Abstract
In the more than 6 decades since its founding, Playboy magazine has had to contend with a great deal of cultural change, most significantly the rise of the Internet pornography industry. The magazine, particularly its signature centerfold, the Playmate of the Month, has had to adapt accordingly. In this visual analysis, I review 65 years of Playboy centerfolds to consider how their bodies—physical characteristics, positions, contexts, and explicitness—have changed, and how this reflects the broader social change to which they are subject. I find that, overall, very little changes over the years, with two notable exceptions: increased visibility of the montes pubis and the slow decreasing in the amount of pubic hair the models have, and the brief time period in which the magazine attempted to remove nudity altogether. My results show that the magazine appears to place more value on staying true to the Playboy image than to adapting to a new market and has continued to be a recognized symbol of gender and sexuality even in light of decreasing readership and publication.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Availability of data and material
All data is available online through the Playboy archives.
Code Availability
Stata code is available from the authors upon request.
Notes
This is, of course, a very small sample, especially when compared to Playboy’s circulation of about 3 million at the same time period as the study (Watson 2019), and is therefore likely not generalizable.
There have now been 2 transgender Playmates, but only one is captured in this sample. They have both been women of color.
The camera angle for every single centerfold is straight on, with only a slight upward or downward tilt in a few cases.
References
Attwood, F. (2002). Reading porn: The paradigm shift in pornography research. Sexualities, 5(1), 91–105.
Attwood, F. (2006). Sexed up: Theorizing the sexualization of culture. Sexualities, 9(1), 77–94.
Attwood, F. (2007). No money shot? Commerce, pornography and new sex taste cultures. Sexualities, 10(4), 441–456. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460707080982.
Beggan, J., & Allison, S. (2001a). What do playboy playmates want? Implications of expressed preferences in the construction of the “Unfinished” masculine identity - ProQuest. Journal of Men’s Studies, 10(1), 1–38.
Beggan, J., & Allison, S. (2001b). The playboy rabbit is soft, furry, and cute: Is this really the symbol of masculine dominance of women? The Journal of Men’s Studies, 9(3), 341–370. https://doi.org/10.3149/jms.0903.341.
Beggan, J., & Allison, S. (2003). What sort of man reads playboy? The self-reported influence of playboy on the construction of masculinity. Journal of Men’s Studies, 11(2), 189–206.
Berkowitz, D. (1992). Non-routine news and newswork: Exploring a what-a-story. Journal of Communication, 42(1), 82–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1992.tb00770.x.
Bogaert, A. F., Turkovich, D. A., & Hafer, C. L. (1993). A content analysis of playboy centrefolds from 1953 through 1990: Changes in explicitness, objectification, and model’s age. Journal of Sex Research, 30(2), 135–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499309551693.
Breazeale, K. (1994). In Spite of Women: “Esquire” magazine and the construction of the male consumer. Signs, 20(1), 1–22. JSTOR.
Cardoso, D., & Paasonen, S. (2020). The value of print, the value of porn. Porn Studies, 1–15.
Cieply, S. K. (2010). The uncommon man: Esquire and the problem of the North American male consumer, 1957–63. Gender & history, 22(1), 151–168.
Dines, G. (1998). King Kong and the White woman: Hustler magazine and the demonization of Black masculinity. Violence against women, 4(3), 291–307.
Evans, A., Riley, S., & Shankar, A. (2010). Technologies of sexiness: Theorizing women’s engagement in the sexualization of culture. Feminism & Psychology, 20(1), 114–131.
Fahs, B. (2013). Shaving it all off: Examining social norms of body hair among college men in a women’s studies course. Women’s Studies, 42(5), 559–577. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2013.794058.
Fahs, B., & Delgado, D. A. (2011). Race, class, and gender in women’s body hair narratives. Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules, 13–25.
Ferriss, L. (2011). Bush. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, 13(2), 77–84. https://doi.org/10.1353/fge.2011.0031.
Fishman, M. (1997). News and nonevents: Making the visible invisible. In D. A. Berkowitz (Ed.), Social meanings of News: A Text-Reader (pp. 210–229). SAGE.
Fritz, N., & Paul, B. (2017). From orgasms to spanking: A content analysis of the agentic and objectifying sexual scripts in feminist, for women, and mainstream pornography. Sex Roles, 77(9–10), 639–652. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-017-0759-6.
Gill, R. M. (2007). Gender and the media. Polity.
Goffman, E. (1979). Gender advertisements. Macmillan International Higher Education.
Hall, S. (2006). Encoding/dDecoding. In M. G. Durham & D. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (Rev. ed, pp. 163–172). Blackwell.
Hatton, E., & Trautner, M. N. (2011). Equal opportunity objectification? The sexualization of men and women on the cover of rolling stone. Sexuality & Culture, 15(3), 256–278. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-011-9093-2.
Krassas, N. R., Blauwkamp, J. M., & Wesselink, P. (2001). Boxing Helena and Corseting Eunice: Sexual rhetoric in cosmopolitan and playboy magazines. Sex Roles, 44(11/12), 751–771.
Kushner, D. (2019). A brief history of porn on the internet. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/brief-history-porn-internet/.
Levy, A. (2005). Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Simon and Schuster.
Lewis, S. (2019). The racial bias built Into photography. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html.
MacKinnon, C. A. (1989). Sexuality, pornography, and method: Pleasure under Patriarchy. Ethics, 99(2), 314–346.
Mann, E. S., & Grzanka, P. R. (2018). Agency-without-choice: The visual rhetorics of long-acting reversible contraception promotion. Symbolic Interaction, 41(3), 334–356. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.349.
Manserus, L. (2017). Hugh Hefner, who built the playboy empire and embodied it, dies at 91. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/obituaries/hugh-hefner-dead.html.
McDonnell, T. E. (2010). Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, urban space, and the interpretation of AIDS Campaigns in Accra, Ghana. American Journal of Sociology, 115(6), 1800–1852. https://doi.org/10.1086/651577.
Mishra, M. (2017). Impact of Smartphone on college students. International Journal of Education and Management Studies, 7(3), 310–313.
Paul, P. (2007). Pornified: How pornography is transforming our lives, our relationships, and our families. Macmillan.
Pitzulo, C. (2008). The battle in every man’s bed: “Playboy” and the Fiery Feminists. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17(2), 259–289.
Pitzulo, C. (2011). Bachelors and Bunnies: The sexual politics of playboy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Preciado, P. (2014). Pornotopia: An essay on Playboy’s architecture and biopolitics. Princeton University Press.
Rohlinger, D. A. (2002). Eroticizing men: Cultural influences on advertising and male objectification. Sex Roles, 46(3/4), 61–74.
Rothman, L. (2015, October 13). How Playboy’s first naked centerfold got published. Time. https://time.com/4071282/playboy-centerfold-1967-history/.
Schudson, M. (1995). The power of news. Harvard University Press.
Shim, J. W., Kwon, M., & Cheng, H.-I. (2015). Analysis of representation of sexuality on women’s and men’s pornographic websites. Social Behavior and Personality, 43(1), 53–62.
Snyder-Hall, R. C. (2010). Third-wave Feminism and the defense of “Choice.” Perspectives on Politics, 8(1), 255–261. JSTOR.
Steinem, G. (1963). May 1). A Bunny’s Tale. Show Magazine, 90, 92, 94, 114.
Watson, A. (2019, August 7). Playboy—Global circulation 1960–2018. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/485332/playboy-circulation-worldwide/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The author declares that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Regan, H. Playboy and Pornification: 65 Years of the Playboy Centerfold. Sexuality & Culture 25, 1058–1075 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-020-09809-2
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-020-09809-2