Flipping through this new issue of the revamped Playboy, it’s pretty apparent this is not your father’s girlie magazine.
For one, Miss March is urging people to read more, as she packs up a Dave Eggers tome — the first Playmate, we’re guessing, to advocate for postmodern literature.
For another, she’s not flashing much skin. In her centerfold, Dree Hemingway (the great-granddaughter of Ernest) dons a white blouse and white panties. An American Apparel ad is racier.
In the photos where she does go au naturel, Hemingway’s got her hands covering the naughty bits.
Yep, the name of Hugh M. Hefner, now 89, still sits atop the masthead, but beyond that, everything seems to have changed in this first issue of a new era, on sale next week.
Each issue was filled with dirty jokes, sexy cartoons and, of course, articles aimed at the “city-bred” (as Hefner called him) single man. The inaugural issue schooled males in “Desk Design for the Modern Office.” A 1955 issue trumpeted “How To Succeed With Women Without Really Trying.”
It was the perfect package for the dawn of the sexual revolution.
But as the decades marched on, as some of the habits of 1960s bachelors came to be viewed as potentially predatory, as the Playmates got more surgically enhanced and less hairy, as images of naked women became commonplace due to the Internet, Playboy lost its cultural cachet.
Hef’s lifestyle seemed as antiquated as smoking on airplanes.
So now, the magazine appears to have mostly uncoupled itself from its founder and everything he stood for — the silk bathrobe, the VD-filled grotto, the endless parade of blond bimbos — and made a play for a millennial audience.
What does that audience want? Well, it appears shorter articles are on the wish list. Many of the offerings in the new Playboy top out at one page.
An interview with Jesse Eisenberg offers a short intro and four quotes. A single-page front-of-the-book story called “How To Pick Up Your Bartender” also includes a recipe for a cocktail.
James Franco, still looking to broaden his résumé for some reason, launches his “Francofile” column with a David Simon interview.
The only other pictorial features cover girl Sarah McDaniel, an Instagram-famous hottie who is apparently known for having different-colored eyes. She’s seen in naturalistic photos lounging in bed and in the shower — but shot through a foggy glass door.
As with the Hemingway pictorial, if you’re in search of nudity, move on down the newsstand to Hustler — if that’s still around.
Ironically, it may have actually been the Internet that forced “Playboy” to abandon boobs and butts.
In 2014, the publisher redesigned its Web site to make it more PG-13, and saw a massive 258 percent jump in traffic. The average age of its reader also dropped from 47 to a more desirable 30.
Much of the traffic on the Web is driven by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and those companies don’t allow nudity. So it makes sense that if Playboy wanted to target a millennial audience, it would have to play by those networks’ rules.
The only real nod to the magazine’s history comes on the final page, a (possibly recurring?) feature called “Playback.” In this issue, we see a 1970 snapshot showing Hef, pipe clenched in teeth and flanked by model Barbi Benton, aboard a fishing boat and brandishing his catch.
But this lifestyle is clearly no longer presented as something to aspire to. It comes off as an ironic nod to a distant past, like the faux-vintage décor of every hipster Brooklyn restaurant.
“This is so out,” you can almost hear anyone under the age of 30 exclaiming, “it’s in!”
A 62-year-old brand could do worse.