Hugh Hefner
He swings. He misses.
By David Plotz
July 21, 2000

In late 1999, Salon qualified the achievements of a then 73-year old Hef as a brilliant career: "Hefner's impact on notions of domesticity and single life, on male and female identity, on fashion, on publishing, on corporate branding wisdom — even on our understanding of the postal system — his impact on all of these are abundantly evident." And let's admit it, Hef proved a nicer subject for canonization than Larry Flynt. Despite Playboy's evidence to his adolescent longing for a display of nice bosoms, it was a romantic longing at heart. "Whatever Hefner believed respect for the fairer sex actually entailed, it was a respect he held at the core of his company's enterprises. When the '70s exploded with Playboy imitators — Penthouse, Hustler — Hefner responded with a newfound restraint... there are limits, Hef decided, to what a classy rag like Playboy will show."

Not even a year later, Slate would have none of that. If Hef was hip again it wasn't because he was on top of things; it was because he was retro: "With no more taste for self-criticism than for middle-aged women, [Hef] doesn't see the poignancy in his return. He doesn't seem to recognize that he has been revived not because he is cool, but because he's not. He is the human bellbottom, an ancient artifact unearthed for giggles, soon to be discarded." And while assessing the reason for his decline, they accurately described the dillema which drove Hef to propose a rework of his company's spearhead magazine.

Hef blamed Playboy's decline on his favorite boogeyman: the puritan. He believed that Playboy was being crippled by the nation's growing conservatism... Playboy, however, faded not because it was too threatening to a conservative country, but because it's too tame for a wild one. Hard-core pornography stole a huge number of Playboy subscribers—the men who had never read the magazine for the articles. Magazines such as Penthouse and Hustler (and worse) were willing to be gynecological where Playboy was blurry... Playboy's readership got older and smaller: Paid readership plunged from more than 7 million a month to barely 3 million today.

Hef's current blip of fame hasn't altered this grim reality. Hard-core porn still owns the more onanistic segment of Playboy's old market. Magazines such as Maxim, which publish shorter, crasser articles, are attracting the boys who once snuck a peek at Dad's Playboy. While porn and publishing are banking record profits, Playboy Enterprises lost $5 million last year and another $6 million in the first quarter of this year.

Playboy still outsells other men's mags, claims the top spots on video sales charts, and runs a busy Internet site, but its staid, Vaseline-on-the-lens style has no obvious future. The girl next door is still cute, but it's no great thrill to see her naked. Playboy occupies an awkward no man's land: It's blue enough that you don't want your mom or girlfriend to see it, but it's not raunchy enough to qualify as porn. Hef, seeking some kind of entree, desperately promotes Playboy as the Cadillac of skin mags: "We're a class act with a history, a heritage, a continuity of accomplishment. Entire generations have grown up with Playboy." But Hef and Playboy have not grown up. That's why Hef is no more than a diverting museum piece, and why his company is floundering.

"I want us to pull back a little bit," [Playboy editor-in-chief Hugh] Hefner said in an interview... "Pull back from the explicit nature of sexuality, to try to re-establish the connections for the reader and the advertiser that were there in earlier decades. We can compete [with hard-core pornography], but that would only erode the uniqueness of Playboy."
— Hefner Decrees: Less Sex Better in New Playboy, Sridhar Pappu

A Playboy with less skin? Has all that Viagra had unexpected secondary effects on Hef? Perhaps not. He just misses the days when the bunny rag was considered a men's lifestyle magazine and jokes about reading it "only for the articles" were still funny.

But that's what Hef thinks Playboy's readership should be doing: "I remember growing up, and people got their information from reading... Now it's quick hits that will play well. When you tell stories or when you emphasize things that are more visual, you end up with more car crashes and more murders on the air, and that passes for news." So he's setting his editorial aims high, looking for "A fresh eye. Better nonfiction. More must-read pieces. More humor. Probably some celebrity pieces that are not as explicit. Big-name writers, yes. But also good reportage." Maybe he'll hook up with a New Yorker-caliber editor.

Enter James Kaminsky—the 41-year-old former executive editor of Maxim, who on Oct. 7 will begin his transition into the editorial director’s role at Playboy, which Arthur Kretchmer has held since the early 1970's...

Or maybe he's looking for a pep-shot like the one Rolling Stone got recently, when its design changed to something closer to a "laddie" magazine, with lots of "entry points" (lists, Q&A's, brief reviews littering the main article) for the benefit of the Ritalin-deprived crowd. Such a change might prove appropriate considering Hef's comments on the possible direction for the pictorials:

"It's one of the things you can see in Maxim and FHM and other magazines of that kind... You see that a non-nude or near-nude pictorial with celebrities can have the same kind of meaning as a nude pictorial."

So anyone concerned for their monthly fix of girlie pictures can let out a sigh of relief. But at the current ratio of three 9-page pictorials (on average) for a 168-page publication, maybe it is time to start paying attention to all those words filling the rest of the pages. Or switch titles.