After more than 50 years as a best-selling “men’s” magazine promoting “free love” –– a lifestyle of promiscuity and sexual exploitation of women –– Playboy has been displaced by the easy availability of pornography on the internet. At one time, supposedly over a quarter of college men were buying a monthly copy of Playboy with total sales of over seven million copies an issue in 1972. Now, sales have dwindled to barely three million copies per issue. The corporation is for sale for $300 million though experts claim that it is barely worth $100 million today. They’ve already lost around $13 million this year and shares have dropped to as low as $1.15. Clearly, the Playboy enterprise is crumbling even though the magazine is distributed by the giant Time Warner empire. Hugh Hefner, the 83-year-old founder of the Playboy, continues to be photographed in his silk pajamas and matching silk and satin robe surrounded by a bevy of young women in tiny bikinis, but it is obvious that his once-risque magazine is passé. After all, hooker attire is commonplace, “skin” is everywhere, and porn is easily accessible on the web.
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How’s a magazine to shock anymore? Even the so-called Playboy philosophy is commonplace.
Well, Playboy just posted an on-line article designed for maximum shock impact. “So Right, It’s Wrong,” by Playboy.com writer Guy Cimbalo, identified 10 conservative women as ones that leftist men would be willing to “hate rape.” The article was not merely a simple text; it was a 10-part gallery of pictures and videos of the conservative women chosen for “hate rape.” Clearly, it was a feature long in planning and carefully constructed for maximum page views and media attention. In fact, they supposedly emailed conservative writers and bloggers to promote the article.
But they got more than they expected.
Shortly after the misogynistic feature was posted, Tommy Christopher, a liberal blogger for AOL, posted a critique of the Playboy article on his personal blog. He said that while the author of the Playboy article about raping Conservative women might think that his comments were “funny or edgy” none of the women consented to being identified and the article was “foul and creepy.”
Instead of being upset about the tasteless and crude feature article, AOL removed Christopher’s critique from their website. AOL claims that Christopher was one of several writers “downsized” and that his liberal use of “profane” language is the real reason his article was removed from the internet. Christopher claims that Politics Daily had never previously deleted any story in the history of the site and that he was fired within five minutes of hearing a proposal for a new story about the Playboy article. Media Lizzy, who runs a poll question on the website, was denied permission to run a poll question about the Playboy article.
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