in Chicago -- there was a totally
over-the-top sentence in there that has always made me crack up over
its extreme ridiculousness.  I will look it up the next time I'm home;
or maybe someone else knows what I'm referring to.)

As cute as many of those overzealous puns were, I wasn't exactly
disappointed when whoever wrote those things moved on...

Back to the Cyber Girls caption: it certainly does project an aura of
crudeness, so I guess the question for PLAYBOY is, is this the feeling
they want to project.  It does have that frat-boy sensibility.
Personally I would agree with Brian: I prefer that they not go in this
direction.  I don't think I'm being a prude, either -- it certainly
doesn't offend me, I do see the humor in it, and I'm not worried it
would offend others, either -- but it just doesn't project the
attitude I'd like to see in PLAYBOY.  It seems discordant to me to
present such lovely photographs and yet give the accompanying text an
uncorrespondingly lowbrow feel.

    Brian> ... I like the
    Brian> way that Playboy's earlier, more discreet style of caption
    Brian> writing made me feel like a gentleman

I would add again that a more "gentlemanly" context is consistent with
the style of photography.  I think that to become (too) crude in their
humor and cleverness is to shoot themselves in the foot.

    Brian> ... And don't tell me that the captions need to get dirty
    Brian> to compete with the lads' mags. Illiterate slobs won't care
    Brian> one way or the other, so why not satisfy us discriminating
    Brian> men?

I think this is a good point in general.  For example, why shorten all
the articles with some notion of pleasing the complaining people who,
I believe, wouldn't read them anyway.  Please the ones who *do* read
them, the others won't even notice.

Peggy Wilkins
mozart@uchicago.edu