Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Left Inadvertently Destroyed Playboy Magazine
“Moral values, and a culture and a religion — maintaining these values are far better than laws and regulation.” — Swami Sivananda
Playboy Magazine announced to its readers (viewers?) that they will no longer publish nude photos of women. While the announcement states that “times have changed,” Playboy’s CEO Scott Flanders made a more detailed comment to the New York Times about what exactly changed with time: taste. He conceded that Americans now have a taste for things more lurid and graphic:
“That battle has been fought and won. You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”
See what happened there? Pictures that would at one time shock the conscience as obscene is today simply “passé.” The “battle” he is referring to is the culture war. Make no mistake the left has won the culture war over sexual acts versus manners and modesty in public view.
Turns out those Playboy pictures really were just about sex, not art, after all.
Note too that Flanders didn’t talk about losing to changing “business models” or paper magazines versus the Internet. Playboy is on the Internet. They are a savvy business company. What changed is American views toward obscenity and our willingness to endure more public view of it, including in front of our children. We have become culturally jaded regarding public sexual content.
There was a time when folks thought we could keep America cleaner by fighting for traditional values. Those folks lost, and the standard-less, free-love, anything goes minions of the left now have their way.
Many years back Jerry Falwell tested Puritan virtue against Larry Flynt, Hustler Magazine’s purveyor of smut. Smut won. In Hustler v. Falwell, 485 US 46 (1988) the Supreme Court held you could say all the nasty, ugly sexual things you want about a public figure so long as you were just joking and not making any false statements.
The battle between Jerry and Larry wasn’t the defining law on obscenity. As with most issues involving public mores, it took a number of decisions to get where we are, and where we are is not a finish line, rather a resting place between Supreme Court interpretations of the First Amendment.
A good roundup on where we are with obscenity laws is found here. Through the morass of “Supreme Court tests” to determine what is and is not legally subject to punishment for being too smutty, the most memorable quote about what is pornography came from Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 concurring opinion in Jacobellis v Ohio. He said of pornography, “I know it when I see it.” What Justice Stewart was telling us is that issues concerning how a community defines obscenity should not rest with the court, rather with a community itself.
For that reason the law does not recognize a “national” community standard for what is illegally obscene.
Unfortunately, even at the local level there is still a tug of war over what is too explicit to be seen in public. Take New York. The area of Times Square at one time was squalor while 42nd Street was synonymous with drugs and sex shops. The era of Mayor Giuliani and the broken windows theory of policing and cleaning up neighborhoods made Times Square a family place again. Now there is a tug back in the other direction, with the big issue in the Big Apple being what to do with all the naked ladies.
On a nationwide scale, the issue becomes problematic when we deal with media available everywhere, like movies, magazines, broadsheets, broadcast, cable, and Internet. It is exactly in these areas were the left has been so successful in pushing American values into accepting evermore prurient images of sex.
It wasn’t that long ago that we stepped into the eyebrow-raising world of Mike and Carol Brady sleeping in the same bed together (not the first TV couple to do so, but it was still quite the risky television move back in 1970). That was a leap forward from Barbara Eden never showing her navel in “I Dream of Jeannie.” You can imagine a picture of a nude woman in Playboy was very racy compared to that.
As the envelope was pushed further and further, people who rallied against it, like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, were marginalized as religious bigots imposing their view. With each battle they lost, America raised her hem and plunged her neckline even further.
So where are we today? Last week’s episode of “American Horror Story” had people being sodomized to death. Last month’s episode of “South Park” had people being sodomized to death. A picture of a naked woman in Playboy is tame compared to that. Our public values have clearly changed.
I don’t really have to bring up those horrid exemplars to make the point, do I? Even the simple and everyday stuff can be unnerving. Every parent who has watched TV with their teenage daughters or sons, and was suddenly shown a commercial about a four-hour erection, knows what I’m talking about. It’s uncomfortable enough when you wonder if they know what is being sold — it’s more uncomfortable when you know that they do.
No channel is safe. Even Disney Family thinks it has to tackle every teenage sexual issue to be relevant. Sitcoms are a mess of sex. Every cop and medical show seems to have rape and sex thrown in. Surf through the cable channels looking for something to watch and you’ll pass more naked people having sex than a Hollywood casting party.
I understand a parent has to broach sexual issues with their children at some point. Does it have to be every damn day? Good grief.
The Internet is a cesspool of weird sexual imagery. I decline to list examples, but I bring it up only because Playboy’s CEO blamed the extreme content of the Internet for killing Playboy’s pictures. He’s wrong. The loss of the culture war killed Playboy’s pictures. We’re too “extreme” for them now.
I understand freedom. But some freedoms should have at least time, place and manner restrictions on them so they are not thrown in view of everyone else.
One might wonder, why not declare victory over the death of cultural muck like Playboy’s naked pictures, even though the left took them down when the right couldn’t? That would have been great in 1970. The fact that it died because it was replaced by something far more terrible is a reason to cry for our culture, not cheer.
Published in Entertainment
I think he misses the point about tastes. The bigger question is price.
Internet porn isn’t all graphic sexuality. There are plenty of sites on the Internet that cater to the same market for “tasteful” nudes that Playboy serviced.
They simply do it cheaper.
I blame the yoga pants. That was just too far.
But, from a libertarian perspective, shouldn’t the offended just avert their gaze? Why trample the liberty of the libertines if they can’t make you participate?
If, back in the 1970s, someone had written an SF story about Playboy in the 21st century dropping its nude pictures because of a lack of audience demand no one would have found the story credible. They would have assumed it was satire, and unbelievable satire at that.
We are living in the crazy years.
Seawriter
Well, freedom & democracy have a lot to do with this, not just the left.
This is a long way from Mae West saying she loved censorship, she made a fortune out of innuendo.
That may be what Judge Potter meant, but what he said meant that the definition of pornography was the opinion of his Supreme Court clerks, who had the (un)enviable task of watching the questionable stuff in the Supreme Court basement.
There are still pitiful scum rebel holdouts. A few months ago Rolling Stones was on the checkout stand at the grocery store, and it was exceptionally almost pornographic, about 3 feet off the floor in plain view of my kids. I took the whole lot of them to the store manager and told her to stop selling them. I haven’t seen them back since.
Culture war 2.0 skirmishes are actually exceptionally easy to wage and win in many cases because everyone is afraid of offending everyone.
As ‘South Park’ itself observed about the internet: “You can’t go back to Playboy!”
I guess it was true.
The movie was so obscene the justices had to watch it more than a dozen times before they could believe it.
Tommy, I agree. Our society continues to buy the lie of freedom with consequence, action without reponsibility.
On another note, how can Playboy possibly continue? I know people joked about reading the articles, but the magazine existed for guys to see nude women. Seems like it would be like Sports Illustrated without the sports.
I even joked about that in a piece I did for Osprey about writing for Osprey. This kills my best line.
Seawriter
Yeah, to all those guys who said they read it for the articles, your bluff has been called.
Don’t they do that once a year anyway? Or do you think they will follow Playboy’s lead and have a more modest swimsuit edition?
Don’t you miss those old Sears catalogs? Plausible deniability. And thick enough that your kids really feared a spanking.
Those weren’t people Tommy, they were Canadians.
It’s as if someone hit the button marked “invert.”
Doing a comedic dialect is considered “obscene” while the Muppets talking about getting laid is acceptable.
This country is either going to have to split or all the conservatives must seriously consider invading Canada. (It’s almost like home and we could overwhelm their liberals in a heartbeat.)
I don’t have a code of conduct compliant comment to this thread.
Isn’t playboy without the nudes called esquire?
I bow to your superior knowledge of Internet sex websites.
(I’m joking)
But I do disagree with your premise that this was about Playboy not being able to compete. They were around when the net was invented.
Their problem is, as the CEO eluded to, their viewership has moved on to more hardened content.
I blame feminists… but only to raise awareness.
No.
Libertarians want to ensure the government isn’t in control. Once we move matters to the public square, that doesn’t mean we are compelled to “avert our eyes.” We have as much right to argue for good culture as anyone else.
In fact, since we fear government control, it is incumbent upon Libertarians to make sure culture doesn’t get so out of control that government thinks it needs to step in.
Haha! Thanks for ending the thread Valiuth no one is topping that!
Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?
I spent all day stuck in my office…
If I were king of the world and had the power to rid humanity of all the sexualized garbage in which we steep, I’d do it.
I’m not king of the world. And now, especially with the highly distributed nature of the web, no one else has that kind of power. (Except for perhaps someone like the Kims in their little hermit kingdom of North Korea–they’ve cut their people completely off from the world while subjugating and starving them).
In the end, as Tommy says, it comes down to the culture, and the libertine culture has won, for now at least.
This discussion reminded me of something the late, great Frank Meyer said about the tension between freedom and moral values: “[B]oth extremes are self-defeating: truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”
That seems right to me. Moral values imposed by coercive central authority kill freedom. Radical individualism unfiltered by moral values kills a culture.
The real trick is the kind of ordered liberty in which the majority choose morality. I fear we’ve lost the knack for that kind of cultural balance.
Bet 4chan is behind that awareness raising activity, too.
Seawriter
The culture is a cesspool is right. And I can’t see how it gets better. There used to be laws against pornography and even sodomy. To paraphrase William Buckley, it’s become the background of our lives. But it’s good to see Playboy is tanking.
Very good post Tommy.
Great comment. You said everything I wanted to say. It used to be that our common Christian heritage self imposed those values through means other than coercive authority.
Because we are all effected by the culture. This “it doesn’t harm anyone else” line of argument is a fallacy.
Tommy & all,
What if I were to suggest a different interpretation. One not from a Libertarian point of view but from what is called here on Ricochet a social conservative or SoCon point of view.
The SoCon point of view would go like this. A long time ago in the 1950s and 1960s a very big lie was told by a very sophisticated evil man. He relentlessly undermined sexual morality. He appeared to have won because sexual morality appeared to be destroyed. However, an even greater evil, telling even bigger lies, came into being. The greater evil overwhelmed the very sophisticated evil man and marginalized him.
I wonder what comes next.
Regards,
Jim
I’m sure the Sears website gets a fair bit of voyeur traffic.
No their problem was they can’t charge for content that is given away free on the internet….
The conservatives are expected to either surrender, or just die out. The left can’t decide which ending would be more delicious. One way or another, though, in this country, you WILL bow down. Sooner or later, you will submit to this stuff, or else. As Rome went from small republic with disciplined virtues, to empire with bread, circuses, and orgies, the United States has gone from a federation of limited government, based on personal virtue, to a big nanny government that celebrates… nay, demands your acceptance of every perversion. John Adams said “The government of the United States was meant for a religious and moral people. It is unsuited for any other”.
We, the descendants of men like John Adams and George Washington, are no longer worthy of the country they made. Honestly, I wonder that, if the founders could see our current age through some kind of time machine, if they wouldn’t have simply went “Why bother? God save the King”.