Pornland (5 page)

When there was no competition from other magazines, keeping readers was relatively easy since their only other option was the poorly produced, down-market variety of pornography, which certainly did not offer the reader a “playboy” image of himself. However, as the pornography market began to develop, other magazines adopted the
Playboy
formula. Chief among these competitors was
Penthouse,
a magazine that specifically aimed to replace
Playboy
as the best-selling pornography magazine in the country. The competition between
Playboy
and
Penthouse
that took place in the early 1970s not only hurt
Playboy
financially, it also changed the mainstream print pornography industry by pushing the limits of what was deemed acceptable, both legally and culturally.

Playboy, Penthouse
, and
Hustler
Go to War

The first hint that
Playboy
had some serious competition came in 1969 when full-page ads appeared in the
New York Times,
the
Chicago Tribune,
and the
Los Angeles Times
showing the
Playboy
bunny caught in the crosshairs of a rifle. The caption read, “We’re going rabbit hunting.” The ads were for
Penthouse
magazine, which would be on the newsstands later that year. According to Miller, the news was at first greeted with some amusement by the
Playboy
staff, since by then the magazine’s circulation had reached 4,500,000 a month.
42

Bob Guccione, editor-publisher of
Penthouse
magazine, aimed to compete with
Playboy
by copying its format of offering both a literary and lifestyle side while making the pictorials more sexually explicit. He did this by forgoing advertising revenue in the short term, planning to draw in the advertisers after he had put
Playboy
out of business. In a
Newsweek
article on
Penthouse,
London-based Guccione was quoted as saying, “I’m not coming to America to be number No. 2 . . . in five years,
Playboy
and
Penthouse
will be locked in a toe-to-toe competition.”
43

Penthouse
started with a circulation of 350,000. By February 1970 this figure had grown to 500,000. Miller argues that one major reason for the increase was that
Penthouse
photos were more explicit, especially in their willingness to reveal pubic hair.
44
Playboy,
meanwhile, resisted pubic hair by focusing instead on what they called the “girl next door look.” The more explicit imagery in
Penthouse
was the focus of a number of articles in mainstream magazines, from
Forbes
to
Business Week
to
Time,
all commenting on the willingness of
Penthouse
to go beyond
Playboy’
s levels of explicitness.
Forbes
described
Penthouse
as being “much bolder. Whereas
Playboy
bared breasts in the mid-fifties, now
Penthouse
has introduced pubic hair . . . and kinky letters to the editor on subjects like caning and slave parties.”
45
Such articles could be seen as free advertising for
Penthouse
since they often discussed the competition in a tongue-in-cheek manner, with no analysis of how this publishing war, with its battleground being the female body, could have consequences for the way women’s bodies were represented in mainstream pornography and media. Rather, the articles gave titillating accounts of Guccione’s
Penthouse
(“his girls look less airbrushed—and hence sexier—than
Playboy
’s and the copy in
Penthouse
is more bluntly erotic”) and gave quotes as teasers from
Penthouse
magazine stories (“Her eyes sparkled. ‘We are in a birchwood. Perhaps you want to birch me. Yes?’”).
46
The only topic that was treated with any seriousness in these articles was the impact that this war was having on the financial health of the magazines.

By the end of 1970,
Penthouse
’s circulation had reached 1,500,000. Hefner decided that he could no longer ignore Guccione and there “began a contest between Hefner and Guccione to see who could produce the raunchier magazine.”
47
In August 1971,
Penthouse
carried its first full-frontal centerfold and in January 1972,
Playboy
did the same. The change in policy was successful; by September 1972,
Playboy
’s circulation had risen to 7 million, but by 1973, it began to decline, while
Penthouse
’s increased to 4 million. To make matters worse for
Playboy,
the magazine’s advertisers were beginning to complain again about the explicit nature of the pictorials, and high-level executives had to fly to New York to placate them. Eventually, due to the combined pressure of advertisers, internal battles with editors, and the appearance of competitors such as
Gallery
and
Hustler,
which captured the more hard-core market, Hefner capitulated to
Penthouse,
sending a memo to all the department editors informing them that
Playboy
would cease to cater to those readers interested in looking at the more hard-core images. He would instead return to the magazine’s previous standards.
48

Circulation figures from the 1990s suggest that Hefner made the right decision. In 1995,
Playboy
had a monthly circulation of nearly 3.5 million, while
Penthouse
reported just over 1 million. One possible explanation for this is that
Playboy,
in staking out its terrain as the respectable soft-core, lifestyle magazine, still had no real competitor. Indeed, in its promotional material aimed at potential advertisers,
Playboy
compared itself to
Sports Illustrated,
Rolling Stone,
Esquire,
GQ,
and
Details,
and described itself as being about “the way men live in the nineties. . . . Entertainment, fashion, cars, sports, the issues, the scene, the people who make waves, the women men idealize.”
49
What is clearly absent from
Playboy
’s list of competitors is its real major competitor,
Penthouse,
and what is thus rendered invisible in its promotional description is the pornographic content that sells the magazine.

Penthouse,
on the other hand, because it tended to be more explicit in its focus on women’s genitals, simulated sexual intercourse, sexual violence, and group sex, had only one foot in the acceptable “soft-core” market, with the other in the more “hard-core” market. This was probably the worst of both worlds because the magazine couldn’t compete with either. It couldn’t attract the writers or interview subjects that provided
Playboy
with its markers of respectability and thus its advertising revenue; nor could it attract readers away from the hard-core magazines by being even more explicit, for fear of offending the advertisers it already had.

The magazine that was largely responsible for drawing readers away from both
Playboy
and
Penthouse
with the promise of delivering real pornography was the more hard-core
Hustler.
Within three and a half years of its inception,
Hustler
reached a circulation of over 3 million, and after four years was showing a profit of over $13 million. It is no coincidence that Flynt published the first issue of
Hustler
in 1974 because one of the results of the battle between
Playboy
and
Penthouse
was a growing acceptance in the mainstream porn market of more explicit imagery, which opened the way for mass distribution of more hard-core materials. Without a doubt, Flynt has had to fight many legal battles, but the groundwork laid by
Playboy
and
Penthouse
facilitated his aim of creating the “first nationally distributed magazine to show pink.”
50

Understanding the pivotal role that product differentiation plays in capitalism, Flynt wrote in the first issue of
Hustler,
“Anyone can be a playboy and have a penthouse, but it takes a man to be a Hustler.”
51
Flynt repeatedly wrote in
Hustler
that his target audience was “the average American” whose income made it impossible for him to identify with the high-level consumption and lifestyle associated with
Playboy
and
Penthouse.
Taking shots at both competitors for being too upmarket, for taking themselves too seriously, and for masquerading the “pornography as art by wrapping it in articles purporting to have socially redeeming values,”
Hustler
carved out a role for itself in a glutted market as a no-holds-barred magazine that told it like it was, “unaffected by the sacred cows of advertising.”
52
From the very first issue, Flynt limited advertising in his magazine mainly to those companies involved in the sex industry (phone sex, vibrators, and penis enlargers being the main wares advertised).

The decision to sacrifice advertising revenue and instead rely largely on subscription-financed revenue paid off—
Hustler
is the most successful hard-core magazine in the history of the pornography industry and Flynt is a multimillionaire today. Moreover, given the type of magazine Flynt wanted to produce, he had no choice; it seems unlikely that even the most daring of advertisers would select
Hustler
as the place to market its products. Flynt created a magazine that looks different from
Playboy
and
Penthouse
in its print and image content. The first few pages of the magazine are often given over to advertisements from the sex industry, with very explicit pictures of women’s genitals and men’s penises. While
Penthouse
may have published shots of women’s internal genitalia, leaking or ejaculating penises were strictly taboo in any section of
Playboy
and
Penthouse.
Within the first ten pages of
Hustler
is a regular feature called “Asshole of the Month,” whose centerpiece is a photograph of a male bending over, testicles in full view, and the picture of a politician or celebrity superimposed onto the anal opening.

Although
Hustler
’s key marketing strategy has been its claim to be the most “outrageous and provocative” sex magazine on the shelves, its centerfolds and pictorials in the early years tended to adopt the more soft-core codes and conventions (young, big-breasted women bending over to give a clear view of their genitals and breasts) rather than the hard-core ones specializing in explicit sexual penetration.
Hustler
was careful not to alienate its mainstream distributors with pictorials that might be considered too hard-core and thus find itself relegated to the porn shops, a move that would have severely limited sales (
Hustler
’s success was mainly due to its ability to gain access to mass-distribution outlets in the United States and Europe).

However,
Hustler
also had to keep its promise to be more hard-core or else it would have lost its readership to the more glossy, expensively produced soft-core
Playboy
or to the more hard-core pornography sold in “adult bookstores.” One way that
Hustler
negotiated this built-in conflict was to use cartoons as the place to make good on its promise to its readers to be “bolder in every direction than other publications.”
53
Cartoons, because of their claim to humor, thus allowed
Hustler
to depict “outrageous and provocative” scenarios such as torture, murder, and child molestation that might, in a less humorous form such as pictorials, have denied the magazine access to the mass-distribution channels.

One recurring theme in
Hustler
was the construction of the reader as a man who likes “tasteless” humor and no-frills pornography, and lacks the financial ability to live like a playboy and own a penthouse. This image trades on the most classist of stereotypes, one that
Hustler
has worked hard to promote both in and out of the magazine. In the 1970s,
Hustler
regularly ran a full-page picture of an overweight, middle-aged white male wearing shabby-looking clothes leaning on a bar, his beer gut spilling over his worn jeans and a glass of beer in his hand. The caption underneath read, “What Sort of Man Reads
Hustler?
” The answer, of course, is a fat, unkempt, working-class male who drinks beer all day. Flynt told
Newsweek
in 1976 that
Hustler
was more interested in attracting truck drivers than professors, and that “we sell to the Archie Bunkers of America.”
54