A while ago I stumbled onto a website that featured a series of early Playboy Magazine stuff, and looking at it, I couldn’t but wonder at how innocent it all was.
I know, calling Playboy “innocent” creates something of a cognitive dissonance in the typical reader, because the whole “Playboy” ethos was anything but that in the 1950s (and even -60s). At the time, of course, it was disturbing, outrageous, even pornographic to the eyes of the time. I mean, inviting a Black person (Sammy Davis Jr.) to perform on Hefner’s TV show, and treating him like an actual person instead of some second-class citizen — okay, nigger, to use a common term for his type back then. That, and Hef’s love of avant-garde jazz (“nigger”) music… I mean, it was just terrible.
But looking back at Playboy today, I find myself yearning for that era, because it really was an innocent time — although nowadays it’s easy to see that its permissiveness was, just as gloomily foretold, very much the thin end of the licentiousness wedge.
Compare, if you will, a typical Playboy cartoon of that era:
…with its more vulgar counterpart from the vile Larry Flynt’s Hustler:
(…which, by the way, I find screamingly funny, but that’s just me.)
Anyway, I thought I’d just use all the above as an excuse to show a few of those Playboy cartoons, and some of their models too. Enjoy.
This was actually from a later edition in that the cartoon showed pubic hair (remember that?) — as they were a lot more careful about that in earlier years — as did the models:
Similarly, in a clearly-more modern edition:
We’ll be looking at more of these — a lot more — in future posts.
I get your point about “innocent” and I yearn for a time from the past. Is it because I am old (69) now? I don’t remember this yearning say, 30 years ago.
30 years ago you were a participant. Now…
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I actually worked there for a couple years in the 90s.
I started saying “Playboy isn’t porn. Porn is exciting…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Annie_Fanny
If memory serves (and my memory isn’t for shit these days), most of what I could get my hands on in the 70’s would barely qualify as “soft core” today. My dad had a stash of playboys and such from the 60’s and yeah, a lot of shots had the crotch area tastefully covered such that you didn’t see bush (or just barely) and definitely no vagina shots. It was definitely better than the lingerie section of the Sears catalog, but really tame by today’s standards.
Yes, tame by today’s standards, enough so that the old joke about only reading it for the articles actually had some credence. It had excellent automotive content and serious actual interviews with notable people. as I remember, the interview with Jimmy Carter caused all sorts of unintended news when Carter revealed he believed in Alien Encounters. …. and of course, high quality photos of unobtainable females. It was perfectly acceptable to have a subscription as i did for most of the late sixties early 70’s. One of my tasks, at my first Consulting Engineering jobs was to setup and organize the quarterly meetings of the Boston Chapter of the Amer. Soc. of Civil Engineers at the Boston Playboy Club. Always well attended for some reason. I like to think it was our choice of speakers and topics.
There were other publications available in the back rows of the downtown Newsstands, but none with quality photography or quality anything that was comparable. Those magazines were full of “train smash” and “trailer park” quality versions.
…. and then Penthouse came along and all went downhill from there.
there were also some excellent short stories
I can remember my Freshman roommate taping some of his centerfold collection to the wall on the side of his bed just before fraternity rush, when the president and the rush master would come around to the freshman dorms to make assessments; who amongst us would receive invitation letters to meet the rest of the brothers at the “house”.
I said, “Charlie, y’ know what the fraternity guys are gonna think…”
Charlie interrupted, “they’ll think I’ve got great taste in wild life photography.”
“Charlie,” I continued, “they’re gonna think that any guy that sticks ’em up on his walls ain’t never seen it before.”
This was back in the spring of ’59, the early years of the “age of innocence”
The natural response, of course, is that “I put them up on the wall so I have something to look at when I’m doing it with an ugly girl. Like your sister, last night.”