More skin or less....

[Steve Sloca]

Dan Stiffler and I have frequently debated the direction Playboy
should be taking on the level of explicitness in the magazine.  He
sums up our positions as follows: "To quickly review the main
contention, I was and remain in favor of adjusting PLAYBOY's newsstand
explicitness so that it can regain marketplace that it has lost in the
post-Meese era, while Steve Sloca has argued for an even more explicit
magazine."

I was reminded of this debate again today when I added to my
collection of 1970's French and Spanish editions of Playboy.  One of
my new acquisitions has a CF of Karen Morton which is identical to the
US version, but without any crotch airbrushing.  Another has a copy of
that great rear end photo of Michelle Drake, where she is bending down
and touching her ankle.  In the US edition, she has a huge, spikey
bush of pubic hair between her wide-spread thighs.  But that is NOT
how she really looks from that angle.  The true version is much more
erotic, and yet more innocent, since the spikey bush made Michelle
look "meaner" than she really is in the photo.  Similarly, there are
copies of well-known photos of Patti McGuire, Lillian Muller and
Dorothy Mays which show these PM's as they really were, as opposed to
how the US edition's censors tried to portray them.  All of them show
a degree of eroticism, yet GNP naturalism, which make them far more
attractive to me than the US edition's edited versions.

In addition, these issues--which, remember, are from 30 years
ago!--feature pictorials of some young looking schoolgirls in uniform,
laughing as they undress each other and examine each other's breasts,
and a pictorial of a beautiful Spanish cover model and TV star nude
with her three children, the oldest of whom looks to be about 8.  The
latter pictorial shows her children bathing her, brushing her long
hair and holding her hand as she leads them to their beds--fully
frontally nude!  It is actually a very beautiful and touching feature,
but one which Playboy wouldn't dare publish in this country.  It is no
wonder that Europeans think that Americans are up-tight prudes, led by
a reckless cowboy who sends Americans off to die in unnecessary wars,
but is afraid to let women have a choice as to what happens to their
bodies.

To me, the "debate" has only one answer: if Playboy is to be a leader
once again, as it was in the '60's and '70's, in making sex and
sexuality a natural part of a Playboy Man's (or Woman's) life, it
cannot bow down to Bush (what an ironic name for a prude), Ashcroft,
Wal-Mart, nervous advertisers--and the Religious Right which preaches
and pushes the anti-sex platform each of these groups espouse--by
covering up its Playmates and Playboy models.  If Hefner had listened
to this bunch in 1953, there would not be any Playboy; and one of his
major achievements which earns our respect was to make full frontal
nudity so respectable and acceptable to a majority of American men in
the '70's that the advertisers did NOT stay away, but fell all over
themselves trying to advertise in Playboy (the '70's issues have far
more advertisements than do today's issues).  Hef was a visionary
then; and it is precisely that vision that has been lost by today's
corporate monolith, now run by a Maxim cast-off who seems to think
American men are perpetual juveniles and Hef's daughter, who seems to
have no clue as to what the Sexual Revolution was all about.

Let's face it.  Those who support the Bush/Ashcroft/Religious Right
agenda are totally "backward" (like Victorian era) in their thinking
about sex compared to most Europeans; and their schizophrenia about
not allowing full nudity in our media while they secretly download
porn by the bucketful is a form of mental illness which makes them
unfit to pretend to leadership of the Free World.  How can they claim
to support "freedom" when they want to restrict how much a woman
willingly shows of her body!  To me, that is just an Americanized
version of the Taliban and their burkas; and any action by Playboy
which validates that Taliban-like policy deserves our contempt.

We are entering an era when culture is becoming more global every
year; and if Playboy is to be part of that culture, it has to toss off
the chains of sexual repression once again and bring into the
open--with class--the deep, inherent and very explicit sexuality which
all of us share in our genes.  A retreat to the era of "fig leaves" in
fear of the Religious Right would be a repudiation of all that Playboy
once stood for.  It would mark the end of the "Playboy Philosophy" and
would become a sad epitaph to a once-glorious chapter in the history
of American media and culture.