Playboy Magazines

If you are like me and grew up in a house with men any time between 1953 and now, you likely had some exposure to Playboy magazines. They were furtively stowed away under the beds, stashed in bathroom cabinets, and in some bolder homes displayed on the living room coffee tables.

And even if female, if you were anything like curious, you opened Playboy magazines to see what all the excitement was about. Wow. Wow. Softly filtered light, unusually golden hues and exaggerated curves and darker toned areolas. Big hair or long hair or…in certain times and places…no hair. Full page cartoons and sketches featuring perverted men, nymphomaniacal women, mythological beasts, and Granny in a see-through negligee. Interviews with popular writers. And articles and ads on politics and cars and current events and colognes.

So the cliché went, “I just read the articles.” Well, once you got through the first couple of issues, concerned woman that you were, you did usually read just the articles, for Playboy Magazines had (and have) some cutting edge writing and some informative interviews and op-eds. I really did just read the articles—usually—and especially loved the fiction. My Mom had shelves of books and on the topmost shelf (where I had to climb to reach, of course—I would snatch down Updike, Nin, Mailer, and all the other racy authors of the decade, so finding the same authors in interview and in fiction sections in the Playboy magazines was a curious delight. So THIS was what the adult world consisted of: naked bodies (well, naked women), clandestine extra-marital affairs, macho resentments, macho glorifications, and an encapsulation or capturing or the mindset and malaise of a time when the word “exploitation” was just being revised and the act of exploitation was just starting to be challenged.

A year ago, I was moving out of one home and into another. The current roommate, who collects Playboy Magazines and has every issue from conception to contemporary, had tossed out duplicates. The issues he discarded happened to be from the time period when I had discovered and was reading Playboy—thirty years ago. I saved those issues and every once in awhile revisit a secret savoring, fascinated now by the period as it was depicted—the cars of the seventies, the hair, the bodies (more muscled, more flattened, and fleshier, respectively)…and the articles. Were then and still are some of the best in periodical literature.