COLD Play

I really fucking hate Playboy magazine. At best it's the Jay Leno of softcore - the most popular of its kind, but completely banal and without even a semblance of interesting content. If Jay Leno is the epitome of comedy but will never make you laugh aloud, so is Playboy is synonymous with porn, but will never really get your dick hard. It's a flavorless, uncontroversial waste of print that on its best days uses celeb cameos in formulaic photo spreads to move product, but more often relies on sycophantic pandering to pop news references as filler between the seven pages of naughty bits that are facsimiles of the pictures that have filled those spots for the past fiftyish years.


A generous stranger recently handed down a box of the past two years of Playboy along with the corresponding two years of Lucky Magazine. I would be more likely to rub one out to the Lucky at this point. First, as I said, there are about fifteen pictures per magazine of tit & bush - that's less than I would see on a single TGP link, and even less than I would see in a European fashion or photography magazine. Maybe excusable if the pictures were hot, but they're literally regurgitation of the same photos that have appeared in the magazine every month since Marilyn graced the cover! I'm not some queen who kvetches about models not being a realistic representation of women in this world - I think I would puke out of my eye sockets after seeing 95% of the women in this world naked - but that the compositions, sets, lighting, and props haven't changed is nothing short of tedious. I have a few antique Playboys from the early 1980s sitting on my desk, and right now I am looking at a photo of Lynda Weismeier that is identical - down to the panties - of a shot of Camila Decesare that was printed in the magazine a few months ago. It's amazing how the magazine has so thoroughly mechanized the process of nude photography - most of the time it doesn't even matter if the girl is blonde ore brunette because after a few kilos of makeup, about a dozen CTO gelled hotlights, and a visit to the frisky fingers of the AD photoshop intern, pretty much every photo of every girl looks identical... When I see a Playboy photo spread, I see tedium, I see stasis... I see bales of hay and sometimes a fleetside chevy pickup or a whimsical french bicycle.


Sometimes the magazine does depart from the monotony of tightpussy midwesterners to showcase a C-List celebrity muff, but exciting as it seems to check out a Wrestlemania chick's monster box five years after anyone on the planet thought she was even remotely hot, the pictures are always a huge letdown. First, the talent - they're like the mid-80s sitcom stars and band members that come to your local white-trash strip mall ribbon cutting - they're hardly famous, you hate their work, but because they did something somewhere a long time ago that was recorded, you cream your cortas at the oppertunity to see them because for the next thirty years of your miserable life, you can tell your kids and coworkers and friends all about the time you met Rerun from Whats Happening (RIP Fred Berry). That's what the "celebs" who pose for Playboy are like. But beyond that, the pictures are horrid! Either the women being shot are clothes-on-attractive (think Kelly Ripa, or your friend's mom that you wanted to bang in 7th grade - a fine piece of ass in a tank top and casual slacks, but jawbreaker when the panties drop), or are actually hot, but are shot with the most unflattering poses / expressions imaginable. Eva Herzigova, Rachel Hunter, Brooke Burke, Amy Acuff, Jamie Pressly, Shannon Elizabeth, Denise Richards - they are all above-average women, but look like stoic death in their respective pictorials - every one. I've never actually seen a picture of celebrity in Playboy and been impressed.

The other gimmick that is employed periodically is the Girls of... feature. This is where Playboy takes a hot topic brand and scours it for the three employees who don't look like zoo animals (note to Hef: Girls of Hot Topic). The frumpy, dumpy girls with prereq man-jaw and overbites are placed on a set of unlicensed faux branding of the popular company, and surrounded by the most cliched one-liner puns imaginable ("...The steamy women of Starbucks show us a latte love!" Zing!). I thought this was something new - The girls of Enron, Starbucks, Walmart, et al, but a look back to 1982 shows Playboy's bleeding edge feature, Girls of Ma Bell! I can hardly wait for the Girls of T-Mobile - a double feature of homely Tennessee t-mobile chicks with superstar headline, Catherine Zeta... good times.


After those half-dozen pages of the mag that actually feature girls, Playboys really goes downhill. First, the witty quip you greet the magazine with, "I only read it for the articles." Fag! Jesus fucking christ, reading Playboy for the articles is like joining a frat for the brotherhood! Yeah, the magazine is about as sexy as Levis ad, but if you can't admit that you like to stare at tits then you don't deserve to have a dick! Die already! I understand that at some point in a man's life a woman comes along and places his cock in a secure lockbox under her bed next to the Medicare, but seriously, who are these guys who don't have enough spine to embrace labia, and do they know how worthless their lives are? Beyond these boys being huge fags, they're also complete imbeciles. Playboy has miserable articles! They're fucking terrible and the only people whom think they're good are fratboys and sycophantic ass-pony corporate drones who think a wild time is hitting up a Happy Hour brewski and Bloomin' Onion at Chili's with the guys in Mergers & Acquisitions. That 20 Questions with Stevie Nicks was a real page-turner, and the Playboy guide to meeting a Scientologist, Pulitzer material. The movie reviews are stale, the comics are atrocious, and the various guides to being a sophisticated man are fucking rubbish ("Dude, a girl will like totally make out with you if you have a scented candle in your room - that lets them know you're really romantic. And shhh! don't tell, but putting on a Barry White CD totally lets her know that you're a sensitive guy"). If you need the watered down Playboy expose to tell you that there are tragedies in Iraq, go kill yourself. If you actually find Playboy Advisor questions like, "Do girls like it when you go down on them?" useful, go kill youself.

Then there's the worst of all - the greatest crime a magazine could commit - the party pics page. Wow! Not only do you have to see shrivel-dick Hefner with his seven goldbricking prostitutes every other picture, but you also have to look at the likes of Gene Simmons, Fred Durst, and Verne Troyer, getting squished between mammoth juggies because in some alternate universe they are considered celebrities. It's bad enough that ditzy sluts will fuck a three foot tall failed abortion because he was in a movie with Mike Meyers, but do we really have to parade their dirty trysts around like bobo the goddamn circus clown? Aren't we better than that?


Playboy is a case study for success through mediocrity. It proves that if you take 184 pages of garbage and lace it with eleven nipples and five or six vulvas you can be a millionaire. My plea to the readers of Playboy is simple - grow a fucking sac and punch the clown to the real shit, like girls fisting dudes, or preteen bukkake. If you've got some bullshit chip on your shoulder about tasteful pictures, then pick up a copy of Vogue, or BlackBook or Surface where you can see pictures that are actually tasteful of girls who are actually attractive... and you can read the articles while you pee sitting down... homo.