No Playboy

Err.. hmmm... how I begin this thread?:D

Well I was thinking the last day about magazine playboy and about the fact that Hugh Hefner thought that if his first number did not had gone well (you remember december 1953 the one with Marilyn Monroe) probably he had decided not to continue with the second number and not to continue to edit Playboy.

Well Playboy is more than the playmates and other girls (And with this only Playboy is very good!:cool: :D errr... My God! I have to be serious (and less hot):) )

Well being serious Playboy is Playboy Jazz club, the interviews to musicians and politics and actors, the Playboy Foundation, the magazines, the mansion, and a lot of things....

So what if Playboy did not had existed the POD the first number is a failure and Hugh decides to not to continue to edit Playboy.

What would be the consecuences? A world without Playboy what social consecuences would have? (yes, yes I know that surely Soviet Union would fall the same, and Ronald Reagan would win the elections in 1980 and 1984 and so on.., but the society of the United States for example would have important changes or would be very different if Playboy did not had existed?)
 
Playboy and cie helped americans (and others) to be less complexed and conservative about sex... So, sans Playboy, the sexual revolution will be delayed/slowed, maybe.
 
Well, in my day I read Playboy for the articles.

Damn, who am I kidding?

There has been many a young lad who learned about sex after finding dad's or big brother's porn stash. I think if there wasn't Playboy, something like it would have come down the pipeline sooner or later. There were, after all, naughty mags before Playboy.
 
I beleive the cultural impact of Playboy is overstated. It was more symptom than casual agent. There would probably have been several nudie mags floating aound by 1960, probably none as dominant. Playboy didn't really have serious competition until Penthouse arrived circa 1969.

One of my theories is that Cosmpolitan really had more to do with the sexual revolution than Playboy. HG Brown actually changed attitudes--in this case young women, the keepers of the gate--more than Hefner did.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
There were nudie mags before Playboy, too. Hefner was an editor on Esquire before he left to start the Great Male Icon.

Without Playboy the 60's would have been different. There were other men's mags yes, but few parlayed the success into a chain of key clubs, casinos and a private 737 jet. Playboy in its heyday was the lifestyle arbiteur for the hippie elite, successful young men who wanted their long hair in the board room, to have their corporate cake and eat their hash on weekends too.

And the aforementioned Hustler would have never substituted. Hustler in fact ended the phenomena. Once the Rest of the World could have sex as well as anybody and Gloria Steinem was no longer willing to do the bunny dip there was little point in being the sort of man who read Playboy.
 
IMO Playboy is a symptom of changes in society. A combination of household conveniences and rising income (which made eating out more affordable) meant that men had less need to marry. This created the market of professional single men which Playboy exploited.
 
In AH there is a tendency to think that if you bump off the first guy who has idea X then nobody else will have it. With things like the telephone there is some obvious problems with this line of thought. But I submit with more subtler ideas--say the idea of a classy men's magazine which later branches out into clubs there is a good chance somebody else may have invented it later. Hefner was a case where the "good" idea and the good execution were in sync. So when he conceived of the classy nudie mag he did it well and dominated the market. Assuming young Hef gets killed in a school bus crash, I would think the idea of a classy prurient mag would've hit somebody else NLT 1960. The details of the evolution could well be different. It could be that Esquire or an Esquire clone incrementally runs a nude and then some more and more often until it eventually becoames a permanent fixture (actually Esquire does a little bit of that but they made a conscious decision not to emulate Playboy too much). The other alternative is a nudie mag that tries to be classy from the beginning. Very possibly both approaches are tried and they compete vigorously with no one getting the market dominance Playboy had pre Guccione. One of them gets the idea for ancillary clubs and the other soon emulates.

So there is some difference in the details but it's not overwhelming.
 
Hefner is a direct descendant of a Puritan that came over on the Mayflower. So if there weren't any Puritans then there won't be Playboy.
 
originally posted by fortyseven
Hefner is a direct descendant of a Puritan that came over on the Mayflower

Tsk, Tsk. Hugh, Hugh if your ancestors look at you and your work the only thing that they had said is:

AAAARGH!:eek:

..... heart attack.


One important aspect could be the psicology of Hugh Hefner, it could have other magazines that could have substitute Playboy but all the things that are Playboy: the mansion, the products, the Foundation, the Jet, the bunnies, the clubs, ...could be ideas from the mind of Hugh, so without Playboy all these things could be thought by the other editors of the possible nude magazines that had substituted to Playboy?
 
It's alive!:eek:

There's one consequence I bet most people don't know: James Bond might not exist. Bond's first app was short fiction, published in Playboy. Had Fleming not reached that particular market, with a very "Playboy man" character, Bond might never have gone anywhere. Or he might be the same minor spy as Quiller.
 
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