On a hot summer day, I picked her up at LaGuardia and she chattered non-stop all the way to her complimentary hotel in Manhattan about how excited she was that she was actually going to meet Jean-Michel. One of them was Sarah, a divorced single mother from the Midwest who had entered our "Win-a-Date with the Centerfold of the Century" contest.
Because I felt so certain that there was a female audience for Playgirl and because there was little demographic research made available to me, I began to seek these women out. But I was pretty sure that all of us, at some point, want to ogle naked men.
Some women like their beefcake, and others (like me) prefer the skinny rockstar look. But the magazine, which has been a cultural icon since its inception in 1973, is not just for gay men. I knew what it implied-that no straight woman in her right mind would actually volunteer to look at naked male genitalia. It was a question I got all the time during my time at Playgirl, where I eventually became editor in chief.
But I figured there had to be some women out there who actually got turned on by the images in our magazine. My only way to connect with all of this was to look at the whole experience as a comedy writing job. Naked Sand Dune Guy posed suggestively with a spear in his hand and, later, lounging on some pillows that looked like they came from Pier One Imports. I was then asked to write the "boy copy" to accompany a naked pictorial of well-muscled man running naked on a sand dune. I fixed a bored, nonchalant look on my face, which I hoped conveyed to her that I saw this kind of thing every day. "Naked guy fixing a car, naked guy with tan lines from his thong in some kind of a jungle setting, TV stars we think are hot-freeze frame on Don Johnson's Johnson, nice! Black guy is the centerfold in some silky bedroom, guy on a leopard print couch, another guy on leopard print pillows-he's uncircumcised-and a threesome of two guys and a girl in a car wash." On the day of my job interview at Playgirl, the current editor in chief had flipped through an issue, giving cursory descriptions of the photos in a tone that fell somewhere between jaded and annoyed.
0 kommentar(er)
