A York Vicar made an unusual protest this week against a range of stationery emblazoned with the Playboy logo. He was interviewed in reference to the story above on BBC Breakfast, speaking about how porn will influence the psychosexual development of the boys who will one day be dating his children. Bewilderingly, he summed this up on the BBC Breakfast sofa with the line:
“KEEP YOUR STICKY SLIME AWAY FROM MY DAUGHTERS!”
Oh yes gentlemen, you heard the man! Keep your sticky slime to yourself!
And I agree, on principal, that he’s right on some aspects of this, yet he strikes me as one of those critics who has only ever seen one type of pornography and judges all the rest by its standards. As far as less exploitative and woman-friendly porn goes, the internet has been a godsend. There’s still a long way to go, of course, but nowadays many of the mainstream porn and fetish websites are owned and run by women who consider themselves feminists, myself included, and on the whole these promote a very different sexual ideal than the old-fashioned images of Barbies in rabbit suits draping themselves over a Viagra-addled old man.
Human sexuality is an enormous spectrum, and the mindless, subservient big-boobed blonde is only one particular fantasy that is aimed at a very specific market. Playboy is a somewhat outdated brand in that aspect, as while there are still men out there with a bimbo fetish, the availability of an almost infinite range of ecletic erotica has rendered it almost obsolete. Just as the porn cinema boom of the seventies was eclipsed by the home video industry in the eighties, online porn is gradually eroding the fluffy bunny magazine stereotypes of recent decades, which I suppose might be why Playboy is trying to cash in on their iconic logo as a symbol of the brand’s past social subversion. In its day, Playboy was a forward-thinking sex-positive rebel. Since then, it unfortunately hasn’t changed much at all, including its now anachronistic attitude to women. The ludicrous softcore, soft-focus product that they’ve stuck with over the years isn’t a big seller, unlike unrelated products from the Playboy brand such as clothing and jewellery. I think that modern consumers are buying what the rabbit head represented in its heyday, not into the ambition to douse one’s self in peroxide, fit a pair of fake breasts, and suck off elderly man.
Much as I think that it is daft and wholly inappropriate to put the logo on pencil cases, I don’t think that it’ll spawn a generation of girls who aspire to be airheads as a direct result. Just be reassured that the porn industry has changed a lot in recent years, and is still in the process of changing for (in my humble opinion) the better.
As for sticky slime though – ban it!
