A former editor offers a Playgirl postmortem

Playgirl magazine had a good 35-year run—a longer lifespan than most publications these days—before yesterday's announcement that the print publication would be shuttered.

Originally dubbed "The Magazine for Women," Playgirl started out confident (dare I say cocksure? You bet I do), and it made perfect sense within the women's lib, consciousness-raising milieu of the 1970s. However, the flagship of women's pornography went strong only for about the first 10 years; after that it faltered with an identity crisis spanning two decades that was ultimately to prove terminal.

Yes, Playgirl was once a contender, with headquarters in Los Angeles and advertising offices in six other U.S. and two Canadian cities. Issues were about 150 pages, many of those packed with dense text, with a proportionate number of ads (record and tape clubs, perfume, cigarettes, a few small vibrator—er—"massager" ads in the back).

A playgirl of the 1970s could have dressed from head to Cutex-painted toe in pink-and-white Playgirl licensed gear: sun visors, owl-eye sunglasses(!), logo necklaces, baseball tees, short gym shorts. There were Playgirl jigsaw puzzles, Playgirl flexi-disc records (with the voices of your favorite hunks!), and a videotape cashing in on the aerobics craze, called Hunkercize. In 1975, there was a Playgirl hotline to answer sex questions, and in 1983, a Dial-a-Centerfold hotline.

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.

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).

So what happened to Playgirl? Shouldn't it be a no-brainer to have a major nudie magazine featuring photography of men, with sex and lifestyle content aimed at women?

In 1986, Playgirl's original publisher sold the title, and Drake Media (later to become Crescent, which became Blue Horizon) moved it to New York. I'm speculating, but this might have marked the official beginning of the struggles. One year later came the notorious experimental year without willies. (Well, that beef ban lasted less than a year, as the reader outcry was so strong.) At first, Playgirl had some known names pose nude or seminude. In the premiere issue, Lyle Waggoner (from Wonder Wo-maaaan!) posed, as later did Sam Jones (star of 10 and Flash Gordon!), Peter Lupus, Tommy Chong, and Bubba Smith. But as the magazine aged, celebrities willing to drop trou became less and less common. The perception that dogged Playgirl to the end began to take form: Male nudity? Isn't that, like, gay?

Which brings us to a period I like to call "The Gay '90s." Of course, photography of a nude male does not automatically equal gay. That's absurd. However, there's a multitude of ways that it can look gay, especially if some of the photographers are gay and some of the models are gay. Add to this the unfortunate '90s trends of Day-Glo spandex, long hair, manscaping, and inverted-triangle-shaped musclebound bodies, and you have a very different look than the classic 1970s regular guy with chest hair in the woods, who is wearing an open flannel shirt but forgot to bring his pants.

Also, as time went on, the coyness about the models' genitalia disappeared, until they were routinely shown at full mast and close up. I think this alienated some percentage of the female readership. Women often need a little more context to fantasize—a story, a person, a mood. Without the right factors in place, seeing a picture of a giant dong can feel like getting flashed. A disembodied penis is not necessarily going to do it for a woman, and she might even find it the furthest thing from sexy. But try selling hardcore pornographers on this concept: The other Blue Horizon magazines could be used for anatomy lessons, with wide-open beavers on every page (sans the whole "beaver" part).

That said, I disagree that only gay men would ever want to look at pictures of naked men. This was a half-baked conjecture I heard over and over when I met new people and the subject of my job came up. To me it came off as a careless denial of women's sexuality; it was equivalent to saying that women don't fantasize.

There's a rumor that pops up (as it were) every few months: [Fill-in-the-blank famous guy] was offered [fill in some crazy five-, six-, or seven-digit amount of money] to pose for Playgirl. This rumor is never true. In the '90s, among the "celebs" to pose nude were the semi-known, fully erect, and appropriately named Peter Steele of Type-O Negative and the weirdo guy from that band Jackyl. By the aught years, one of the only celebs to pose seminude was Keith Urban. It was a best-selling issue, indicating how well the magazine could sell if it were able to convince more celebs to strip down, but Urbs later said he regretted posing.

Another challenge for the staff was trying to cater to all tastes: to read their letters, to recognize that some want smiling hunks only, some like manscaping, some hate it, some loved tattooed models while others hated them, and one woman's cougar-bait is another woman's jailbait.

I've also wondered if there weren't some parallels between Playgirl's struggle to find its identity and readership and the developing lack of cohesiveness among feminists, as the ranks divided into second and third waves, and the waves subdivided with different opinions about sex, porn, and, well, fun, and perhaps a greater proportion of women don't identify as feminist.

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 it's over, and it's a shame that an instantly recognizable brand has been allowed to die. What are women going to do for porn now? I don't know; honestly, I don't even particularly like porn. (My motivation for taking the job was twofold: It paid more than my previous job, and it was still an editing job at a feminist magazine.) Hopefully a publisher or entrepreneur with a lot of money and a strong vision will take up the mantle (and hopefully he or she will throw a sister some freelance work).

What happens when a magazine dies? I don't know what's going to happen to the material remains of the magazine—the back issues, the old files of faxes and party invites and stationery and promotional postcards. And all those files of unused photographs of naked amateurs! Maybe everything will be packed up in boxes and put into storage until it's no longer convenient to store it. And then, look out, Midtown, because there will be a Dumpster or three filled with nude dudes, some of them with long hair, some with perms.

It's too bad the remnants of this part of publishing history is headed for the dump, but I own some '70s and '80s issues of Playgirl that I promise to preserve and look upon fondly once in a while.

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Colleen Kane is a former Playgirl editor.