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The Sex Blog Of Record
Tuesday, October 10th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
Remember Mary, who is supposed to have been followed everywhere by her little lamb? Well, the jokes page in the January 1954 issue of Playboy (the second issue ever of that magazine) quite thoroughly reimagined the relationship between Mary and her various sheep:
As the Playboy version of the nursery rhyme goes:
Mary had a little sheep
and with the sheep she went to sleep.
The sheep turned out to be a ram–
Mary had a little lamb.
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Tuesday, September 19th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
There’s a lot going on in this orgy photo by Richard Fegley for the December 1972 issue of Playboy:
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Saturday, March 26th, 2022 -- by Bacchus
The 1970s, man. A time when, if you believed the Playboy advertisers, you really needed quadrophonic sound in your shag-carpeted orgy room:
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Thursday, September 28th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
The internet is awash today with tributes and obituaries for Hugh Hefner, and it would be foolish of me to write another one. But I did want to say one thing.
If you came to your sexual maturity after 1990 or so, you’re probably wondering right now why the internet is losing its shit over the death of an old creep who objectified women relentlessly. As well you might. 21st-century Hugh Hefner was a cruel parody of the man being remembered so fondly in all those obituaries today. The sexual revolution moved on from him, far beyond him in fact… but never forget HOW MUCH HE DID FOR IT.
You have literally no idea how bad things were, sexually, in the world into which Hugh Hefner published the first Playboy. Neither do I; I’m not that old. But I saw my first porn in the 1970s, and I can tell you this: if Hugh Hefner didn’t invent sex positivity (as I’m sure he did not) he sure as fuck carried a bunch of the load of its early promotion.
In that era porn was sleazy, and grim as hell. It was mostly garbage made by mafia dudes, full of racist slurs and misogyny. Every woman in it was a bitch, a slut, a whore, or a tramp, with some kind of racial slur appended with a hyphen if she wasn’t white. Do I exaggerate? Sure, some. But those were the prevalent attitudes. What Hugh Hefner brought to the party was a whole new aesthetic. He said “We’re men, and we like sex, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and here’s a magazine full of culture and literature and pretty nude women, and you don’t have to be ashamed to read it or a dick about being the kind of man who enjoys it, and the ladies don’t have to be ashamed to be photographed in it, and we can all party together at my house, and it’s the new American future, and there’s not one damned thing wrong with it, and the people who don’t like it? They can go to hell.”
Sure. He got old, and he didn’t keep up, and he became a figure of derision or sympathy depending on how much respect and empathy you’ve got in your soul. But what he did for the toxic culture of sexuality in this country in the second half of the 20th century was an enormous fucking gift. Thank you, Hugh Hefner. Goodbye.
Saturday, October 17th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
It’s no secret that since 2005 or so, I have attempted to make a living at sex blogging. What may be news (if hardly surprising) is that I am no longer succeeding. The single biggest reason (and what I currently perceive as my largest business challenge) is that in 2015 there is no hope of growth in web traffic without social media, and social media companies are (predominantly) hostile to adult content. Generalizing: you can’t put (or link to) smut on social media, you can’t grow or even maintain your web traffic without social media, and so it’s very hard to make money on the adult web. Traffic and revenue decline, and there’s no way to chase it where it is. Back in 2012 at ErosBlog’s 10 anniversary, I wrote:
But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”
I still hope so, yes I do. But it’s no longer clear that ErosBlog can survive as a profit-making enterprise. One of these days it may become a hobby, and a hobby with a much cheaper and less reliable server at that. I sometimes flatter myself that crowdfunding might offer a way forward, but it’s not immune from #pornocalypse either.
Enough about ErosBlog. Icons of the adult industry much bigger than me are struggling with the same dynamic. When your problems are also Hugh Hefner’s problems, you’re at least in good company. When I drunkenly posted the other night about the then-breaking news that Playboy was going to be putting panties on all of its Playmates going forward, commenter André adroitly identified the story as a #pornocalypse situation:
Pornocalypse comes to Playboy. Of all places. It was a common sense business decision, apparently. Porn is everywhere, so Playboy had long lost their edge, and in an age of sanitized social media, their only way to make it into mainstream platforms (Facebook et at) to — in their mind — secure a viable future (doubtful!) was to clean their act up and hide the nudity that offends the terms of service of those platforms.
André should write for Wired magazine. Here’s Wired:
Times have changed. Nudity and pornography are ubiquitous on the Internet. And people are buying fewer magazines overall, choosing instead to read online. Meanwhile, those same readers increasingly come to stories through third-party platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Those platforms have their own rules, and often prohibit or limit nudity. For Playboy to survive in a platform-driven world, the pressure to conform to those standards is immense–so much so that the publication is abandoning the core of its brand’s identity.
This isn’t really a new thing for Playboy. The company already transitioned its website away from full nudity, for the same reason:
Playboy’s shift isn’t completely new. The magazine re-launched Playboy.com last year “as a safe-for-work site,” and has seen significant success. “Tens of millions of readers come to our non-nude website and app every month for, yes, photos of beautiful women, but also for articles and videos from our humor, sex and culture, style, nightlife, entertainment and video game sections,” the magazine says.
The company’s chief executive, Scott Flanders [says] that some content was made SFW “in order to be allowed on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.” The Times also reports that following the website’s shift away from nudity traffic to the site increased “to about 16 million from about four million uniques users per month” as “the average age of its reader dropped from 47 to just over 30″–in other words, a demographic totally at home on social media.
Here’s the Wired summary of social media’s hostility to adult content:
On many social media platforms, the so-called community standards barring explicit content aren’t that different from what Hefner felt he was rebelling against when he famously published Marilyn Monroe’s nude centerfold back in 1953. Facebook, the company says, “restricts the display of nudity because some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content.” Twitter requires that sensitive content like nudity be marked as such so it can be hidden behind a warning. Celebrities and activists have had little luck in their campaign to have Instagram “free the nipple.” Apple’s App Store guidelines, meanwhile, warn that “apps containing pornographic material… will be rejected.”
This, my friends, is why we can’t have nice adult things. Discovery is no longer via search. (Google killed search for adult sites several years back anyway.) Discovery is via social media. And social media is hostile to adult. It’s not just me. Maybe “Bacchus” at a dumb little 13-year-old sex blog just doesn’t “get” how to market on the modern platforms-and-silos internet. But when freakin’ Hugh Hefner himself abandons the core of his venerable brand, which is models wearing no panties, because the social media platforms are hostile to ladies without panties? It’s not just me. It’s a thing.
I think I shall call it #Pornocalypse.
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Monday, October 12th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
According to the BBC Newsday show currently playing on my radio, Hugh Hefner has approved a redesign of Playboy magazine that will remove all the nude photography, as part of a major repositioning of Playboy as a “lifestyle” brand.
Younger readers of this blog will be like “So?” And the very youngest will be like “Magazine? What’s that?” But for a lot of readers of my own generation, a Playboy was probably the first nude image we saw. No more nudes in Playboy is like no more sports on ESPN. It’s big weird news that reminds us that the 21st century is deeply odd and getting odder fast.
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Friday, November 5th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
I’m liking Roger Ebert the blogger way more than I ever liked Roger Ebert the TV movie reviewer. Apparently after last week’s blog about Playboy (which I mentioned here), he got a lot of flak because he (horrors!) included a Playmate photo in the blog post and didn’t include a NSFW warning for timorous puritans.
Well, his most recent blog post begins as a spirited defense of his posting the photo without an NSFW warning:
As a writer, it would have offended me to preface my article with a NSFW warning. It was unsightly — a typographical offense. It would contradict the point I was making. But others wrote me about strict rules at their companies. They faced discipline or dismissal. Co-workers seeing an offensive picture on their monitor might complain of sexual harassment, and so on. But what about the context of the photo? I wondered. Context didn’t matter. A nude was a nude. The assumption was that some people might be offended by all nudes.
I heard what they were saying. I went in and resized the photo, reducing it by 2/3, so that it was postage-stamp 100 pixel size (above) and no passer-by was likely to notice it. This created a stylistic abomination on the page, but no matter. I had acted prudently. Then I realized: I’d still left it possible for the photo to be enlarged by clicking! An unsuspecting reader might suddenly find Miss June 1975 regarding him from his entire monitor! I jumped in again and disabled that command.
This left me feeling more responsible, but less idealistic. I knew there might be people offended by the sight of a Playmate. I disagreed with them. I understood that there were places where a nude photo was inappropriate, and indeed agree that porn has no place in the workplace. But I didn’t consider the photograph pornographic.
He goes on to contrast our puritanical American attitudes about nudity with more relaxed standards prevailing in Europe, and to make a favorable comparison of the artistic merits of the photo with various bits of classical fine art that would have raised no eyebrows. The only weirdness about the piece is, after essentially defending the photo and his publication of it without a warning tag, and gently ridiculing at length the poke-noses who complained, he wraps the whole article up with two unexplained sentences in which he apologizes and says he won’t do it again:
In the future I will avoid NSFW content in general, and label it when appropriate. What a long way around I’ve taken to say I apologize.
What a long way indeed, Roger — and nothing in your blog post prepared us for that jarring and inconsistent conclusion to an otherwise fine if somewhat rambling blog. Is that something the Chicago Sun-Times told you they wanted to hear you say?
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Saturday, April 24th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember that Playboy magazine used to ask in its advertising: “What kind of man reads Playboy?” And apparently the answer is this kind:
Friday, January 8th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
As quoted in the Long Island Press:
“I am delighted and honored that my breasts and I were able to play a role in helping this freedom fighter achieve so many of his goals.”
— Pamela Anderson on Hugh Hefner
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Monday, November 16th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
There’s a long and pedestrian business article here about the decline of the Playboy empire and the signs (faint though they are) that Hugh Hefner may finally, at age 83, be tired of maintaining his playboy image. But what struck me was the abject cluelessness of the last three paragraphs, two of which (after subtracting a paragraph of standard-story boilerplate filler) propose Kink.com’s Peter Acworth as the next “Mr. Playboy”:
But if Hefner sells up, who might take his place as Mr Playboy? The leading contender is Midlands-born Peter Acworth, a former Barings banker and founded of Kink.com, a suite of S&M and bondage-themed websites.
Acworth, 39, says he got the idea after he read in a British tabloid about a fireman who sold pornographic pictures on the internet. “He had made a quarter of a million pounds over a short period doing nothing very clever at all. So I basically just ripped off that idea.”
It’s a long way from bunny ears; Kink.com’s brand icon is a forked tail.
On the one hand, it’s illuminating that Kink.com should be considered one of the strongest brands in porn, that it could be compared to Playboy in any fashion. But this business writer — although clear on the meaning of the Playboy brand — has obviously failed to grasp the central branding connotations that have made Kink.com what it is today. Playboy has always had an iconic individual (Hefner) living it up with the models, with a wink and a nudge as to the propriety of same. (To be fair, Playboy’s photographers have a reputation for running clean and professional shoots.) But Kink.com is known for being holier than the Pope when it comes to professionalism and clean dealing with its models. It needs this reputation because of the edgy nature of its kinky material. Trying to cast Acworth in a Hefnerian role — something he’s shown no sign of wanting — would be an epic disaster for the brand.
It’s probably true that we’ll see Acworth, along with a rich cast of his dominant hirelings, being waited on hand and foot by naked slaves once the forthcoming reality-show site The Upper Floor (think Roissy meets Real World) goes live on the top floor of his San Francisco Armory castle of kink. But for Hefner-level striving-after-celebrity, he’d need to pull up at the Erotic Exotic Ball in a carriage pulled by a dozen prancing pony girls, and I don’t think we’ll see him going there.
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