Merchants of Raunchiness

By Thomas Griffith

The sharpest division in American popular culture is between those who like a lot of sex in what they read and see and those who don't. Those who don't have a hard time ignoring the subject: four of the top ten bestselling magazines on the newsstands are skin books. In this highly successful and sleazy field, the big news is that Playboy, once the undisputed leader, no longer rules the roost.

Faced with returns of thousands of unsold newsstand copies, Playboy has now cut back its circulation guarantee from 5.4 million copies a month, to 4.5 million--exactly the same as its upstart rival Penthouse. (Hustler and Playboy's naughtier younger brother Oui are the other two top sellers.) Since with age and success Playboy has become the most "conservative" of the sex magazines, some might argue that its newsstand decline only proves Gresham's law. But this morality play isn't all that simple. It has more to do with society's shifting sexual standards and who is more adept at exploiting them. In this, Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione, a canny tortoise, has at least drawn even with the Bunnies of Hugh Hefner, whose bigger but long overextended Playboy empire is in trouble. Only Hefner's London gambling clubs, which attract rich Arab bettors, are an unabashed success. The IRS is also questioning whether Hefner's high living expenses ($3 million in 1976) are deductible.

It must be hard for the IRS, or for Hef himself, to sort out what is pleasure, profit or business expense in Hef's lifestyle. The difficulty is evidenced in this month's nudie Playmate, the magazine's famous foldout. Along with 14 undressed pictures of a 20-year-old blonde, the text explains that she has landed a top role, "that of Hef's more-than-occasional companion." Tax man, how would you score that? Business promotion? In fact, one of Playboy's problems is its narcissistic photographic preoccupation with Hefner's Playboy mansion, which must do untold damage to his assumed reputation for sophistication. Surrounded by young beauties, he looks a dour sybarite Square. Hefner is in the business of selling fantasies; he has made the mistake of trying to live his. Enter Rival Guccione. who does not show his readers how he lives.

Guccione has his office in an expensively tacky off-Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City, full of mirrored walls, oversized candelabra and a gilded piano that Liberace might envy. The furnishings look as if they came intact from a Neapolitan bordello, but they actually came from Judy Garland's estate, as did the house. Guccione, in well-coiffed hair, is obviously more concerned with his own appearance than his apartment's: he wears a shirt open to his hairy chest, against which bobble necklaces of large gold medallions. No one believed him seven years ago when he said Penthouse would catch the Bunny, and because he couldn't get other investors, he's made himself rich. Guccione concedes that Hefner made skin magazines successful and quasi-respectable by photographing not tarts but the wholesome-looking girl next door. He patronizes Hefner for not moving with the times, for not seeing that the girl next door grew up, "is no longer uptight about nudity," and thus in Penthouse is pictured enjoying her own sensuality. As a photographer himself, Guccione is the best in the business at the narrow craft of what he calls "romanticizing the sexual encounter"; since the mystery used to be in what was concealed (but no longer is), Guccione has to work hard, with soft focus and Victorian props, to lend variety month after month to anatomical sameness.

To critics, the success of such magazines only proves America's declining moral standards, but that success also coincides with increased contemporary sexual awareness, openness, candor. In this the magazines have sometimes played a liberating role, giving space to honest facings of troubling concerns. But they all compete to exploit these concerns and curiosities. Their subject is sex, not love; their emphasis is all on experiencing and experimenting; their message is self-gratification. "I went pubic in 1967," says Guccione proudly --while Playboy was still holding back. He also started a skin magazine for women, Viva. With the air of a man who might have invented first penicillin and then Aureomycin, he lists his publishing firsts: "Lesbians, threes, full-frontal male nudity, erect penis."

The degree of raunchiness in the pornography magazines depends on how each publisher assesses his need to be daring, his hankering for respectability and acceptance, or his fear of the law. Hustler, raunchiest of them all, aimed at blue-collar workers, has only the law to fear. Cheaply edited but high in price ($2.25), it scorns respectability and advertising because it makes so much on circulation alone (a news dealer, who gets from 20% to 30% of a magazine's cover price, earns five times as much for selling a copy of Hustler as he does from a 45-c- Woman 's Day. Hustler, says Guccione disdainfully, "has all the allure of a six-car accident. Morbid curiosity."

Guccione's own fastidiousness might be more creditable if Penthouse didn't devote so much space each month to advice by Xaviera Hollander, "the happy hooker," who favors whatever two or more people can do together. He also publishes long accounts of readers' fantasized sexual successes, which he apparently considers a contribution to mental health: "Some browbeaten bastard in a bed-sitting-room reads it and says, I'm not a freak.' " How much further does Guccione long to go? "I'm no missionary. It isn't really what we want to do. It's what the public wants."

Most readers of Playboy and Penthouse are between 18 and 35 years of age, come from higher-income families and have one or more years of college--exactly the male market most sought by Madison Avenue. Caught in a conflict between opportunity and conscience, or perhaps just worried about what their wives might think, most manufacturers and advertisers for a long time shied away. Liquor and tobacco advertisers, and makers of foreign cars and cameras have no such qualms, and their ads fill the magazines. Detroit--and General Motors in particular--has held off. Playboy attracts twice the advertising revenue of Penthouse but finds itself schizophrenically split, trying to stay audacious enough to hold its audience while discreet enough to reassure the advertiser. The trick, says one of its worried editors, is "how to become more erotic but less raunchy." To the less inhibited Guccione, advertising is all "gravy," but he resents the fact that Kodak won't even advertise in Photo World, his picture magazine, and piously regards it as "unfortunate for Detroit" that they're letting foreign cars take away so much business through Penthouse.

Engaged in the great American game of trying to have it both ways, Playboy and Penthouse try to distance themselves from their gamier rivals. Both run serious critical departments on films, books and records. Playboy carries fiction, though not often the best work, by top writers, who are paid top prices because their presence, in the jargon of Hollywood, "authenticates" the magazine.

Playboy's current interview with Andrew Young has made headlines, and its most notable coup, the 1976 interview with Jimmy Carter, is surely the most candid self-analysis ever volunteered by anyone about to become President. (Playboy has been capitalizing on Carter's famous word ever since, assuring advertisers that the Playboy reader's "lust for life" makes him an impulsive big spender.) Within the past year, while Penthouse in particular has made its inside text more blatant and kinkier, both Playboy and Penthouse have toned down the nudity of their covers. Guccione, whose Penthouse makes more money for news dealers than any other magazine, is concerned about the small-town Midwest distributor "whose wife plays pinochle with all the local wives." On request, Guccione supplies free "blinder racks" to any dealer so that only the name of the magazine shows.

In fact--are you ready for this?--Guccione worries about all the hard-core pornography around. He favors licensing movie theaters like bars. If their marquees are too vulgar or the theaters admit children to X-rated movies, their licenses could be revoked. Nor would he object to legislation that skin magazines could be displayed only at adult height and in such a way that anyone could make a 360DEG visual sweep of a shop and not be assaulted by nude-magazine covers. He obviously fears any movement that would put his kind of magazine back under the counter. Whatever his motives, Bob Guccione is responding to a problem that the Supreme Court, with all its difficulties in defining obscenity and upholding the First Amendment, has had a hard time handling. It is a conflict between two liberties, in a society that no longer feels it possible or desirable to legislate uniformity. A growing number of Americans might concede that adults have a right to read whatever they wish--or at least might accept that the law requires this. But they also argue an equal right not to be subjected to pornography that they consider offensive. The law seems to be moving toward some such distinction between content (protected) and display (regulated), which may not answer all the troublesome questions but is a start.

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