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.
