Sex, by Mike Gold
I’ve been gallivanting across this fine country again like the high society bon vivant that I am, so I was a little late in scoring my family’s big box o’ comics. It was even heavier than usual, despite the fact that my wife and daughter are both big-time comics fans. I figure it was about four and one-half pounds heavier. That’s because Playboy Cover to Cover – The 50s, finally arrived. It was released as a Christmas item last November, no doubt under the belief that it would make for an excellent stocking stuffer should King Kong become a cross-dresser.
If you ask founder / publisher / editor Hugh Hefner, he’ll give you the impression he single-handedly invented the sexual revolution back in 1954. That’s okay; he’ll also give you the impression he has foursomes with The Girls Next Door. Whereas I think the creation of the birth control pill and the resultant sexual empowerment of women had a lot more to do with it than Hugh, he did take a lot of risk and paid some heavy dues. Remember, until 1965 laws prohibiting the distribution of information about contraception, and in some cases even the possession of contraception, were still on the books – and not just in the bible belt states. Connecticut was the last to fall. People still went to jail for publishing, owning or mailing stuff about sex.
From a sexual perspective, all Playboy’s success did was put some of the under-the-counter content out on the newsstand racks. By the time Penthouse and, later, Hustler came out Playboy was irrelevant from a pictorial point of view. Of course, later the Internets completely rendered Playboy magazine sexually impotent, as they supplied men the one thing any magazine could not: freedom from your own fist. No, sex is not the reason Playboy was hip.
Playboy brought cool to the masses.
During the extremely conformist, ultra-uptight and massively stone conservative 1950s, Playboy published Jack Kerouc, Nelson Algren, Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, no less), and Lenny Bruce. They covered, promoted and interviewed Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Dizzy Gillespie. Himself a cartoonist, Hefner published the works of Shel Silverstein, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder, and Jack Cole. Its design and illustration approach was nothing short of astonishing, and it remains a bastion of fine magazine illustration art to this day. In the days of demonstration and racial strife, Playboy actively promoted equality and gave black artists (writers, performers, cartoonists) a fair shake.
In the 1950s Playboy was just about the only outlet for this kind of material. Oh, sure, Mort Sahl and Shelly Berman and Irwin Corey were burning people’s ears on the nightclub circuit, and the original Madwas corrupting our nation’s youth. Television was not a mass force back then – most markets only had one or two stations, if any, back in 1954 – and the medium was so conservative Lucy couldn’t tell Desi she was “pregnant.” Heck, they couldn’t even use the word pregnant in the episode title, lest TV Guidepick up the word inadvertently. Maybe Steve Allen could get away with some of the musical acts, but that was after 11:15 PM.
Sure, sex sells. Lenny Bruce defined the difference between dirty screwing and fancy screwing; the latter is art and it’s okay. Pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot defined fancy screwing. Playboy has come under some criticism for promoting an environment of sexual harassment and there’s some truth to that, but Playboy hasn’t done half as much damage to women’s self-image as the ads in the fashion magazines.
They were among the first magazines to employ women in critical roles, and Playboy Enterprises’ current CEO, Christie Hefner (yeah, well), brought the operation into modern times by focusing on cable, pay-per-view, home video and Internet ventures. I worked with Ms. Hefner when she was running the Playboy Foundation – several social service programs I was working on received the benefits of their largesse. Less known is the fact that both the Playboy Foundation and the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation have quietly financed a lot of feminist causes, including some of the first-class documentaries on the critical role of women as writers and directors in the early days of the motion picture industry.
Playboy Cover to Cover – The 50s contains a DVD-ROM of all the issues of the magazine published in the 1950s. It also contains an excellent trade paperback chronicling its history, a reprint of the first issue, and an awesome index. As such, it is an important addition to our cultural history.
And, at long last, it frees men from their fist.
Mike Gold is ComicMix’s editor-in-chief.
Isn't it What a good WIFE she could be?Another song stuck in my head.Sigh –
OK – Not sure how I did this, but I have somehow dropped a comment to John Ostrander's column in the wrong place.This article reminds me of standing in a book store in the local mall at the magazine rack at age 13 or 14. I was thumbing through a magazine reading an article, and I was chastised for being under age 'reading' Playboy – I was reading the articles, — I had scoffed at that excuse 'I get playboy for the articles' like everyone else. I didn't say anything, because I was sure i would not be believed.
Hey, that's my wife you're talking about, me bucko.
Well yes – and I am amazed anyone can follow that.So singing about Brandy has no link in my head to "Sex, by Mike Gold"Now let me shut up before I bury myself any further.
Well, that's a relief to at LEAST one of the four of us.
It's a running joke, but you really can enjoy Playboy for the articles. Many maintain it was Jimmy Carter's Playboy interview (where he admitted to having lusted in his heart) that humanized him enough to get the presidency. There was a poem by Shel Silverstein called "The Winner" that stays with me today – I don't believe it's ever been reprinted, like much of his Playboy work (someone correct me, please!)There were plenty of men's magazines when Playboy premiered; Hef just added an air of sophistication to his. Ironically, when magazines like Maxim came out, they were whimsically described as "all the great articles from Playboy without the pictures". Well, when sales were tepid, they added those cheesecake shots BUT quick. It's the precise combination of the two that made Playboy the cultural phenomenon it was. Like the alleged secret equation Jim Henson had for placing the Muppets' eyes the exact angle and distance from the nose to make them adorable, there's a lost-chord-like synergy to the contents of Playboy. Penthouse, still primarily a sex magazine, Hustler, don't get me started…Playboy, Just the essence of cool.
I don't know about that particular Shel Silverstein poem, but I have a compilation of his more adult stuff that I picked up a few years ago. I wonder where I put that?I had it at my desk at work, and I was surprised at how many comments I got, and how many people only knew Shel as a children's author.My collection of Playboy from the 60's and 70's was fueled in large part by things from Shel Silverstein. Then again there was always something fun about looking at cutting edge electronics like the original Atari with all 16 games in the ad, or Select-a-vision explaining what a VCR is with the huge clunky top loading tapea, and the wired remote control.
One google later, it appears he did a reading of it on one of his albums, but it's not been reprinted anywhere.A guy at a bar hears about a really tough guy who's never lost a fight. Filled with liquid courage, he challenges the guy to a brawl. The guy replies by chronicling all the injuries he's taken over the years just to be "a winner". He then concedes the fight to the drunk kid, and everybody laughs the kid away. The guy decides he's got two legs that work, and he can breathe without coughing, so he's "a winner". Great poem. Right up there with a copy of Uncle Shelby's Zoo as Shel stuff I'd love to own. "Go over and play with the Gumplegutch, Tommy; there's nothing at ALL to fear! …I'll wait for you here."
OK I lied — I found 'Different Dances' and it is cartoons, not the poems or other writings.But that is why I used to collect the magazines because they were so hard to find anywhere else.That said shel Silverstein's web site is great, even if it is kid centric –
Playboy has it's own weird Puritanism. When they ran excerpts from Norman Mailer's ANCIENT EVENINGS, they edited out the more graphic female sexuality.
Okay, okay, I confess! I bought Playboy for the cartoons. Playboy introduced me to the wonderfully macabre world of Gahan Wilson, and I was huge fan of Kurtzman and Elder's Little Annie Fanny.
I used to know one of the Party Jokes editors. Entry-level position; his job was to open all the mail and decide which jokes were usable. This was just about the worst job in the world, ever. Think about it: if you've ever read the jokes that were deemed the best of the bunch and for every joke published they received (in those days, at least) several thousand that were worse. I'd hang myself by the end of the first week.
Okay, I have an anthology of Playboy SF. I did, however, volunteer for OMNI, one of Penthouse's sister mags.