Playboy (another now-imperiled oldline media brand) has posted a gallery of all of its 1970s covers. They display the peak of the magazine’s creativity, followed by a quick fall back into formula.

The magazine had begun in the 1950s with the simple premise of being the first US nudie mag respectable enough to attract mainstream advertising.

By 1970, its first real competitors had shown up. Its editors responded by turning the Playboy cover, theretofore a simple tease shot of a blandly grinning model in an artsy composition, into something more complex, more colorful, more mysterious.

The images still weren’t as complex as real sexual desire, but they began to approach that high-erotica territory. It remained a slick corporate publication promoting a superficial, smirking approach to sex, but it had begun to hint at the emotional and aesthetic layers beyond its skin-deep stance.

(This being the ’70s, the images also swirled with that era’s soft-focus photography and art-deco nostalgia.)

Then precisely in 1978, that effort ended.

Convenience stores had begun placing Playboy and its raunchier rivals behind the counter. To stem massive circulation losses, the magazine’s covers went to big bold headlines surrounding basic staring-at-the-camera poses.

Later on, of course, came all the models with teased-up hair and cartoonish implants and the rest of the unsexy nonsense that followed.

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One of the few things more formulaic and trite than Playboy is anti-Playboy criticism. Latest example: Kate Harding at Salon.com.

Harding quotes one of the mag’s recent models, Joanna Krupa, praising the opportunity it gives to women such as herself and asking why any feminist would criticize such success.

Then Harding reiterates some (not all) of the standard anti-Playboy and anti-porn stances—and other “actual feminist” arguments that aren’t even about the topic at hand.

Yes, as Harding asserts, Playboy is the pay-and-prestige apex of a certain type of modeling work, one that’s not open to women who don’t have the specific “look,” and which can be a tough and short-lived career even to those who break in.

But ALL OF CORPORATE ENTERTAINMENT is like that.

There are a few stars, a lot of would-be stars, and a heck of a lot of strugglers and strivers. They’re all fighting for the opportunity to express some committee’s vision of what will sell to the target market.

To change that, you need to change the whole showbiz industry model, away from the centralized purveyors of formula tripe (in any genre) and toward more street-level works expressing real ideas and passions.

In sex entertainment, that’s being done by the neo-burlesque movement and its many spinoff ventures, by the burgeoning erotic art scene, and by the thousands of amateur erotic writers, photographers, and painters now online.