WI: No Playboy Magazine

Zachariah

Banned
How different might the world be today in a TL where Hugh Hefner never founded Playboy Magazine? How much less pervasive and mainstream might pornography be ITTL?
 
A little more raunchy, Hue Heffner and Playboy porn a little more tasteful.
Larry Flint is still out there so mainstream pornography is still going exist. If there's money to be made it will get done.
 

Zachariah

Banned
A little more raunchy, Hue Heffner and Playboy porn a little more tasteful.
Larry Flint is still out there so mainstream pornography is still going exist. If there's money to be made it will get done.

Trouble is, Hefner faced obscenity charges in 1963 for publishing and distributing Playboy, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict. If raunchier and less tasteful porn magazines rose to take its place in an ATL, wouldn't those magazines and their founders most likely be charged with obscenity instead, and shut down post-haste by court orders because of that?
 
Trouble is, Hefner faced obscenity charges in 1963 for publishing and distributing Playboy, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict. If raunchier and less tasteful porn magazines rose to take its place in an ATL, wouldn't those magazines and their founders most likely be charged with obscenity instead, and shut down post-haste by court orders because of that?
Not if they hired Hef's lawyers.
The same legal argument would probably result in the same result.
 
The other magazines aiming for the 'tasteful' niche would gain more sales. Yellow Silk is a example of the genre. Erotic art, short stories, poetry, but without the centrefold. The sexual revolution was happening with or without Hefner, it would have had a slightly different flavor w/o the Playboy glossy flagship.
 
Well, for one thing, Fahrenheit 451, which was serialized in the first few issues of Playboy, goes unpublished.

A lot of top notch interviews - be it Miles Davis, the MLK interview, the John Lennon interview, never get done. Playboy has always had some of the best interviewers among its stable of reporters, and we'd be poorer for their loss.

A lot of other writers and reporters - be it Norman Mailer, Ursula Le Guin, or Evan Wright or a dozen others - all either got their start or earned a lot of momentum and notoriety writing for Playboy. Hell, one of the reasons I would kill to write for Playboy is they pay freelancers very generously.

Believe it or not folks, there are folks who read Playboy for the articles.
 
Well, for one thing, Fahrenheit 451, which was serialized in the first few issues of Playboy, goes unpublished.

A lot of top notch interviews - be it Miles Davis, the MLK interview, the John Lennon interview, never get done. Playboy has always had some of the best interviewers among its stable of reporters, and we'd be poorer for their loss.

A lot of other writers and reporters - be it Norman Mailer, Ursula Le Guin, or Evan Wright or a dozen others - all either got their start or earned a lot of momentum and notoriety writing for Playboy. Hell, one of the reasons I would kill to write for Playboy is they pay freelancers very generously.

Believe it or not folks, there are folks who read Playboy for the articles.
and A Sound of Thunder, too, iirc. Bradbury owed alot to Playboy :p
 
Bradbury might have found another magazine.

Doubtful... a lot of publishers wouldn't even touch it, for various reasons. Hefner took one look at it, and published it proudly - fully aware of the connection of its fears of censorship and his one choice to sell porn.

And, as @oshron points out, he would go on to sell several other of his most famous stories to Playboy. For Bradbury, Playboy was to him was Cosmopolitan and Esquire were for Hemingway.

Fun fact, Cosmopolitan used to be a classy lit mag. Shocker, right?

and A Sound of Thunder, too, iirc. Bradbury owed alot to Playboy :p
 
Well, for one thing, Fahrenheit 451, which was serialized in the first few issues of Playboy, goes unpublished.

A lot of top notch interviews - be it Miles Davis, the MLK interview, the John Lennon interview, never get done. Playboy has always had some of the best interviewers among its stable of reporters, and we'd be poorer for their loss.

A lot of other writers and reporters - be it Norman Mailer, Ursula Le Guin, or Evan Wright or a dozen others - all either got their start or earned a lot of momentum and notoriety writing for Playboy. Hell, one of the reasons I would kill to write for Playboy is they pay freelancers very generously.

Believe it or not folks, there are folks who read Playboy for the articles.

It has also had political implications- Jimmy Carter's Playboy interview in '72 hurt his campaign significantly.
 
It has also had political implications- Jimmy Carter's Playboy interview in '72 hurt his campaign significantly.
His interview came in 1976. I don't know about hurt his campaign, but it sure provided comedy writers with a lot of raw material. To his credit, Carter said what he thought and pulled no punches. But a lot of what he said came off as either dogmatic or funny.
 
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