Saw a day’s worth of Playboy TV the other week, for the first time since ’94.
Back then, the channel presented a hermetically-sealed fantasy world built around the parent magazine’s carefully-crafted Playmate stock character–slickly “beautiful,” bereft of imperfection or personality, a supremely non-threatening ideal for post-adolescent readers lacking in sexual self-confidence. The magazine’s cable operation carried over this fleshless flesh and passionless eroticism, as best as its budget allowed, with a low-key, “friedly” lineup of centerfold videos and softcore movies.
That’s all changed. The channel now apparently wants to be as raunchy as possible without unduly tarnishing the Playboy brand image or jeopardizing its relationship with the cable companies that carry it. So it now carries “celebrity profiles” of porn stars (complete with lightly censored scenes from their works), travelogues to lap-dance clubs, and call-in shows in which the male callers talk lewd-‘n’-crude to nude female hosts showing off what they coyly call their “meat wallets.” Even the centerfold videos, which used to strictly show the models cavorting alone in pastoral settings, now feature them in soft-focus fake sex scenes.
Today’s Playboy TV is as dumb as yesterday’s, but in different ways. The old Playboy TV was almost numbingly bland. The new Playboy TV is a hackneyed visualization of some of shock-talk radio’s worst cliches, especially in the overabundance of capital-A Attitude.
But it’s also got an energy the old Playboy TV never had, an enthusiasm about itself and its primary topic. The fantasy world depicted by the new Playboy TV is one in which everybody (with the possible exception of you) is having outrageous, consensual, mutually gratifying, sweat-inducing sex just about all the time; sex that never, ever leads to STDs, unwanted pregnancies, or emotional relationship turmoil.
It’s a fantasy based on a different ideal of sexiness–not the soft-smiling, reassuring traditional Playmate image but the sassy, perky strip-club or porn-video goddess, a woman who might superficially look like a bimbo but who’s clearly focused and determined, bearing an unstoppable drive to sell, sell, sell.
A perfect sex-symbol depiction for the age of hyper-marketing.
