Girlie Mags and serious journalism

Seth Mnookin had quite a scoop yesterday: it looks like Penthouse is about to go under. Apparently Friday's paychecks were slashed by 75%, and the parent company's long-precarious finances have never looked worse. The latest issue of Penthouse could be the last ever: something even owner and editor-in-chief Bob Guccione is not blind to. He told the New York Times over a year ago that there is “no future for adult business in mass market magazines.”

Mnookin says that

For years, Penthouse has been squeezed from both directions by the Scylla and Charybdis of men’s entertainment. On the one side, the monster growth of hard-core pornography on the Internet has meant that consumers no longer need to suffer the embarrassment of receiving their mail in plain brown wrappers. On the other side, the rise of laddie publications like Maxim and FHM has meant there are publications that show a lot of skin without the stigma of being pornographers.

He's undoubtedly right, but I think he misses something. Playboy and Penthouse are unique among magazines in that they attempt to deliver everything a man might want: smut, yes, but also (gasp!) interesting articles. The death of Penthouse might not mean much by itself: it will rank quite a ways down the list of what Matthew Rose calls the "little scandals" of magazine closings, well below Talk and Rosie. It is, however, symptomatic of a broader phenomenon: that of the ghettoisation of intelligent journalism. If you want smut, you can still get it; you'll just get nothing else. If you want to read something smart, you'll have to work your way through the dry pages of the Atlantic, the New Yorker, or Harper's.

I went out yesterday afternoon and picked up the latest issues of Playboy and Penthouse, as well as the smuttiest lad mag I could find: the UK's Loaded. I didn't pick up Maxim or FHM, partly because I've already written about Maxim, and partly because I really don't think that Playboy and Penthouse actually compete with the lad mags. The venerable duo live (or lived) largely on subscriptions, while the hot newcomers are newsstand giants, spending most of their effort on their cover lines. As Mnookin says, pornography carries a stigma, not only with advertisers but also with the general public: I can't recall ever seeing someone reading Playboy or Penthouse at the local coffee shop or on the subway.

And indeed, for all that Loaded probably features more bare breasts than Playboy and Penthouse combined, it does so in a fun, relaxed way. Look at the covers above: even though Playboy has poached James Kaminsky from Maxim to give it some of the Felix Dennis magic, it still boasts astonishingly dull cover lines like "New Millennium Sports Awards: Tyson's Tattoo to Bush's Pretzel". (That's not a story which would have appeared in the old Playboy, to be sure, but it's also not a story which is going to make anybody buy the magazine.) Loaded, by contrast, has cover lines like "Win £1,000 Jeans" to pique your interest, along with the promise of "27 clothes-free foreign ladies".

What Loaded doesn't have is any long-form articles. The Playboy Interview is famous, but the magazine also devotes five pages to Charles Rangel, the New York congressman; it also has ten pages of fiction by T Coraghessan Boyle. To top it all off, there's another nine pages of proper narrative investigative journalism about a drugs sting at a high school in Pennsylvania. It's illustrated with a full-page photo of a hot babe, but the story itself is not lascivious: it's easy to imagine it in the New Yorker.

Playboy, in other words, is keeping up its traditions: while the age-old story about "I read it for the articles" might be as much of a fib as ever, the idea is obviously still to keep the subscription renewals coming by giving men some protein along with their dessert. After all, if all you want to do is ogle babes, you don't need to shell out cash any more: scantily-clad women are everywhere these days, from the internet to the TV.

Playboy's high-mindedness has meant that it's kept its advertisers. There are the booze and fags, of course, but also people like Toyota and Pioneer who would never buy space in Penthouse. Why? Because where Loaded has breasts and Playboy has a small amount of oh-so-tasteful full-frontal nudity, Penthouse is hard-core. Mnookin's choice of language is revealing:

Penthouse has gone ultra hard-core. These days, the extreme close-ups of Penthouse’s pictorials seem more appropriate for a medical manual, and the live-action sex scenes are as graphic as anything available.

The fact is, hard-core pornography – where you show sex acts – is hard-core pornography. You might not like it, but Penthouse isn't "ultra" hard-core: it's just made the decision that if it's to compete with what's available for free on the internet, this is the stuff which it has to publish. Or maybe the logic was a bit different: Playboy made lots of money by showing things which other magazines wouldn't, and then Hustler made lots of money by showing things which Playboy wouldn't, and now Penthouse is positioning itself at the hardest end of the market, as the magazine which shows things all other household-name magazines shy away from.

In doing so, however, it's lost its respectability. Its cover doesn't feature a hot babe or two, in the way that Loaded or Penthouse do: it features a too-young girl, with fluffy toys in her hair, with the implicit-to-readers (and delivered upon) promise that pretty soon we're going to see her spread-legged, wearing knee-high black leather boots and little else, doing something which most of us confine to the bathroom. If I were an advertiser, even if I liked that sort of thing I'd keep my product well away from it: there's simply no way that I could benefit from the association.

Yet Penthouse is still different from most porno mags. For one thing, the production values are very high; but more importantly, the magazine still attempts to be about more than just sex. On the cover are four headlines, the first of which is "Security shell game: Homeland terror war is Bush's ultimate power trip" and only one of which is purely sexual. Once again, there's intelligent original reporting here. Loaded's slogan is "For men who should know better"; Playboy's is "Entertainment for men"; but Penthouse's is "The magazine of sex, politics and protest". There's a reasonably wide mix of men's magazine material, from rock climbing to a profile of wrestler Chris Jericho. But the budget obviously isn't there, and at this point – the very end of Penthouse's life-cycle – it all feels a little weak.

The demise of Penthouse is, surely, no biggy. It's one of the slowest train crashes in history: everybody saw this one coming ages ago, and it will come as a surprise to nobody. But I wonder if Si Newhouse and Jann Wenner ought not to pay a certain amount of attention. Magazines like Rolling Stone and GQ still run expensive long-form narrative journalism, despite the fact that most people don't read it and that even those who do would probably still buy the magazine if it wasn't there. As US Weekly and Lucky increasingly dominate the newsstand, how much longer can such material last?

Maxim and FHM are the Fox News to GQ's CNN, and are clearly winning the ratings war. And just as CNN is going Foxier, GQ is increasing its babe quotient. Is the next step the elimination of the long stories which few people read?

Actually, I think there's room for optimism on that front. Penthouse wasn't killed by overspending on editorial, it was killed by a lack of advertising. Felix Dennis makes money from readers, but Si Newhouse makes money from advertisers. There aren't all that many of them, compared to the number of magazine readers, but they're much more important. Advertisers love being in prestigious publications, and running long articles by Sebastian Junger or whoever is a very good way of impressing onto advertisers just how prestigious you are.

But even if the death of Penthouse does not mean another nail in the coffin of general-interest magazines, it's still indicative of which way the wind is blowing. GQ had a wonderful headstart on FHM and Maxim, but no one could afford to start it up now, and if they did they would almost certainly fail. Every magazine fails eventually, and when the likes of GQ go, there will be nothing to replace them. Talk couldn't do it; Radar won't. High-end advertisers will be stuck with Vogue and Vanity Fair, and serious journalism will be all but banished from the glossies. It's already happened in the UK, there's no reason why it shouldn't happen here as well.

Posted by Felix at 23:32 EST

Comments

"It's already happened in the UK, there's no reason why it shouldn't happen here as well."

You are probably right and even though I don't buy these magazines any more it is too bad. The loss of intelligent (if oft unread in some of the mags) content is indicative of the ongoing dumbing of America.

Posted by: Steve at 17:49 EST, July 21, 2003

More and more I look for my serious writing and journalism online, and mostly in blogs. It's more immediate than dead trees can ever be, and more interactive as the presence of this comment confirms. Sure, the low cost of entry (and the non-existent measure of quality) means there is a lot of crap, but the market sorts it pretty effectively, and the reference (word-of-links) mechanism works efficiently. Once you find one goot site, you will find more and more just by checking its links. Dead tree media does that a lot less efficiently (in the case of books with bibliographies, and not at all in the case of many magazines.)

And another sorting mechanism, that of category is also more efficient. If I want criticism of politics, I don't have to deal with full-color close ups of airbrushed genitalia to distract me from my real aim (honest!)

Nice piece (pun intended).

Posted by: dan at 16:01 EST, August 09, 2003

heh, i find it funny i'm reading this on a website ;-) i get plenty of intelligent reading online. also, harpers kicks ass. paper kills trees. and trees are cool.

Posted by: phil at 0:26 EST, November 15, 2003

Please send me anything you.

Posted by: Malcolm MacDonald at 11:56 EST, May 27, 2004