R.I.P. Playgirl

So, after decades of showing how hairless and glisteny naked firemen can be (Extremely, it turns out!), Playgirl is heading under the ol’ dirty mattress in the sky. Which is personally extremely sad for us since we used to intern there once-upon-a-time in college. Our former boss-lady, Colleen Kane, wrote up a retrospective on the magazine, debunking the idea that it was just for gay men (actually, you’d be surprised at the number of midwestern housewives named Peg and Barb who wrote in to our “Erotic Encounters” section), and touting its pivotal role in the annals (LOLZ!) of pop culture history. (Did you know, for example, that porn star Ron Jeremy got his start posing in Playgirl’s reader-submitted “Real Men” section? Of course you did.):

As for the men in those earlier issues, they were nude, but it was generally a classy kind of nude, with a lot of shadows, and yes, a lot of body hair. (Perhaps also a man-perm or 10.) At first, there were only about one or two models in each issue. Although Playgirl was infamous for featuring male nudity—the final frontier!—the nudes weren’t the only focus of the magazine, not by a long shot. Believe it or not, the letters section of those early issues featured thoughtful responses to articles about abortion, addiction, and the ERA.

But, then, as most beautiful, hairy things do, Playgirl up and got all irrelevant and douchey, despite the best efforts of its staff (ROFL!):

By the time I joined the operation in 2005, Playgirl issues ran about 96 pages with hardly any ads. Those it did have were mainly house ads for other Playgirl enterprises, like Playgirl TV, or a few for DVDs and phone sex services that looked suspiciously gay, probably because of the pictured gay men fellating each other. (I’m exaggerating, but only a little.) The staff was made up of just four people (two art, two editorial) and the office was shared with the staffs of numerous hardcore pornographic titles put out by Playgirl’s publisher, Blue Horizon Media: Cheri, High Society, Celebrity Skin, and what are known as the “young girl mags”: Live Young Girls, Purely 18, and Finally Legal (mind you, not to be confused with Larry Flynt’s Barely Legal—totally different)

Sad. There hasn’t really been another mainstream magazine aimed at giving heterosexual women a chance to be the ones doing the gazing for once. And that’s a real shame, especially in a world where something like Cosmo’s “69 Tips To Drive Him Wild” is considered viable sex advice for women:

Maybe the end of Playgirl is just a sign of these times, which are tough for all magazines. In this era when women’s sexuality is discussed more freely, and when naked men can be found within seconds on the Internet, is there a place anymore for Playgirl? I would still argue yes.

Not the way the magazine was at the end, made by a skeleton crew of New York City women and published by pornographers, all of whom were choosing and creating content for women in that other part of the country known as “America.” (No one I knew personally read the magazine, and they probably couldn’t have found it if they wanted to: I worked with local freelancers who went in search of their issues from newsstand to bookstore to newsstand and failed.)

So, R.I.P. Playgirl. We’ll always remember you fondly. So long… and thanks for the vibrating strap-on dolphin.

GOODNIGHT, SWEET HUNKS [Radar]